Page 238 - Life of Gertrude Bell

21 8 GERTRUDE BELL

of considerable concern to me here and arc not a little resented
by the Political Officers. She will have finished the Blue Book
by the end of the month, after which there will really be nothing
for her to do.

There can be little doubt that Gertrude had set out to promote
her own policies, policies which had been discussed, formulated
and sharpened by her meetings with Hogarth, Lawrence, Faisal
and the rest of the Sharifitc lobby at Paris. She had access to the
most important men of government and she saw no reason why
she should not use those contacts. It has been said in her defence
that it was ‘a typically woman-like thing’ to correspond over her
chief’s head with his superiors. But it is not a defence that she
would have welcomed. She inhabited a man’s world without
asking or giving quarter, and if indiscreet correspondence has
been characteristic of many women in history, so has it been of
men. Her letters were not malicious and were probably not in­
tended to defy Wilson so much as to put her own point of view.
All the same, they were indiscreet and caused Wilson great annoy­
ance at a time of peculiar difficulty in his temporary and unsought
job. One thing is certain, Gertrude helped to destroy her own
high standing among the ‘Politicals’ by her disloyalty to Wilson.
Much can be said on the other side. Opinions which Wilson came
to hold later hardly accorded with his description of himself as a
born democrat and liberal. His unbending religious orthodoxy
was laughable to many people, and offensive to others. His Latin
tags in the Political Office and the Mess, sometimes misquoted,
and his super-patriotism — Cromwell’s ‘We are a people with the
■
stamp of God upon us’ was bis favourite quotation—became
something of a joke. Yet he was, without a shadow of doubt, the
hero-figure of the young Political Officers who came to Iraq after
the war. They and many others in the community admired him
beyond measure for his unfailing support for the underdog and
his unwillingness to submit to the tyranny of Whitehall and the
military. Whenever a Political Officer was in difficulty or there
was fighting in his territory, Wilson was there within hours, often
using an aeroplane to get to the scene. By the same token,
Gertrude was ridiculed for what was often called her ‘status
snobbery’, her dislike of her own sex and her hob-nobbing with
the elite. On one occasion she wrote to Chirol: ‘I really think I am
beginning to get hold of the women here, I mean the women of