Page 244 - Life of Gertrude Bell

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11 GERTRUDE BELL
But Lawrence had written a letter to the Sunday Times on August
22nd, 1920 suggesting that the rebellion was a spontaneous rising
against British oppression in the country. It was just one of a
scries of letters to the Press from the old Arab Bureau brigade
which incensed Wilson at a time when he was coping with insur­
rection, along with the Kurdish problem where an early attempt
at autonomy had been abandoned by the administration. The
military authority was unwilling to support him, especially since
General Sir Aylmer Haldane had taken over from MacMunn as
G.O.C. in March, and soon another problem came to the fore —
the rising strength and insistence of Ibn Saud. Wilson’s was not
a light burden and he was at no great pains to conceal his irritation
from the India Office. According to his biographer he comforted
himself at the time by putting a new Latin motto over his desk,
Aeqttam memento rebus in arduis servarc mentem, which he rendered
rather freely —‘All men, when prosperity is at its height, should
consider within themselves in what way they would endure
disaster’. He beseeched the India Office, in the words of Cromwell,
‘in the bowels of Christ, consider it possible that ye may be
mistaken’. The quarrel between Wilson and Gertrude came to its
unfortunate climax at the height of the revolt.
Gertrude seems to have known that she was in danger of being
dismissed. In June she wrote in explanation of her admitted in­
discretions, ‘I had an appalling scene last week with AT ... I gave
one of our Arab friends here a bit of information I ought not
I technically to have given. It wasn’t of much importance, and it
didn’t occur to me I had done wrong until I mentioned it casually ...
He told me my indiscretions were intolerable and that I should
never see another paper in the office. I apologised for that par­
1 ticular indiscretion ... but he continued: “You’ve done more
harm here than anyone. If I hadn’t been going away myself I
should have asked for your dismissal months ago—you and your
: Amir.” I know really what’s at the bottom of it—I’ve been right
and he has been wrong.’
She was certainly stretching her chief’s patience to an extreme
limit when, at the start of the rebellion in July, she wrote a letter
to Haldane the G.O.C. which expressed her belief that the bottom
had dropped out of the agitation, an impression gained from
‘many heart-to-heart interviews’. Haldane took her word for it
and delayed military action, and afterwards cited Gertrude’s letter
to Wilson as an excuse. Wilson deserves the last word: ‘...it was,