Gertrude Bell

by Georgina Howell

  Reminding him that the words for “garden” and “paradise” were the same in Persian, Gertrude had invented the metaphor of a fantasy garden where only the two of them could enter. There they could always be alone together:

  You give me a new world, Gertrude, you give me the key to your heart, though I have friends, some of them women, even a wife, they are as far removed from the garden where we walk as east from west . . . I have often loved women as a man like me does love them, well and badly, little and much, as the blood took me, or the time or the invitation, or simply for the adventure—to see what happened. But that is all behind me.

  At the end of January 1914 Dick visited Hugh again, then set off for Addis Ababa. As he left, he wrote a letter that was less rhetorical and more sensual than any he had sent her: “Where are you now? By the Belka castles,* working like ten men, tired and hungry and sleepy . . . Like that I love to think of you: sometimes, too (but it’s beastly of me), I love to think of you lonely, and wanting me . . .” Finally, he wrote the words she had waited so long to hear:

  You said you wanted to hear me say I loved you, you wanted it plain to eyes and ears . . . I love you—does it do any good out there in the desert? Is it less vast, less lonely, like the far edge of life? someday perhaps, in a whisper, in a kiss, I will tell you . . . love like this is life itself . . . Oh, where are you, where are you? . . . Well, I go. Africa draws me; I know I shall have things to try for . . . But of them I scarcely think: it is only that I love you, Gertrude, and shall not see you . . .

  Sitting in her small tent, she read the words again and again, and her heart leapt. He had made a commitment to her at last. He had admitted to himself as much as to her that he loved her. And yet she had never felt further from him. Could he even remember what she looked like? she wondered. There were terrible moments when she tried to conjure up his face, and could not do it. She was nearly at the end of her journey, she could almost say that she had survived it, but facing her was perhaps a vaster loneliness than she had already endured. He was physically as distant from her as ever, and no nearer to leaving his wife. Weeping from sheer exhaustion and sadness, she asked herself what she had gained:

  I try to school myself beforehand by reminding myself how I have looked forward . . . to the end, and when it came have found it—just nothing. Dust and ashes in one’s hand . . . dead bones that look as if they would never rise and dance—it’s all just nothing and one turns away from it with a sigh and tries to fix one’s eyes on to the new thing before one . . . Whether I can bear with England—come back to the same things and do them all over again—that is what I sometimes wonder.

  She returned to an England without Dick Doughty-Wylie—but not to do the same things all over again. The summer was hot and full of political foreboding. His letters continued, their tone intensifying and becoming less guarded than ever: “What wouldn’t I give to have you sitting opposite in this all-alone house?”

  At Rounton on the outbreak of war, on 4 August, she was propelled into war work—at first, temporarily, at Lord Onslow’s hospital at Clandon Park near Guildford in Surrey. She had written to the Red Cross asking if they could find a job for her. She had not been at Clandon for more than three weeks when she received a telegram in reply, asking if she would go at once to Boulogne, to work in the Wounded and Missing Office there.

  In October the German army had marched through Flanders, and a British expeditionary force sent to Ypres to stop them had been virtually massacred. The casualties were huge. There were still wounded men on stretchers waiting at the docks and at the station when Gertrude arrived at the end of November.

  She checked into her tiny attic room in the town, and went at once to the office, setting to work filing and indexing, making lists of the wounded and missing for the War Office. Working eight or nine hours a day, she would go to a restaurant for her dinner, then sit down, dead tired, to write to Dick and to her family. She was less unhappy now that she was at full stretch again, well into her stride and beginning to work at a pace that her office colleagues could hardly believe, still less keep up with. His letters were now as passionate as she could wish; she took them with her to the office so that she could reread them over her snatched lunch:

  Tonight I should not want to talk [he wrote]. I should make love to you. Would you like it, welcome it, or would a hundred hedges rise and bristle and divide?—but we would tear them down. What is a hedge that it should divide us . . . ? You are in my arms, alight, afire. Tonight I do not want dreams and fancies. But it will never be . . . The first time should I not be nearly afraid to be your lover?

  Deprived of sex, he could sometimes think of little else.

  So much a thing of the mind is the insistent passion of the body. Women sometimes give themselves to men for the man’s pleasure. I’d hate a woman to be like that with me. I’d want her to feel to the last sigh the same surge and stir that carried me away. She should miss nothing that I could give her.

  She answered him from the depths of her heart:

  Dearest, dearest, I give this year of mine to you, and all the years that shall come after it . . . Dearest, when you tell me you love me and want me still, my heart sings—and then weeps with longing to be with you. I have filled all the hollow places of the world with my desire for you; it floods out to creep up the high mountains where you live.

  But in December came unwelcome news. Judith had arrived in northern France, and was not far away, working in a hospital. All too soon a letter arrived, suggesting they meet for lunch. Panicking, unable to consult Dick, Gertrude decided that it would look odd if she did not respond. She would go through with it.

  If Judith already had her suspicions that Dick and Gertrude were in close contact, they were likely to have been confirmed by the encounter. Gertrude was no dissembler. Asked the question, she would have told the truth. It seems, from Gertrude’s subsequent letter to Dick, that Judith, trembling with anger and misery, had told her that Dick would always stick to his marriage, and that Gertrude must accept that in the end he would abandon her. She wrote to him: “I hated it. Don’t make me have that to bear . . . You won’t leave me? . . . It’s torture, eternal torture.”

  From the very beginning, each encounter, each letter, had snatched her up to the heights before dropping her once more into the depths. Almost predictably, she now lurched from one extreme of feeling to the opposite. The lunch with Judith had thrown her into turmoil. Now, she suddenly found herself elevated to a state of sublime happiness—Dick had written that he was coming home. He would reach Marseilles in February, call in on Judith on his way through France, then journey on to London. Gertrude could join him there. She should wait for his message, and be ready to go. But he would not stay long. He had volunteered for the front line, “with joy,” and was on his way to Gallipoli.

  The message came. Her small bag was packed already. She snatched it up and ran for the car that would take her to the ferry. Arriving in London, she made her way to 29 Half Moon Street, raced up the steps, and rang the bell. The door opened, and they were face-to-face at last. They stood looking at each other for a moment, then he scooped up her suitcase with one hand and drew her inside with the other. They were together and alone for four nights and three days. Then he was gone, to join General Sir Ian Hamilton’s staff as the forces gathered for the hopeless quest that was Gallipoli.

  With the Great War stuck fast, a whole generation of young men were being killed in France on the Western Front without any advance being made against the Germans. To try to break the deadlock, British battleships in the Mediterranean were ordered through the narrow Dardanelles to pound Constantinople and Germany’s allies, the Turks. If a new battle front could be opened in the south-east, Germany would be forced to divert troops from the Western Front. In the event, tragically, the British ships ran straight into mines. Three battleships sank, and the navy retreated. The hasty fall-back plan for opening the new front was to land the British army on the beaches at Gallipoli. It w
ould become a suicide mission for the men, strafed continuously by Turkish machine-guns as they struggled out of the water and up the beaches.

  The happiest romantic moments in Gertrude’s life were also the most poignant and painful. A modern woman will find it hard to understand that she still had not consummated her love in the full physical sense, but she had not. It could be argued that her inviolable principles, the same ones that had brought her safely through the desert and a thousand other dangers, would not allow her to become an adulteress. But it is not necessary to make that case. A letter that the distraught Gertrude wrote to Dick a few days after their parting makes it clear that she was not afraid of the consequences in terms of a possible pregnancy, but she had not been able to overcome an inborn prudishness. She so much wanted to consecrate their union in sex, and at the same time she could not prevent herself from recoiling at the last moment. What she really wanted, she had to explain, was that he override her reluctance and her protests and make forceful love to her. But for all his experience, he was a gentle and fatally compromised lover, and could not bring himself to do it.

  She sent letters after him, terrified at her inability, panicking, consumed with regret:

  Someday I’ll try to explain it to you—the fear, the terror of it—oh you thought I was brave. Understand me: not the fear of consequences—I’ve never weighed them for one second. It’s the fear of something I don’t know . . . you must know all about it because I tell you. Every time it surged up in me and I wanted you to brush it aside . . . But I couldn’t say to you, Exorcise it. I couldn’t. That last word I can never say. You must say it . . . Fear is a horrible thing . . . It’s a shadow—I know it’s nothing . . . Only you can free me from it—drive it away from me, I know now, but till the last moment . . . I was terribly afraid. Then at the last I knew it was a shadow. I know it now.

  He wrote back: “Was it perhaps some subtle spirit of foreknowledge that kept us apart in London? The risk to you was too great—the risk to your body, and to your peace of mind and pride of soul . . .” She was prepared to “meet the bill,” she replied, however high the cost—pregnancy, disgrace, or social exclusion. Now she thought that a baby, far from being the worst of consequences, might have been the best:

  And suppose the other thing had happened, the thing you feared—that I half feared—must have brought you back. If I had it now, the thing you feared, I would magnify the Lord and fear nothing . . . Not only the final greatest gift to give you—a greater gift even than love—but for me, the divine pledge of fulfilment, created in rapture, the handing on of life in fire, to be cherished and worshipped and lived for, with the selfsame ardour that cherishes and worships the creator.

  Her letters grew out of hours of suffering and regretting, as she promised him that she would never hold back again. “If I had given more, should I have held you closer, drawn you back more surely? I look back and rage at my reluctance . . . I’ve had a few resplendent hours. I could die on them and be happy. But you, you’ve not had what you wanted.”

  For Gertrude, intrepid as she was, sex was the final frontier. She should not be judged too harshly—she was certainly punished for her reluctance every day for the rest of her life. She had only really known Dick well since those happy days in London in the spring of 1912. In the three years since then, despite the rising tempo of their letters, she had spent only a handful of days with him. Time and again they would glimpse each other across a crowded, eventful world, stretch out their hands to each other and be snatched apart. Gertrude and Dick were in some ways no different from those many wartime couples who married on the brink of war, were parted when the man left for the front, then reunited long afterwards as husband and wife—and almost complete strangers. They should have got to know each other when they were young, amid family and friends, and drifted towards an intimacy that would have led inexorably to bed; but such gradual progressions rarely happened in the violent, confusing world of 1915. They were thrust together for a moment, barely got to know each other again during those four nights in London, and then he was gone, leaving her even more in love, and even more bereft.

  She had not believed her suffering could get any worse, but it had increased tenfold. What she wrote to him was an ultimatum:

  I can’t sleep—I can’t sleep. It’s one in the morning . . . You and you and you are between me and any rest . . . out of your arms there is no rest. Life, you called me, and fire. I flame and am consumed . . . Dick, it’s not possible to live like this. When it’s all over you must take your own . . . Before all the world, claim me and take me and hold me for ever and ever . . . Furtiveness I hate—But openly to come to you, that I can do and live, what should I lose? It’s all nothing to me; I breathe and think and move in you. Can you do it, dare you? When this thing is over, your work well done, will you risk it for me? It’s that or nothing. I can’t live without you.

  The people who love me would stand by me if I did it that way—I know them. But not the other way. Not to deceive and lie and cheat and at the last be found out, as I should be . . . If it’s honour you think of, this is honour and the other dishonour. If it’s faithfulness you think of, this is faithfulness—keep faith with love . . . Because I held up my head and wouldn’t walk by diverse ways perhaps in the end we can marry. I don’t count on it, but it would be better, far better for me . . . But don’t miss the camp fire that burns in this letter—a clear flame, a bright flame fed by my life.

  Do you think I can hide the blaze of that fire across half the world? Or share you with any other. If you die, wait for me—I am not afraid of that other crossing; I will come to you.

  He had told her, when they were together, that Judith had threatened suicide by using the “morphia tubes” available in the hospitals. He had not dared to explain to his wife about Gallipoli or what it might mean, but he kept no such secrets from Gertrude. He trusted her to be calm and resilient. Now—no doubt, to his horror—he read that she was considering that same way out. She wrote in April 1915:

  I am very calm about the shot and shell to which you go. What takes you, takes me out to look for you. If there’s search and finding beyond the border I shall find you. If there’s nothingness, as with my reason I think, why then there’s nothingness . . . life shrinks from it . . . but I’m not afraid. Life would be gone, how could the fire burn? But I’m brave—you know it—as far as human courage goes.

  Oh Dick, write to me. When shall I hear? . . . I trust, I believe, you’ll take care of me—let me stand upright and say I’ve never walked by furtive ways. Then they’ll forgive me and you—all the people that matter will forgive . . . But it’s you who should be saying this, should be saying it now, not I. I won’t say it any more.

  Poor Doughty-Wylie, caught between a distraught wife and a lover bent on following him into the afterlife. From Gallipoli he answered Gertrude:

  My dear, don’t do what you talked of—it’s horrible to me to think of it—that’s why I told you about my wife—how much more for you—don’t do anything so unworthy of so free and brave a spirit. One must walk along the road to the end of it. When I asked for this ship, my joy in it was half strangled by that thing you said, I can’t even name it or talk about it . . . Don’t do it. Time is nothing, we join up again, but to hurry the pace is unworthy of us all.

  And again, reminding her of her own earlier conviction that death ends all, “As to the things you say of some future in far places, they are dreams, dream woman. We must walk along the road—such heavenly madness is for gods and poets—not for us except in lovely dreams.” His letters now became a little remote. After all, the time for Gertrude to offer herself was past. He knew very well that the battle ahead was little short of a suicide mission, and he had much to think about.

  In the archives of the Imperial War Museum there is a final letter from Dick Doughty-Wylie. Written neither to his lover nor to his wife, it holds the key to the indecisiveness of his attitude towards Gertrude. It is a letter written to Judith’s
mother, Mrs. H. H. Coe—Jean—in Llandysul, Wales. It was dated 20 April 1915, six days before he was killed at Gallipoli, and written from General Headquarters Mediterranean Expeditionary Force. A careful and sober letter, it speaks of his concern for his wife and his anxiety about her state of mind.

  My dear Jean,

  Lily [Judith] tells me that I never wrote to you . . . I wanted to tell how she was when I saw her in France, both coming and going. She was very full of work, and doing I think rather too much herself, as she always is prone to do, but on the whole well. It is a very good work very well done, in the middle of many difficulties of all sorts. Her nursing staff I liked and thought well of, and also her two English doctors. I didn’t care so much about the French doctor but he has been changed.

  Now I want you to do something for me. I am going to embark tomorrow on what is certainly an extremely dangerous job, namely the wreck ship of which you will see in the papers. If the thing went wrong, Lily would feel intolerably lonely and hopeless after her long hours of work—which tell sorely on anybody’s spirits and vitality. She talks about overdoses of morphia and such things. I think that in reality she is too brave and strong minded for such things, but still the saying weighs on my spirits. If you hear I’m killed go over at once to France with H.H. and seek her out. Telegraph to her at once that you are coming and want her to send Frank Wylie and a car to meet you at Boulogne—don’t lose any time, but go and look after her. Don’t take her away from her work, for it will be best for her to work, but manage to stay somewhere near and see her through. Tell her what is perfectly true that the work cannot go on without her. I haven’t told her yet of this wreck ship because I don’t want her to know till it’s over.

  This is only by way of precaution. She has a great friend with her, one Sister Isobel Stenhouse, and a Miss Sandford sister of my helper in Abyssinia, a very good girl indeed—and on the whole she is in the best place possible—and I am unduly worried about her.