Page 226 - Life of Gertrude Bell

208 GERTRUDE BELL

thrown in their lot with the Turks after the occupation, active
members of the Committee of Union and Progress (the Party
to whom the entrance of Turkey into the War against Great
Britain was directly due) and others who had not ventured to
remain in Baghdad on account of their well-known Turkish
sympathies came back from Mosul early in November ... The
cfiect of the declaration was no doubt heightened by the news
that the Sharif Faisal had gone to the Peace Conference as the
representative of an independent Arab State.

There was reference to the difficulties of minorities in Syria and
Iraq and to the ‘invidious position’ of stable elements such as the
Naquib and the Darwesh, Sayid Muhammad Kadhim al Yazdi.
By the time her report had reached London, Gertrude was on
her way to Paris, her first visit ‘home’ for nearly four years. She
had gone at the instigation of Wilson who was anxious that she
should put the case for Iraq at the Peace Conference and believed
that she was as well qualified as anyone to do so. She stayed at the
Hotel Majestic, close by the residences of the main Foreign Office
delegation and of Lloyd George and President Wilson. The story
of the subsequent events has been told time and again: the
whispered conversations among the national clans, endless tea and
dinner parties; the famous statesmen of the world rushing to and
fro with breathless enthusiasm for their various causes; and at
the centre of it all, the diminutive figure of Lawrence in his silken
Arab robes with gold-threaded agal, and his charge the Amir
Faisal, or the Sharif Faisal as they now called him, son of Husain
of Mecca, come to pick up the rewards of the war-time alliance.
Sir Hubert Young had spent the latter part of the war in Syria
with Allenby after serving in Iraq, and now he was translated to
assisting Curzon who held the Foreign Office fort while Balfour
was away in Paris. He had met Lawrence during the latter’s visit to
Basra in 1916 and was so confounded by his antics that he never
sought to renew their old friendship. Among the first documents
to meet Young’s gaze when he went to the Foreign Office was a
petition from the so-called Committee of the Covenant, formed
by a group of Faisal’s Syrian and Mesopotamian officers in the
aftermath of the victory at Aqaba on July 6th, 1917. Towards the
end of that year the officers had formed an offshoot of the organi­
sation, the Covenant of Iraq, and on June nth, 1918 they had
petitioned the British Government asking that areas in Arabia