Death's whisper

Trevor Mostyn
A Quest in the Middle East: Gertrude Bell and the Making of Modern Iraq
by Liora Lukitz
Tauris, 320pp

First published in the Times Literary Supplement, 23 June 2006

WITH IRAQ IN TURMOIL, SYRIA unstable and the Palestinian West Bank fragmenting, Liora Lukitz's A Quest in the Middle East is a timely account of Gertrude Bell's role in shaping the Middle East after the First World War. Bell's travels in the Ottoman Empire, Iran and India inspired her to write books which were, like T. E. Lawrence's The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, influenced by Charles Doughty's classic, Travels in Arabia Deserta. She helped to plant the Sharif Husayn of Mecca's third son, Faysal, on the Iraqi throne and create and map out modern Iraq. Bell, Lawrence, Kenahan Cornwallis (who became Faysal's adviser) and other members of the Arab Bureau in Cairo during the war "aimed to build a new people in the East", as Lawrence put it in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom.


  Bell (third rider from left) is flanked by Winston Churchill, on her right, and T E
   Lawrence at Giza during the 1921 Cairo Conference.

Liora Lukitz's biography recounts Bell's flight from a comfortable life in the Northern English town of Middlesbrough to epic adventures, above all her time in Iraq, from 1916, when she was sent by Lord Hardinge, the Viceroy in India, to Basra to work under the chief political officer of the Persian Gulf area, Sir Percy Cox. In 1920, the League of Nations awarded Britain the Mandate to govern Iraq, Cox was made its High Commissioner, and Bell followed him to Baghdad to serve him as Oriental Secretary and confidante. She wrote to her father, "I feel at times like the Creator". She told him, that "we shall make Iraq as great as its past". In Baghdad, she, Cox and Cornwallis helped to lay the foundations of modern Iraq and mapped out the country's present boundaries. They had to deal with major issues such as the reaction of the Shi'a tribes to Sunni rule, the extent of Kurdish autonomy in the north and whether Mosul would go to post-Ottoman Turkey or, with its oil vital to the British Navy, remain in Iraq (which it did).

Expelled by the French from Syria, Faysal was invited to take the throne. Bell developed a bond with Faysal who would hold her hand and call her "our sister". However, he resisted British manipulation and, pressured by Iraqi nationalists, soon wanted Britain to leave. "I preferred to go before the snow image which I had created . . . melted before my eyes", Bell wrote sadly. Though A Quest in the Middle East is thoughtful, Lukitz does not add much to the plethora of biographies of Bell already published. Her book follows the 2004 republication of H. V. F. Winston's Gertrude Bell (1978).

While Lukitz does not refer to present-day Iraq, Winston draws damning parallels, outraged by the looting of artefacts in 2003, under United States forces' eyes, from Baghdad's National Museum, which Bell had created. "It broke the hearts of Woolley, Langdon and other diggers", writes Winston, when Bell insisted that Iraq must keep the best of its finds from Ur and other sites.

The love of her life was to be "Dick" Doughty-Wylie, whom she described as "Gallant and fearless, duty-bound, courageous and loyal" - but later as "incoherent, vacillating . . . . sending double messages". He wrote to her, "You shall walk in my garden - even ghostwise and imperfect in this life . . .".
Lukitz believes that the unconsummated love affair suited her because it did not challenge her independence, but the heartbreak throws its shadow over the book.

Doughty-Wylie had a wealthy wife whom he felt unable to leave. Besides, Lukitz hints that Bell was reluctant to sleep with him and that he was getting tired of her inhibitions. "And if you die", she wrote, "wait for me. I am not afraid of that other crossing . . . ." He would reply in similar vein. It was as if they preferred an erotic relationship based on words alone. When he was killed at Gallipoli, she responded with a line she had translated from Hafiz: "And the wind of Death has swept hopes away". The deserts of the Middle East may have represented an escape from her failed love life. Sometimes she would, on her travels, muse on the world she had fled: "the parties, the dances, the ballrooms lit by the glitter of chandeliers, the Ascot races, the theatre and other social events of London's season".

In 1915, she had been sent to Cairo to act as head of the Iraqi branch of the Arab Bureau which was created by Sir Mark Sykes and headed by Professor D. G. Howarth.

One of the Bureau's goals was to keep the Foreign and India Offices, the Admiralty, the War Office and the Government of India (whose opinions differed sharply) informed about German and Turkish policies. Some derided the Bureau as an outfit of brilliant eccentrics, which it was. Sykes's name would be connected in particular with the Sykes-Picot agreement, which the Bolsheviks published in 1917 to embarrass Britain. A secret Anglo-French correspondence, the agreement planned to carve up the Near East and impose Anglo-French control. The same year saw the publication of the Balfour Declaration, which called for a "National Home" for the Jews, in Palestine. Bell condemned the Declaration but, according to Lukitz, she believed that the Jews should settle in the area north of Jerusalem, including the port of Haifa, and that the Arabs should keep the rest. "It's a great plot I am weaving", she wrote to Doughty-Wylie.

A gifted travel writer, an intrepid traveller, a skilful archaeologist and a linguist with a profound knowledge of the Arabian tribes ("I know every Tribal Chief of any importance throughout the whole length and breadth of Iraq", she wrote), Bell was the sole woman delegate to the 1921 Cairo peace conference; the photograph of her, Lawrence and Churchill on camelback before the Sphinx is iconic. Sykes described her as a "flat-chested, man-woman, globe trotting, rump-wagging, blathering ass". Lawrence spoke of her "changing her directions each time as a weathercock". Doughty Wylie knew a "shadowy woman, hostile and alarming, that swept across my bed like a hawk . . . . The woman meant attack. And I wanted the light".

In fact, Gertrude Bell, too, wanted the light, and her motto was "absit omen" ("let the bad omen be far away from us"). Although an atheist, she was drawn to Sufism, translating much of Hafiz's Diwan. Her death, in 1926, from a morphine overdose is unexplained, although clues to her feelings may lie in lines such as "When death comes to you ... Whispering: silence" from one of Hafiz's poems.

© Trevor Mostyn 2007 - www.trevormostyn.com