Page 273 - Life of Gertrude Bell

FAISAL’S kingdom 247
had noticed, Faisal was sometimes angry with her when he could
not have his own way, she had good cause to feel aggrieved by her
protdgd’s conduct. Early in his reign Faisal dismissed five of his
Cabinet ministers in a fit of pique. Cox, who had admitted to
Churchill before die coronadon that he could not properly lay
down the law to the king once he was enthroned, laid it down
firmly with Gertrude’s blessing, and the ministers were reinstated.
There were, of course, vociferous Arab opponents of the regime,
especially among the Shia majority who were virtually unrepre­
sented in the government. Internal differences were never far from
erupdon. Kurds would not live contentedly alongside Arabs,
Armenians and Turks. Sunni and Shia could never be reconciled.
Tribesmen wanted nothing whatever to do with government of
any kind. Gertrude and her colleagues had taken on an unenviable
task, but as they had been told, indeed as she herself had recog­
nised when she first came to the Arabian peninsula, they flew in
the face of millennia of history in their attempt to make a kingdom
out of a few vilayets of the Ottoman Empire; with, at that, an
alien king as their instrument. But by now there was no other way,
except the coward’s course of simple retreat. Gertrude’s view of
Faisal became in the end a romandc vision:
I send you a little puff about HM’s farm which I published in
the Baghdad Times. I hear that the cinema man was a great
success ... He photographed all the farm, with the King picking
cotton and the tractors working etc. and we shall have it in
Baghdad shortly. I had an immense talk with HM yesterday
afternoon about his household arrangements and Syria and
everything...
But as she toiled to convince the world of the justice of the
Hashemite cause, Faisal and his father and brothers continued to
plot against the powers that had sustained them. In a moment of
exasperation she described the old man of Mecca as ‘That old
rogue King Husain’. Then, putting on her rose-tinted spectacles:
T was having tea with HM this afternoon, it was the loveliest
Oriental scene. He was sitting in the garden near a fountain in
full Arab dress, the white and gold of the Meccan princes ... ’ In
February 1924 there were rumours that Mustafa Kamal’s Turks
and the French were plotting with Husain to make Ali, the eldest
of the Hashemite princes, king of Syria in an effort to undermine
the British position in Iraq. While Lord Milner was admitting to