World War One

January Term, 2015
Abu Dhabi
NYUAD
HIST-AD 118J
Course: World War One:
A Case Study in the Causes, Course and Consequences of War
and the Possibility of Peace
Professors Robert Berdahl and Alan Kimball

Credits: 4
Prerequisites: None

Remember to renew this page each time you open it

Table of Contents =
*--Coded Markers and the Key Terms and Concepts for which They Stand (acronymic abbreviations)
*--Students' Annotated Chronology and Systematic Bibliography [SAC] [ID]
*--Course-specific Bibliography, alphabetized, coded and linked to The Big Boneyard Bibliography [BYD] [ID] with examples of codes useful for FIND searches [ID]. Most of these titles are available on the rolling course library cart.

Course Syllabus, with narrative intro
*--Readings
*--Writing
*--Calendar =

January 5 (Monday)
January 6 (Tuesday)
January 7 (Wednesday)
January 8 (Thursday)
January 11 (Sunday)
January 12 (Monday)
January 13 (Tuesday)
January 14 (Wednesday)
January 15 (Thursday)
January 18 (Sunday)
January 19 (Monday)
January 20 (Tuesday)
January 21 (Wednesday)
January 22 (Thursday)

TXTs, MAPs and other sites at bottom of this syllabus webpage

BBC's moving-MAP of WW1 western front [W.fr]
Norman Stone's review of Waites.CLASS [W.fr]
James Buchan about Gertrude Bell [S.fr]
David Woodward about Iraq in WW1, with relevance to recent times [S.fr]
Peter Sluglett about Iraq in WW1, with relevance to recent times

Syllabus of Topics and Dates

The First World War was the seminal event of the 20th century. It left ten million soldiers and six million civilians dead. Under the strain of war and defeat, Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire collapsed in revolution. Large portions of France lay in ruins and England’s wealth shattered. Europe ceased to be the center of the world, as leadership passed to the United States in the west and Japan in the east. And in the Euro-Asian territories of the old Russian Empire, a new colossus arose, the Soviet Union. Lost, too, was the 19th century’s easy confidence in human rationality, perfectibility, and progress. The war set the stage for disastrous events in the 20th century.

This course will concentrate on short-term and long-term causes and consequences of World War I. We will examine the roles of liberalism, nationalism, industrialism, socialism, imperialism, and militarism. We will examine the European state system and the consequences of the internal decline and contradictions of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and of the Ottoman Empire. We will analyze the immediate responses to the crisis of 1914, the judgments and misjudgments that started the conflict. We will examine war strategies, the costs and futility of its battles. By looking at diaries, letters, and contemporary writings, we will study its human impact. And we will study the larger outcomes of the war: changes in society, the revolutions, the peace settlements and their consequences. We will also examine how the war transformed those “isms” listed above.

Because the European fronts of World War I were so ghastly and important in setting the stage for the renewed European conflict of World War II, most of the histories of World War I concentrate on the Western Front in France and the Eastern Front in Germany, Poland, and Russia. While this course will cover these areas and the subsequent collapse of the empires of Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey, we also want to give special attention to the extension of the conflict in the Ottoman Empire, from Turkey itself to the Arab peninsula and as far east as Baghdad. The conflict in the Ottoman Empire and the subsequent division of its Middle Eastern empire are of major importance to the region today. Of special interest in this respect are the battles fought on the Turkish peninsula of Gallipoli when Britain launched its attack there, employing large numbers of troops from its empire – India, New Zealand, and Australia.

Plan for the Course:

Readings: Each session of the course will have assigned readings, with options to choose from among them (see below). These will be drawn from a variety of primary and secondary sources. In addition, the class will have access to a large number of books dealing with aspects of the war available on a rolling cart at the main desk of the NYUAD library. In addition, a very large body of primary documentation is available online, which students will be expected to utilize in preparing their written papers and their classroom presentations.

Students will be asked to acquire:

John Keegan, The First World War (Vintage: New York, 2000) [Keegan.WW1]
Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, The_First World War in the Middle East (Hurst, 2014) [Ulrichsen.MIDEAST]
Edward J. Erickson, Gallipoli and the Middle East, 1914-1918 (Amber: London, 2012) [Erickson.GALLIPOLI]

Writing Assignments/ Papers: Students will be asked to keep daily journals that will contain their class notes, their reading notes and, most important, their reflections on readings and discussions. Journals should also include notes students take as they prepare group projects and gather information for the papers they will write. Journals will be turned in on January 12 and January 21.

Each student is expected to write two papers (the first ca. 3 pages long, the second ca. 8) on topics suggested by the instructors or topics selected by the students and approved by the instructors. Here is a list of possible topics =

Part I: Background and Causes of World War I

January 5 (MO): (1) Introduction: Course Scope, Objectives, and Materials
(2) The “isms”: liberalism, nationalism, industrialism
(3) In class we will form six groups =

United Kingdom of Great Britain [England]
French Republic
Russian Empire
German Empire
Austro-Hungarian Empire
Ottoman Empire [Turkey]

course "rolling cart"

On liberalism:
John Locke, Second Treatise on Government, Chapters I, II, III, V, VII, VIII, IX, XIX [E-TXT]

On nationalism:
Charles Ingrao, "Ten Untaught Lessons about Central Europe" [E-TXT]
Stuart Woolf, Nationalism in Europe, 1815 to the Present [NIE], Introduction.
Ernst Renan, What Is The Nation? [SAC ID & E-TXT]

On industrialism:
Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers [Kennedy.R&F], pp. 143-193
or

January 6 (TU): The “isms” continued: socialism, imperialism, militarism.

Readings:

Keegan:3-70
Ulrichsen:1-30
W&P,1:3-63 [search out primary documents mainly associated with your "national" group]

On socialism:
Barbara Tuchman, Proud Tower [Tuchman.PROUD] Ch 8="The Death of Jaurés": 407-462
or
Merle Fainsod, International Socialism and the World War, [Fainsod.scx&wrx] pp. 11-103

On imperialism:
J. A. Hobson, Imperialism, E-TXT excerpt
Mustafa Aksakal, Ottoman Road to War in 1914... [Aksakal.OTM], pp. 1-18 “Pursuing sovereignty in the age of imperialism”, and pp. 56-92 "The Ottoman Empire within the international order"
or
Alexander Macfie, End of the Ottoman Empire [Macfie.END], pp. 1-19 (summary)
and/or
Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars [Hochschild.END], pp. 16-39

On militarism:
James J. Sheehan, Where Have All the Soldiers Gone? [Sheehan.WHERE], pp. 3-41
Barry R. Posen, “Nationalism, the Mass Army, and Military Power,” in C&S.NTNism:135-185.
or
Brian Bond, War and Society in Europe, 1870-1970 [Bond.WAR], pp. 40-71.
or
Gordon Craig, The Politics of the Prussian Army, [Craig.POLITICS], pp. 216-298

January 7 (WE): The European System, Balance of Power, and the “Sick Men” of Europe; Anticipations of War

Readings:

Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers [Kennedy.R&F], pp. 194-274.
or
Geoffrey Wawro, A Mad Catastrophe [Wawro.MAD], pp. 15-98.
or
Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers [Clark.SLEEP], pp. 121-242.
or
Mark Mazower, Governing the World [Mazower.GOVERNING], pp. 3-64
or
Macfie, End of the Ottoman Empire [Macfie.END], pp. 20-55 (Young Turks) and 71-94 (Balkan Wars)
and
Peter Durnovo, “February 1914 Memorandum”, E-TXT
Norman Angell, The Great Illusion, SAC ID & E-TXT
Norman Angell, “Letter to the London Times, August 1, 1914”

January 8 (TH): The Summer of 1914

Each group representing the Allies and the Central Powers will make presentations in class on the diplomacy of 1914 and the events leading to the outbreak of war in the summer of 1914. Students will read the material relevant to the country they are reporting on.

Readings:

John Keegan, The First World War [Keegan.WW1], 3-70
or
Max Hastings, Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War [Hastings.1914], pp. 1-102
or
Sean McMeekin, July 1914 [McMeekin.JULY].
or
David Fromkin, Europe’s Last Summer [Fromkin.WHO] pp. 131-257.
and
World War I Document Archive, 1914 [E-TXT passim]

January 9-10: Weekend

Part II: The Course of the War

January 11 (SU): War on the Eastern Front and "Southern Front"

JOURNALS TO BE TURNED IN
FIRST PAPER DUE

Reading:

Sean McMeekin, Russian Origins of the First World War [McMeekin.ORIGINS], pp.194-233
or
Keegan, The First World War [Keegan.WW1], pp. 138-174 and 234-249.
Edward J. Erickson, Gallipoli and the Middle East [Erickson.GALLIPOLI], pp. 1-125.
and/or
Peter Hart, Gallipoli [Hart.GALLIPOLI], passim.
Reynolds.SHATTER: 1-18

January 12 (MO) and January 13 (TU) and January 14 (WE) and January 15 (TH): Excursion to Gallipoli

Reading:

Erickson, Gallipoli and the Middle East [Erickson.GALLIPOLI], pp. 126-181

Part III: The Consequences of the War

January 18 (SU): Wrap up (1) Southern Front (Palestine and Iraq [Mesopotamia]) and (2) Eastern Front| Lay foundations for tomorrow's and subsequent nation-group reports, which will begin with Great Britain (England) and France

Readings:

Keegan, The First World War [Keegan.WW1], pp. 71-136; 175-203; 257-372.
Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory [Fussell,Paul], pp. 36-74.

January 19 (MO): The Home Front: Social Transformations and European post-war crises

Reports of nation-groups England and France

Readings (4 or 5 hours with some part of the following):

David Stevenson, With Our Backs to the Wall [Stevenson.1918], pp. 439-508
Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919 [MacMillan.PARIS], pp. 366-380
Judith Merkle, Management and Ideology, E-TXT, plus pp. 172-207

January 20 (TU): Russian Revolution and Civil War

Reports of nation-state groups Russia and Turkey

Readings (4 or 5 hours with some part of the following):

Ulrichsen.MIDEAST:149-205
SAC 1917-1920 [on the WW1 Southern Front and the Russian (Soviet) Revolutionary Civil War]
Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed, ch12, “Arming the Republic”, pp. 405-47
William L. Cleveland, A History of the Modern Middle East, pp. 149-170.

January 21 (WE): The Central Powers: Collapse and Revolution in Germany, Austria-Hungary

Report of nation-state groups Germany and Austria-Hungary

JOURNALS TO BE TURNED IN

Readings (4 or 5 hours with some part of the following):

Richard Bessel, Germany After the First World War [Bessel.GRM], pp. 1-48, 69-90.
Roger Chickering, Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914-1918 [Chickering.GREAT], pp. 95-167
V. R. Berghahn, Modern Germany: Society, Economy, and Politics in the Twentieth Century, pp. 38-81.
Robert Gerwath and John Horne, War in Peace: Paramilitary Violence. . . [Gerwath.PARAMILITARY], pp. 1-20; 52-71

January 22 (TH): The Treaties of 1919 and Consequences of the Peace: Europe/Middle East
The Consequences of the War and Peace for the “isms” =
(liberalism, nationalism, industrialism, socialism, imperialism, militarism)

SECOND PAPER DUE, SUBMITTED AS EMAIL ATTACHMENTS SENT TO
Professor Bob Berdahl <bob.berdahl@gmail.com>
Professor Alan Kimball <kimball@uoregon.edu>

Reading:
With your nation group in mind, use the indexes and skim for some 3-4 hours from among the following titles

Arno Mayer, Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking [Mayer.P&D], pp. 3-30 & 875-93
Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919 [MacMillan.PARIS], selections within page-range 208-494
David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire . . . [Fromkin.PEACE], pp. 351-462
William L. Cleveland, A History of the Modern Middle East, pp. 149-170.
At appropriate moments, Professor Alan will share some things from the following =
Arno Mayer, Wilson vs. Lenin, E-TXT
Élie Halévy, "The World Crisis of 1914-1918: An Interpretation", in Era of Tyrannies, pp. 209-47
Mark Mazower, Governing the World [Mazower.GOVERNING], ch5: 116-53 “League of Nations”; ch6:154-88 “The Battle of Ideologies”; ch10:273-304, “Development as World-Making, 1949-1973

Coded Markers and the Key Terms & Concepts for which They Stand
(used in this SYL, in BYD, and in other course webpages [EG=SAC] )
What follows is a three-part list

1.

The most important key concepts underpinning the course =
THE GREAT "isms"
Hop to this entry about the rise of "isms" = SAC | Then hop back here [ID "hop"]

2.

Then follow other significant acronyms relating to the historical "Long Duration" [Ldur] playing into and beyond WW1

|>AnR    = Ancien régime, the "old order" in pre-FREV Europe [ID] CF=REV
|>BoP    = Balance of powers | CF=CoE
|>cvc.pbl = Civil Society [SAC TXT on cvc.pbl] CF=lbx | CF=mlt
|>Ldur   = Longue durée (long duration, historical features or trends that endure over the long haul) [Wki ID]
|>nrg       = Energy, especially oil [nrg.p] CF=mfgR#2
|>stt.ndp = Sovereignty [SAC ID], but useful too in analysis of domestic politics | CF=sttism | CF=mlt
|>wrx     = War CF=mltism | CF=REV (wrx.&REV)

3.

Yet further useful codes

E.fr

Eastern Front

Deutsche Reich

H.fr =

Home front

OTM.TRK

S.fr

"Southern Front" in "AfroAsia" (2 neologisms) [ID]

E.fr

W.fr

W.fr

Western Front

BBC Moving MAP

Course Bibliography
Coded, alphabetized and linked to bbl.BYD [ID]
Also some textual or "historiographic" comparisons ["c&c" means "compare and contrast"] are suggested [EG]
*--| before entry means not on Abu Dhabi rolling shelf, but worth a hop to bbl.BYD

Some Course TXTs~ [Readings], MAPs etc.

BBC's moving-MAP of WW1 western front| Other BBC sites = W#1 | W#2 | W#3 (the big one)
*1988ja03:Sunday Times (London)|>Stone,Norman (Professor of Modern History at Oxford University) review of Waites.CLASS =

THE worst mistake by governments in this century was to suppose, in 1914, that the war would be short. This mistake caused the Germans to provoke war in the first place; they would not have done so if they had known what it would mean. The short-war illusion also shaped the disastrous initial strategies of the Great Powers -- vast all-or-nothing offensives which killed hundreds of thousands of men in the first few weeks, and destroyed the training-machines which might have turned the later conscripts into proper soldiers. Yet, disastrous as the short-war illusion was, it was almost unversally shared. Why?

Bernard Waites' interesting book has some of the answers on the British side. People could not imagine that a great war, interrupting trade and ruining public finance, could possibly go on for more than six months

Of all oddities, the Prince of Wales set up a fund to look after the unemployed. A Canon Foukes Jackson, from Jesus College, Cambridge, appealed to "the propertied classes not to dismiss their servants, but to live themselves as poor men in order that no one in Britain may be in want of food". In reality, the country faced serious labour shortages within a few weeks of the outbreak of war, and solved them only by widespread use of female labour, at every level. By November 1914, the war in the West had settled down into the great slogging-match which has haunted our imagination ever since. [...]

[The November, 1914, battle around Ypres] spelled the end of the old BEF [British Expiditionary Force]: after it, we [Stone writes as a Brit] were fighting with an ill-trained militia. [...] The original BEF had more than its due quota of aristocratic officers, and their losses were so high that Debrett's Peerage was not published, as usual, in the spring (of 1915) because the editors were unable to revise all of the entries in time. War memorials of Oxford and Cambridge Colleges and of the public schools [in England "public schools" are what in USA are called "private schools"], show what a holocaust there was in the officer-class (to their credit, these war-memorials sometimes also record the names of enemy alumni). The confidence of the British upper class has never really recovered from this. As the war continued, its domination of politics was fatally weakened.

This weakening is the subject of Bernard Waites's book [...]. We often still hear that Britain is marked by supposedly terrible inequality. But such remarks go in flagrant defiance of history: the whole march of this century has been towards an equality that would have been unimaginable in the 1890s. In this march, 1914-18 occupies a special place.

Income tax and death-duties on the one side, and inflation on the other, sharply reduced the wealth of the Edwardian rich. They also brought down the Pounds 500-per-annum professional man, to the point where doctors, solicitors, clergymen and university professors, among others, have never recovered their Edwardian preeminence. Their investment in War Loan similarly caused an erosion of their savings.

Against this, certain parts of the lower middle class and much of the working class were strikingly better off in 1918 than they had been in 1914. There was also a shift, within the working class, to the benefit of semi-skilled or unskilled labour which could work machinery more cheaply than the old craft-union skilled men. True, this was not entirely caused by wartime requirements; and the political consequences of these transformations have never been satisfactorily analysed.

Waites's book, which contains statistical labouring of a remarkable kind, but which also shows humanity, is an important step on the way to understanding these matters.

In Europe as a whole, there were also similar shifts in the class-structure, causing enormous resentments. [NB! Stone's emphasis on "causing resentments" rather than "facilitating democratization"; & also NB! no specific mention of social transformations in Austria, Hungary, Russia or the Ottoman Empire = ] In Germany and Italy, there was a near-civil war between the classes at the end of the war. The old consensus of the French Third Republic was broken by them. In blessed Britain, for all the middle-calss resentment and post-war industrial trouble, consensus soldiered on and kept us together for the next great wartime ordeal.

*2003mr11:The Guardian|James Buchan, "Gertrude Bell"

[SAC editor has abridged Buchan's article and inserted a few IDs and hypertext links to meet the needs of our course. Do bear in mind that the article was published in 2003, just nine days before USA invaded Iraq.]
In British diplomatic group photographs of the early 20th-century Middle East, amid the plumes and uniforms and the calm paraphernalia of [a post-WW1 English] empire going to hell in a bucket, there is often a solitary female. The woman is slim, with a head of luxuriant hair, and neatly dressed in billowing muslins or in the pencil silhouette and cloche hats of jazz-age Baghdad.
[Photo of 1921mr11 "Cairo Conference" with Gertrude Bell standing on the right (SAC entry) ]
[SAC entry devoted to Cairo Conference, with photos]
[Photo after the 1921au23 English High Commissioner Sir Percy Cox (#2 in pix) declared Faisal (#1) king of the newly designed Iraq| Bell is #3 (pix) ]
The woman is Gertrude Bell, who is as responsible as anybody for the rickety national state first known as Mesopotamia, and now as Iraq. As a powerful official of the British administration in Baghdad after the first world war, Bell ensured that an Arab state was founded from the three Ottoman provinces of Mosul, Baghdad and Basra, but one which was too weak to be independent of Britain. "I had a well-spent morning at the office making out the southern desert frontier of the Iraq," she wrote to her father on December 4 1921.

[*1921:MAP of Syria, Iraq and Kuwait after British unilateral rearrangement of post-WW1 international agreement in the Treaty of Sévres (ID) ]
One of Oxford University's most brilliant students, the greatest woman mountaineer of her age, an archaeologist and linguist, passionate, unhappy and rich, Bell saw in Arab male society, and what US President Woodrow Wilson called "the whole disgusting scramble" [of European powers for exploitative advantages in] the Middle East after the first world war, opportunities that were unthinkable at home.

John Buchan, in his novel Greenmantle (1916), and TE Lawrence [ID] in his guerrilla exploits in Arabia the following year, made popular a myth that an Englishman could become an Arab -- only more so. To her generation in Britain, Bell went one better. She seemed to move as an equal among the sheikhs without compromising her British femininity. Her letters to her father and stepmother, one of the great correspondences of the past century, pass easily from orders for cotton gowns at Harvey and Nichols [sic (ID)] to the new-fangled British air warfare being tried out on recalcitrant Iraqi Arabs and Kurds [ID]. [More about Bell and airpower]

The historical waters have closed over TE Lawrence. Even back in the 70s, I could find nobody with any recollection of him at the scenes of his exploits in western Arabia. But "Miss Bell" is still a name in Baghdad. Even in conversations with the vicious and cornered cadres of Saddam Hussein's regime, her name will come up to evoke, for a moment, an innocent Baghdad of picnics in the palm gardens and bathing parties in the Tigris.

Yet Bell and her superior as British high commissioner, Sir Percy Cox, laid down policies of state in Iraq that were taken up by Saddam's Arab Ba'ath socialist party [ID]. Those policies were to retain, if necessary by violence, the Kurdish mountains as a buffer against Turkey and Russia; to promote Sunni Muslims and other minorities over the Shia majority; to repress the Shia clergy in Najaf, Kerbela and Kazimain, or expel them to Iran; to buy off the big landowners and tribal elders; to stage disreputable plebiscites; and to deploy air power as a form of political control. "Iraq can only be ruled by force," a senior Ba'ath official told me in 1999. "Mesopotamia is not a civilised state," Bell wrote to her father on December 18 1920.

The Ba'ath is facing extinction. Any US civil and military administration in its place will have the precedent of Bell's 1920 white paper (typically, the first ever written by a woman), Review of the Civil Administration of Mesopotamia [E-TXT. Sixteen volumes of diaries and about 1,600 letters to her parents, transcribed and posted on the web by the University of Newcastle library are a must-read at the Pentagon, less for their portrait of an oriental culture in its last phase as for their perilous mingling of political insight and blind elation. [A delightful turn of phrase, but SAC editor cannot allow us to move on to the next paragraph without adding that the Newcastle library link above takes you to a fabulous collection of Bell's photos.]

Gertrude Margaret Lowthian Bell was born on July 14 1868 in Washington, Co Durham. Her family were ironmasters on a grand scale, with progressive attitudes. In 1886, Bell went up to Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, where she was the first woman to win a first-class degree in modern history. Unwanted in the marriage market -- too "Oxfordy" a manner, it was said -- she taught herself Persian and travelled to Iran in 1892, where her uncle was British ambassador.

She wrote her first travel book, Persian Pictures, and translated the libertine Persian poet Hafez into Yellow Book verse. She also fell in love with an impecunious British diplomat, who was rejected by her father. Though she was to form passionate attachments all her life, she kept them under rigid formal restraint.

The next decade she killed in two round-the-world journeys and in the Alps, where she gained renown for surviving 53 hours on a rope on the unclimbed north-east face of the Finsteraarhorn, when her expedition was caught in a blizzard in the summer of 1902. She had begun to learn Arabic in Jerusalem in 1897, wrote about Syria, and taught herself archaeology. She immersed herself in tribal politics and in 1914 made a dangerous journey to Hail, a town in northern Arabia that was the headquarters of a bitter enemy of Britain's new ally, the founder of Saudi Arabia, Abdul Aziz ibn Saud [ID].

With the outbreak of war that summer, and the entry of the Ottoman empire on the side of Germany that November, Bell was swept up with TE Lawrence and other archaeologist-spies into an intelligence operation in Cairo, known as the Arab Bureau [ID]. In Iraq, an expeditionary force from India had surrendered to the Turks at Kut al-Amara on the lower Tigris in 1916. Bell travelled to Basra, where a new army was assembling. When Baghdad fell to the reinforcements in 1917, she moved up to the capital and was eventually appointed Cox's oriental secretary, responsible for relations with the Arab population.

British policy in the Middle East was in utter confusion. While the government of India wanted a new imperial possession at the head of the Persian Gulf, London had made extravagant promises of freedom to persuade the Arabs to rise up against the Turks. The compromise, which was bitterly resented in Iraq, was the so-called League of Nations Mandate, granted to Britain in 1920 [ID].

Senior Indian officials, such as the formidable AT Wilson, argued that the religious and tribal divisions in Iraq would for ever undermine an Iraqi state. Bell believed passionately in Arab independence and persuaded London that Iraq had enough able men at least to provide an administrative facade. But she had two blind spots. She always overestimated the popularity of Cox and herself, and she underestimated the force of religion in Iraqi affairs and the Shia clergy "sitting in an atmosphere which reeks of antiquity and is so thick with the dust of ages that you can't see through it -- nor can they".

On June 27 1920, she was writing: "In this flux, there is no doubt they are turning to us." In fact, the Shia tribes of the entire middle Euphrates rose in revolt the next month, and hundreds of British soldiers and as many as 8,000 Iraqis were killed before it could be suppressed. The next spring, Winston Churchill called a conference in Cairo, where Bell - the only woman among the delegates - had her way [ID]. The Hashemite Prince Faisal, a protege of TE Lawrence who had been ousted by the French in Syria, was acclaimed King of Iraq in a referendum that would not have shamed the Ba'ath. The "yes" vote was 96%. In place of the mandate, an Anglo-Iraqi treaty was railroaded through the Iraqi parliament.

Bell was carried away. "I'll never engage in creating kings again; it's too great a strain," she wrote with uncharacteristic vanity. She fell prey to Iraqi flattery and was given the nickname Khatun, which means fine lady or gentlewoman. "As we rode back through the gardens of the Karradah suburb," she told her father on September 11 1921, "where all the people know me and salute me as I pass, Nuri [Said] said, 'One of the reasons you stand out so is because you're a woman. There's only one Khatun... For a hundred years they'll talk of the Khatun riding by.' I think they very likely will."

Yet she could also attend a display of the force being deployed by the RAF on the Kurds around Sulaimaniya: "It was even more remarkable than the one we saw last year at the Air Force show because it was much more real. They had made an imaginary village about a quarter of a mile from where we sat on the Diala dyke and the two first bombs dropped from 3,000ft, went straight into the middle of it and set it alight. It was wonderful and horrible. Then they dropped bombs all round it, as if to catch the fugitives and finally fire bombs which even in the brightest sunlight made flares of bright flame in the desert. They burn through metal and water won't extinguish them. At the end the armoured cars went out to round up the fugitives with machine guns."

Bell was never liked, either in London or New Delhi, and when Cox left Baghdad in 1923, she lost her bureaucratic protector. She devoted more of her time to her old love, archaeology, and established the Baghdad Archaeological Museum which, remarkably, has survived. Her letters home were more and more dominated by illness and depression. On Monday July 12 1926, quite suddenly, Gertrude Bell died.

The official story was that years of gruelling work in the 49C (120F) heat of the Baghdad summer had proved too much for "her slender stock of physical energy". In fact, she took an overdose of sleeping pills, by accident or by intention. She is buried in Baghdad.

Thanks to crude oil, found in commercial quantities at Kirkuk in 1927, the little Iraqi monarchy survived Turkish intrigue, Saudi aggression and repeated uprisings, the worst in 1941 when pro-German officers drove the king and Nuri Said, the prime minister, into exile. But the collapse of British power and prestige at Suez in 1956 marked the end of the road. Faisal II and the royal family were murdered in a republican coup d'etat on July 14 1958.

The Iraq of Gertrude Bell had lasted 37 years. The Ba'ath finally seized power in 1968, built a prosperous despotism in the 1970s but destroyed itself and the country in hopeless military adventures in Iran in the 1980s and Kuwait in 1990. As of yesterday, Ba'athist Iraq had lasted 35 years.

Bell's letters home
Whenever there was snow we sank in it up to the waist... I nearly took a straight cut on to the glacier, for I slipped on a bit of iced rock into a snow gully till the rope fortunately caught me. We all cut our hands over that incident, but it was otherwise the most comfortable part of the descent. The Alps, 18 July 1902

Such an arrival! Sir Percy made me most welcome and said a house had been allotted to me... a tiny, stifling box of a place in a dirty little bazaar. Fortunately, I had not parted from my bed and bath. These I set up and further unpacked one of my boxes which had been dropped into the Tigris and hung out all the things to dry on the railing of the court. Baghdad, April 20 1917

I don't think I shall ever be able to detach myself permanently from the fortunes of this country.... it's a wonderful thing to feel the affection and confidence of a whole people round you. But oh to be at the end of the war and to have a free hand! Baghdad, May 26 1917

Until quite recently I've been wholly cut off from [the Shias] because their tenets forbid them to look upon an unveiled woman and my tenets don't permit me to veil... Nor is it any good trying to make friends through the women - if they were allowed to see me they would veil before me as if I were a man. So you see I appear to be too female for one sex and too male for the other. Baghdad, March 14 1920

Have I ever told you what the river is like on a hot summer night? At dusk the mist hangs in long white bands over the water; the twilight fades and the lights of the town shine out on either bank, with the river, dark and smooth and full of mysterious reflections, like a road of triumph through the midst. Baghdad, September 11 1921

Woodward,David R| BBC essay "The Middle East During World War One" [E-TXT]|
Sluglett,Peter on two Iraq wars, 1915-18 (WW1) and 2003+ ("mission accomplished")| *2008fa:The Middle East Journal#62(4):593(17pp)| [E-TXT]