Page 246 - Life of Gertrude Bell
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                                         GERTRUDE BELL
                   usually polished and quiet, more like a Turkish Mufti? Philby
                   asked him if he could make his return journey by land through the
                   Hijaz. The king refused, remarking that ‘People were saying that
                   he had sold his country to the English’. As Philby went to take his
                   leave the old man said to the English party that ‘they would come
                   in due course to accept his view of Ibn Saud’s unworthiness’.
                   Philby replied: ‘I was sent to Najd by the British Government to
                   see things with my own eyes, and it is my misfortune that I have
                   arrived at conclusions widely differing from those of Your
                   Majesty.’ I-Iogarth, said Philby, averted his eyes. Now, in 1920, a
                   desert force called the Ikhwan, the Brotherhood, reviving the old
                   religious fanaticism of the Wahhabi kingdom, was on the rampage
                   and had already opened Ibn Saud’s pathway to Mecca. Three times
                   in 1918, Husain’s forces attacked the Saudi sympathisers of the
                   oasis of Khurma. In August of that year Philby wrote a memor­
                   andum to the Government in which he said: ‘Ibn Saud most un­
                   doubtedly claims Khurma as being within his jurisdiction—he
                   does so not only on religious and territorial grounds but also on
                   historical, administrative and tribal grounds. He therefore con­
                   siders the Sharif’s action as aggressive and hostile to himself.’ In
                   August, Wilson Pasha, Wingate’s representative in the Hijaz,
                   declared: ‘Khurma belongs to Husain.’ Backed by British words,
                   if not deeds, Husain decided to try again in 1919. His army was
                   annihilated. In 1920 the House of Rashid, Ibn Saud’s bitter rivals
                   in Najd, succumbed to the last of a long series of royal homicides.
                   Saud ibn Rashid, the young ruler who had been in the care of the
                   Sharif in his youth and had been the ally, however unreliable, of
                   the Turks, became the last victim of a bloody history of murder
                   and dishonour. By that time Britain, encouraged by Hogarth and
                   Lawrence, had begun to toy with the idea of an alliance between
                   the Rashids and Husain to bolster the tottering power of its Arab
                   proteges. But it was too late. Early in 1921 Ibn Saud took Hail.

                   In August 1920 the Iraqi insurrectionists claimed their most dis­
                   tinguished victim, Colonel Leachman, explorer and soldier of
                   fortune. In March, Leachman had been posted to Dulaim on the
                   Upper Euphrates, following an operation for appendicitis. He
                   occupied a district which for four years had been the centre of
                   looting and murder, but he gave as good as he got among the
                            who surrounded him. Several officers had been killed
                   wild men
                   but the intrepid Leachman  was  not perturbed. On August 12th
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