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compatible with good and safe government.” His superiors in London ruled that out. They preferred indirect rule, something the British had used in the Indian princely states and Egypt. It had the advantage of being cheaper than direct control—an important consideration, especially in 1919. As Balfour pointed out, when the Eastern Committee was talking away about all the glorious possibilities that lay before Britain: “We consider the advantage to the natives, the advantage to our prestige; we consider certain things connected with trade and commerce, and all the rest of it; but money and men I have never seen referred to, and they seem to me to be the governing considerations.” And indirect rule did at least bow in the direction of Arab self-determination and liberal opinion. “What we want,” said a senior official at the India Office, “is some administration with Arab institutions which we can safely leave while pulling the strings ourselves; something that won’t cost very much, which Labour can swallow consistent with its principles, but under which our economic and political interests will be secure.” 41

This was easier said than done. There was a new spirit stirring in the Arab world and farther afield. In India, nationalists were rallying behind Gandhi; in Egypt, the Wafd party was growing day by day. Arab nationalism was still weak in Iraq, but it was already a potent force in Syria and Egypt. Arnold Wilson’s oriental secretary and trusted adviser realized this, even if he did not.

Gertrude Bell was the only woman to play a key figure in the peace settlements in her own right. Thin, intense, chain-smoking, with a voice that pierced the air, she was accustomed to being out of the ordinary. Although she came from a rich, well-connected family, she had broken with the usual pattern of her class—marriage, children and society—by going to Oxford and becoming the first woman to receive a first-class degree in history. She climbed the Matterhorn and pioneered new routes in the Alps. She was a noted archaeologist and historian. She was also arrogant, difficult and very influential. In November 1919, when the British commander-in-chief in Baghdad held a reception for eighty notables, they left their seats to crowd around her.42

With only her servants and guides for company, Gertrude Bell had traveled all over the Middle East before the war, from Beirut to Damascus and from Baghdad to Mosul. She loved the desert: “Silence and solitude fall round you like an impenetrable veil; there is no reality but the long hours of riding, shivering in the morning and drowsy in the afternoon, the bustle of getting into camp, the talk around Muhammad’s fire after dinner, profounder sleep than civilization contrives, and then the road again.” 43 By 1914, she was widely recognized as one of Britain’s leading authorities on the Middle East. In 1915, she became the first woman to work for British military intelligence and the only woman officially part of the British expedition to Mesopotamia.

She herself did not believe in rights for women. Nor did she like most of her own sex. “It is such a pity,” she said loudly in front of a young English bride, “that promising young Englishmen go and marry such fools of women.” Her best friends were men: Lawrence, St. John Philby (father of a notorious son), Feisal and, for a time, Arnold Wilson. She loved passionately but never married. When her first great love turned out to be a gambler, her father refused his permission, and her second was already married. On Christmas Day in 1920 she wrote to her father: “As you know I’m rather friendless. I don’t care enough about people to take trouble about them, and naturally they don’t trouble about me—why should they? Also all their amusements bore me to tears and I don’t join in them.” 44

She threw herself into her work in Mesopotamia. “We shall, I trust,” she wrote to her father, “make it a centre of Arab civilisation and prosperity.” The Arabs, she assumed at first, would play little part in their own government. “The stronger the hold we are able to keep