Treasure Seekers: Edge of the Orient Page #5

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Two months later,

British forces occupied Baghdad.

Gertrude Bell wasn't far behind.

When the Armistice came

in January 1918,

she was exactly where

she wanted to be.

There was always this sense of

ownership in her attitude towards Iraq.

And she loved it in a very

paternalistic way,

with this attitude that she, herself,

could control the area

that she could decide

what was going to happen to it.

There was one letter that

Gertrude Bell wrote home

where she said,

"I feel like God in his creation."

She was so aware that the British

were creating countries,

Puppet states, if you will,

for the British.

But starting from scratch.

There had never been

a state of Iraq before.

There had never been

any such thing.

In this great expanse of empty desert

and disparate tribes,

Gertrude Bell drew the lines,

creating the modern state of Iraq.

Defining the contours of

the contemporary Middle East,

still in contention today.

In 1919, nationalism seethed

as the British and French divided

the area into protectorates.

At first, Gertrude believed that

the British should govern Iraq.

But T.E. Lawrence helped change

her mind.

He argued that the throne belonged to

this man, Faisal,

the charismatic leader

of the Arab revolt.

At a conference in Cairo in 1921,

Gertrude Bell took her place between

Lawrence and Winston Churchill.

There were these famous pictures

of her at conferences

where she is the only woman.

This must have been incredibly hard,

and she carried it off.

She was a woman in a world

dominated by men.

Surprisingly,

Gertrude Bell preferred it that way.

Back in England, she had campaigned

against a woman's right to vote.

In her gut,

she really never did believe that

women were the equal of men.

She believed that

she was intellectually,

but of course, if all women were

treated as the equal of men,

that would also have made her

less special.

It would have made her

just another woman

who happened to be an extraordinary

one, but just another woman.

Now, this extraordinary woman prepared

for the coronation of King Faisal.

She made sure he couldn't do

without her,

hosting a series of teas and dinners

for him in the garden of her home.

These were some of the best years

of Gertrude Bell's life.

She was very close to the King,

King Faisal.

In fact, she had an almost

school girl crush on him,

and he was very fond of her.

And everybody relied on her,

so she had a great sense

of importance, of power.

On pleasant afternoons,

Gertrude would take Faisal

to view the ancient ruins

in the desert.

"We shall make Iraq as great as

its past," she promised the new king.

But it wasn't long before Faisal had

his own ideas, his own set of advisors.

To occupy Gertrude's time,

he appointed her honorary director

of antiquities.

She took the position seriously,

insisting that her British

and American colleagues

turn over 50 percent of the treasures

they found in Iraq

to form the nucleus of

a new museum in Baghdad.

Gertrude Bell wrote some of the first

laws protecting the rights of a country

to safeguard its ancient treasures.

Yet her letters home were

sounding plaintive.

Except for the museum,

I'm not enjoying life at all.

The role of the British

in Iraq was waning,

and with it, Gertrude's power.

As time went by,

there were no more dinner parties

in her garden.

And so she found herself there

more and more on her own,

with less and less to do.

She became sadder and sadder,

until she felt as if a great black

cloud had come over her.

She felt that there was nothing left

for her in Baghdad,

and certainly nothing left

for her in England.

One has the sharp sense of being

near the end of things,

with no certainty as to what,

if anything, one will do next.

It is a very lonely business

living here now.

In her mind she felt that

she had failed in her lifelong quest

to be recognized as a person.

She was tired, ill, and alone.

Haunted by doubts about the choices

she had made.

On July 11, 1926,

three days before her 58th birthday,

Gertrude Bell took an overdose

of sleeping pills and died.

She was buried the next day

in a full military funeral

attended by thousands of people.

One of her colleagues paid tribute:

Hers was the brightest spirit that

shone upon our labors in the East.

Gertrude's dream of the East

had sustained her

through a life of public achievement

and personal heartache.

She may have died doubting it,

but to history

she was a person at last.

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