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here the better the inhabitants will be pleased.” She got on well with Arnold Wilson in those early days. He was, she reported enthusiastically to her parents, “a most remarkable creature, 34, brilliant abilities, a combined mental and physical power that is extremely rare.” Wilson in turn admired her “unwearying diligence” in dealing with paperwork. She was, he told his family, “extraordinarily vigorous and helpful in many ways.” Together they waited for word from their superiors about what would happen to Mesopotamia. It did not come. “I presumed,” said Wilson, “that if their oracles were dumb it was because their doubts were even greater than ours.” As they waited, Bell began to change her mind about the sort of government Mesopotamia needed. Arabs would have to play a larger role than she had at first thought. 45

In January 1919, Arnold Wilson sent Bell off to Cairo, London and Paris to try to find out what was happening. In February, he followed her to Paris, where she was putting the case for a country in Mesopotamia. As she wrote rather grandly to her family, “I’m lunching tomorrow with Mr. Balfour who, I fancy, really doesn’t care. Ultimately I hope to catch Mr. Lloyd George by the coat tails, and if I can manage to do so I believe I can enlist his sympathies. Meanwhile we’ve sent for Colonel Wilson from Baghdad.” She was convinced, rightly as it turned out, that the fate of Mesopotamia was linked to settlement of the dispute over Syria: “We can’t consider one without the other, and in the case of Syria it’s the French attitude that counts.” She had been spending a great deal of time with Lawrence and Feisal and now shared their hope that the French might be persuaded to have Feisal as king of an independent Syria. Arnold Wilson disapproved strongly of Lawrence and his views: “He seems to have done an immense amount of harm and our difficulties with the French seem to me to be mainly due to his actions and advice.”46

The talking and the lobbying accomplished little. As Montagu, secretary of state for India, wrote plaintively to Balfour: “We have now collected in Paris Miss Bell and Colonel Wilson. They are responsible to me. They come to me and say ‘We are here. What do you want of us?’ I can give them no information of what is going on.” While the peacemakers prevaricated, in Mesopotamia unrest was spreading: among Kurds and Persians, who were restless under Arab domination; among the Shia, who resented Sunni influence; among tribal leaders challenged by British power; among high-ranking officers and bureaucrats who had lost their status with the collapse of the Ottomans; and among the increasing numbers of Arab nationalists. Bell worried from the sidelines. In April she wrote to her old friend Aubrey Herbert, himself anxious about Albania, “O my dear they are making such a horrible muddle of the Near East, I confidently anticipate that it will be much worse than it was before the war—except Mesopotamia which we may manage to hold up out of the general chaos. It’s like a nightmare in which you foresee all the horrible things which are going to happen and can’t stretch out your hand to prevent them.”47

That spring Egypt blew up. Egyptians had never taken happily to British rule, even though the British tried to disguise it by governing through a khedive. By the time the war started, Egypt had the foundations for a strong national movement: powerful religious leaders, local magnates and a growing professional class, who were building links to each other and downward, into the huge peasant population of the Nile delta. The war itself brought fresh trouble. When the Ottoman empire, still nominally the overlord of Egypt, declared war on Britain in 1914, the British declared a protectorate. That infuriated many Egyptians, as did the influx of quantities of British and Australian troops, and the accompanying rise in prices. The British sent out contradictory messages about the future: on the ground, their hold over the country tightened, but the government in London used Woodrow Wilson’s language. The Fourteen Points