Miss Gertrude Bell, whose death we announce with great regret on page 14, was perhaps the most distinguished woman of our day in the field of Oriental exploration, archaeology, and literature, and in the service of the Empire in Irak. Her life has been in some ways quite unique, for she is the only Englishwoman who has travelled right across the wild deserts of Arabia, winning for herself thereby the gold medal of the Royal Geographical Society, and who, having placed her rare knowledge of the East at the disposal of the British authorities during the Great War, and been sent to Baghdad soon after the British occupation, has held a high position in the Political Department of the Government of India, originally in charge of Mesopotamian affairs. Her premature death must be ascribed to the deep interest in her work and to the unflinching sense of duty which, except for two very short holidays at home, kept her for nearly ten years almost continuously at Baghdad, even during the torrid heat of the Mesopotamian summers, when the thermometer stands for weeks together about and above 120deg. in the shade.
Her career was entirely of her own choosing and making, though in its early stages she could naturally not, in the least, foresee the shape it would ultimately take. The eldest daughter of Sir Hugh Bell, the great Yorkshire ironmaster, she studied at Queen's College, London, and at Oxford University, where she took a first class in history in 1887. Not long afterwards she went out to Persia, where her uncle, the late Sir Frank Lascelles, was then British Minister, and it was at Teheran that she first heard the East a' calling.
THE ARAB LANDS.
But though Persia and the Persians first captured her imagination, it was the Arab countries and Arab life and Arabic literature that soon acquired a far stronger and more enduring hold upon her. She began to travel on her own account and to watch from year to year, while the Arab lands still formed part of the old Ottoman Empire, the stirrings of a new Arab sense of nationhood during the last period of Abdul Hamid's reign and under the Committee of Union and Progress after the Turkish Revolution. She was a keen observer of the political changes which were taking place all over the Near East under the powerful impact of the West, but her chief interest and delight was in the life of the East, the picturesque habits and customs of the humbler folk, the intellectual outlook of the ruling classes, whether they still stood firm and stubborn in the ancient ways or were taking on a veneer of modern civilization. Doughty's masterpiece of Arab travel, then almost unnoticed in England, exerted a potent influence upon her, and she learnt from him to seek out the black tents of the Beduin tribesmen, whose confidence she captured by reciting to them favourite passages from the old desert poets as familiar to them as the Old Testament stories to our Roundheads. At the end of 1906 she revealed herself to her fellow-countrymen in a volume entitled "The Desert and the Sown," perhaps the most brilliant one she ever wrote, with the breath of the desert still upon her, and yet with the restraint of one whose mind was already trained to sober judgment. It was followed at the end of 1910 by "Amurath to Amurath," in which archaeological and topographical research in the silent Mesopotamian borderland plays as important a part as her shrewd speculations in the more tumultuous field of Near Eastern politics, then ripening for the bloody harvest of war.
It was in 1913 that her adventurous spirit compassed and carried out a bold scheme for crossing the Arabian peninsula from west to east and visiting the Shammar stronghold at Hayil, to which no European had penetrated for 20 years, and it is worth noting to-day that the large store of information she brought back with her included an estimate of 1bn Saud of Al Riadh as "the chief figure in Central Arabia," though very little was then known about him, which the events of the last few years have signally borne out. All these exhausting and often dangerous journeys she accomplished without any European companion and attended only by her one devoted Syrian servant, Fattuh, to whose resourcefulness and loyalty she has paid many warm tributes. She never attempted to disguise her nationality or her sex, and, indeed, she rightly believed that her sex was her best safeguard among the fierce but proud children of the desert who respect the reliance placed in their good faith, whether they are inclined to look upon the strange traveller as a mad woman, and therefore under the special protection of Allah, or as one who comes of a great and honoured race whose customs are inviolable. The real secret of her success in conquering the desert, which she sometimes loved and sometimes hated, was that with a splendid constitution and great powers of endurance she combined absolute fearlessness and quick sympathy and understanding, whatever the particular type of humanity with which she happened to be thrown into contact.
INFLUENCE IN IRAQ.
The war changed her life, and not merely "for the duration." She had hitherto been her own mistress and had done as she listed. She realized at once the magnitude of the issues involved in the East as well as in the West and she threw herself into the service of her country where she knew she would be most needed. After some valuable work in France and in the Intelligence Department in Egypt, she went out at the request of the then Viceroy, Lord Hardinge, to Mesopotamia, where her almost unrivalled knowledge of Arab tribal politics and of many of the most influential tribesmen was invaluable in the critical stages of the Mesopotamian campaign and still more in the work of administrative reconstruction which followed the expulsion of the Turk. She had not perhaps in the first years, when British policy in Mesopotamia was being shaped largely by Indian military administrators, the influence which she acquired afterwards when Sir Percy Cox and more lately Sir Henry Dobbs as High Commissioners had settled down to lay the foundations of a more stable order of things in transition to a constitutional State of Iraq under a British mandate, and ultimately with full rights of sovereignty as soon as the people shall have been proved capable of governing and protecting themselves without foreign help and support. If Iraq has already made some progress towards that goal, if King Feisal already sits on a less uneasy throne, it is in no small measure due to the indefatigable spade work done by Miss Bell. The close friendship between her and the Sovereign of Iraq dated back to the Paris Peace Conference, which he attended as the son and representative of King Hussein of the Hedjaz, and she as an acknowledged expert on all questions connected with Arabia. But since he was chosen to be King of Iraq and came to reign at Baghdad, no one has enjoyed his confidence more tactfully and beneficially than the English lady whom he delighted to call his "sister." In many moments of crisis she was the unobtrusive channel for confidential and delicate communications between the Residency and the Palace, and equally trusted by both. In ordinary times her work was chiefly connected with tribal affairs, but there were few administrative questions on which her ripe knowledge of the country and the people was not consulted or failed to carry weight, and it is to her exhaustive survey of the civil administration, laid before Parliament four years ago, that the British public owes the fullest information yet given to it on the condition of Iraq.
AFTER THE TREATY.
With the conclusion and ratification of last year's Treaty between Great Britain and Iraq, which formally consecrated the new regime, Miss Bell began to feel that the consummation for which she had always worked in the interests of both countries had been as fully assured as the condition of a still storm-tossed world allowed, and during her last short visit home, barely a year ago, she confessed to her friends that the strain of so many arduous years in so pitiless a climate was beginning to tell even upon her iron constitution. There seemed then some hope that she would return before long, perhaps even this year, to enjoy a much needed rest before turning to the no less valuable work she still hoped to do on the vast materials she had collected and had not yet had time to utilize. But a compelling interest arose for her as soon as she got back to Baghdad in connexion with the development of an archaeological department on which she had long set her heart, and the last piece of work she sent home was a catalogue of the small Iraq Museum of which she was bent on securing the future. The results of the recent excavations at Ur of the Chaldees strengthened her conviction that there lie still buried under the sands of Iraq innumerable remains of a great antiquity equally precious from the point of view of history and of art, and it is a pathetic coincidence that the news of her death should have reached London on the very day on which Mr. Woolley was displaying at the British Museum some of the remarkable finds made during the last winter season at Ur to which her private letters have frequently referred with all her old enthusiasm.
Her death is a grievous loss to her country, whom she served in many fields, lending distinction to all; to Iraq, who has had no better friend; to the personal friends who learnt to know her fine character as well as her fine intellect, and to the large circle of those whose admiration she won through her books and her work, and won abundantly. With all the qualities which are usually described as virile she combined in a high degree the charm of feminine refinement, and though only revealed to few, even amongst her intimates, great depths of tender and even passionate affection.
