Arabian nights of Gertrude Bell, The

Hudson Review, The, Autumn 2001 by Mullen, Alexandra

No turning the other cheek for Bell: "May God deprive him of the other eye also!"

At the start of her journey to Hayyil, Bell had thought all the risks were worth it. And, by some standards, the trip was a success. The Royal Geographical Society awarded her the gold medal for this expedition. And Jeremy Wilson, in his authorized biography of T. E. Lawrence, notes that her journey provided a "mass of information ... about the tribal elements ranging betwen the Hejaz Railway on the one flank and the Sirhan and Nefud on the other, particularly about the Howaitat group" which was of "signal use" to Lawrence and the British in the Arab campaigns of 1917 and 1918. But as if it were an emblem of her life, the journey, despite its usefulness, didn't turn out as Bell had planned. When she reached Hayyil, the current Rashid emir was out on a raid and she was elegantly but unmistakably held prisoner for eleven days. To Doughty-Wylie she presented a fairly insouciant account ("It gets upon your nerves when you sit day after day between high mud walls and I thank heaven that my nerves are not very responsive"), but the diary she kept for herself conveys the genuine threat. She was prevented from continuing on to visit the Sauds. Above all, she feared the futility of her self-chosen adventure.

It is nothing, the journey to Nejd, so far as any real advantage goes, or any real addition to knowledge.... Here, if there is anything to record the probability is that you can't find it or reach it, because a hostile tribe bars your way, or the road is waterless, or something of that kind, and that which has chanced to lie upon my path for the last 10 days is not worth mentioning-two wells, as I said before, and really I can think of nothing else. So you see the cause of my depression. I fear when I come to the end I shall not look back and say: That was worth doing; but more likely when I look back I shall say: It was a waste of time. It's done now, and there is no remedy, but I think I was a fool to come into these wastes when I have not, and cannot have, a free hand to work at the things I care for.

Bell's life for the next twelve years until her death was crammed full of useful employment, but it's arguable that she ever felt she had a free hand. She worked with the Red Cross in France at the beginning of the war; during the war, she worked at the Cairo Intelligence Department and became the Mesopotamian correspondent of the Arab Bureau in Basra. At the Paris Peace conference, she represented (and began to redefine) British interests; at the Cairo conference, Bell and Lawrence advised Churchill on setting up Feisal's ascendancy to the throne of Iraq. As Oriental Secretary in Baghdad (the first woman imperial servant, apparently), she became Feisal's chief confidant ("When I come to think of it, it is curious to be settling the family affairs of a descendant of the Prophet who is also King of Iraq"). Awards and honors were hers. But Doughty-Wylie had been killed at Gallipoli; her later passion for a young English adviser to King Feisal was unrequited; it seems likely that, a few days before her fifty-eighth birthday, Gertrude Bell committed suicide.