Bell - The Arab War

Gertrude Bell, writer, traveller, political officer, archaeologist and cartographer, was one of the most remarkable women to emerge from post-Victorian England. As the daughter of a wealthy, well-connected family, she grew up politically aware and accustomed to the company of articulate, well-educated parliamentarians, diplomats and intellectuals. She enrolled at Oxford University at age 17 and two years later graduated with a first class honors degree in history, the first woman to ever graduate from Oxford.

In 1892, she visited her uncle Sir Frank Lascelles, British minister to Iran, at his residence in Tehran. This began her lifelong fascination with the Near East and for the next 15 years she visited most of the major cities of the Levant developing her linguistic abilities she was fluent in Arabic, Persian, French and German and conversant in Italian and Turkish and learning the meticulous discipline of archaeology. In 1909, she traveled to Mesopotamia where she visited the Hittite city of Carchemish and mapped the ruins of Ukhaidir before going to Babylon and the Shia holy city of Najaf. Back in Carchemish, she consulted with the two archaeologists on site, one of whom was the young scholar T. E. Lawrence . In 1913 she made an adventurous journey to Hail in Northern Arabia where after a series of difficulties she met and visited with Ibn Rashid, the chieftain of the powerful Shammar tribe. She wrote several books about her travels and adventures that enhanced her reputation as a Middle Eastern expert and a singular woman with practical knowledge of the Near East.

At the beginning of World War I she requested to serve the British government as a Middle Eastern advisor, her offer was spurned, so she volunteered with the Red Cross in France. With the failure of the invasion of Gallipoli, the British government turned to the strategy of instigating an Arab revolt to engage the Turks in the Near East. To this end the Arab Bureau was formed in Cairo under the command of General Gilbert Clayton and the direct supervision of Lieutenant Commander David Hogarth, the renowned professor of archaeology and history at Oxford. In late 1915 Bell was recruited to rejoin her fellow Arabist and archaeologist T.E. Lawrence to begin the development of a comprehensive profile of the regions leading personalities, and important tribes along with their affiliations and customs.

Six months later Bell was rushed to Basra to advise Percy Cox, the Chief Political Officer of Mesopotamia, on the British advance to Bagdad over terrain she knew better than any serving British officer. She drafted maps that were instrumental in the safe passage of the Imperial forces to Bagdad which fell to the British on March 10, 1917. In recognition of her contribution she was named the only female British political officer and officially given the title of Oriental Secretary.

Her other duties in Basra included submitting reports to the Arab Bulletin, the intelligence summary published by the Arab Bureau in Cairo, concerning the various events and personalities of the eastern Arab theater that she considered important to the war against the Turks. These reports comprise The Arab War .

To quote her superior officer Lord Kinahan Cornwallis, They [the reports] made no attempt to give a connected account of how the war was moving in her area, but each was complete in itself, whether it described a system, an individual, or a phase in tribal history. She wrote them as an official for official purposes, but officialdom could never spoil the freshness and vividness of her style or the terseness of her descriptions. Throughout them all can be seen the breadth of her knowledge, and her sympathy and understanding for the people whom she loved so well. It is good that they have been recovered from the oblivion of the Arab Bulletin and it seems a great pity that more of the reports which she wrote during the years when she was in Iraq cannot be unearthed from the dusty file cupboards where they must still be reposing.

After the war, in 1921, Bell, Cox and Lawrence were invited by Churchill to attend a conference in Cairo to determine the boundaries of the British mandate and the new countries of Transjordan and Iraq. Throughout the conference, she and Lawrence successfully advocated for the establishment of constitutional monarchies in the two countries with the sons of Sharif Hussein of Mecca, Abdullah and Faisal, as kings.

She resided in Bagdad where she devoted herself to advising the new King Faisal and creating the Iraqi Archaeological Museum . She has been called the mother of modern Iraq and until her death on July 12, 1926 she served on the Iraq British High Commission advisory group.

She was an extraordinary woman who lived a fascinating life, there are many excellent books about her life and times among them Janet Wallachs Desert Queen and Georgina Howells Gertrude Bell, Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations .