Page 240 - Life of Gertrude Bell

220 GERTRUDE BELL
There was a final paragraph that helps to establish the somewhat
compromising position of Gertrude in the aftermath of the
war. ‘Would you please glance at the enclosed ... published by the
Intelligence Branch here/ she asked her father. ‘I should be very
glad if you would enter a protest against any official body so un-
qualified issuing things of this sort... Let them draw up proper
propaganda written by competent persons, but this stuff docs
nothing but harm/
The atmosphere of the time and the qualities of Britain’s
administrators are summed up by the Van Esses. They werc es-
pecially fond of Wilson and Gertrude, and she spent some of her
happiest moments in Iraq with them. Mrs Van Ess wrote:

A.T. was a great friend of John’s; they saw eye to eye on the
problems of the current situation and their solutions would
have been nearly identical. John considered Colonel Wilson
the brains of Sir Percy Cox’s administration; he recognised
that Sir Percy had an impressive fagade and was an imposing
figurehead, but he often exclaimed in private, ‘He is just a
rubber stamp for Lord Curzonl’
Of Gertrude:
During those lovely spring days Gertrude sat with her feet
tucked under her in true Arab style, on a settee in John’s study,
I
smoking his cigarettes and arguing with him interminably, but
always amicably. ‘But Gertrude 1’ he would exclaim. ‘You are
flying in the face of four millenniums of history if you try to
draw a line around Iraq and call it a political entity! Assyria
always looked to the west and east and north, and Babylonia
to the south. They have never been an independent unit.
You’ve got to take time to get them integrated, it must be done
gradually. They have no conception of nationhood yet/

But those joyous days of spring sunshine were flanked by the
cold, w’et months of winter and by the unendurable heat of
summer. Problems of day-to-day government and international
politics were interspersed with long periods of concern for die
archaeological treasures of the country and Gertrude made many
arduous journeys to the great mounds near Hillah where ancient
Babylon lay partly bared, and to those other mounds of Akkad
_„d Sumer, Babylonia and Chaldea at Sippar, Kish, Birs (ancient
an
Borsippa), Erech, Lagash, Larsa, Eridu and Ur-where so much