Gertrude Bell

by Georgina Howell

  This is a very interesting show from every point of view—but it runs a great many chances however one looks at it. It may be a really startling success, and is certainly bold enough an idea.

  I hope you and H.H. are both well. I was only in England as I think you knew under 3 days and I had no time to see anybody at all—or in fact to get fit of which I stand in need.

  So don’t be unduly anxious over this business—it’s all in the day’s work as far as I am concerned—and her hospital is the very best place in the world for Lily if anything did happen.

  Love to you both

  Yrs. Affectionately Dick

  He was not, of course, telling the truth when he told his mother-in-law that he had not been able to see anybody in London. More important, the letter casts a new light on him and on his attitudes towards the two women in his life. It suggests that the letters that Gertrude had found so hard to understand, seeming to declare his love on the one hand and avoiding any kind of commitment on the other, were compromised by his wife’s instability and his continuing responsibility and care for her. Perhaps he knew that Judith would not be able to cope without him. When not losing herself in her demanding hospital work, she was evidently in disarray. As he had not dared to tell her about the “wreck ship,” it is quite likely that she was actually threatening suicide if he abandoned her for Gertrude. In any case, he saw that if he was killed she would probably break down.

  It seems that he had come to love Gertrude as much as she could have wished, sex or no sex, but had never been able to bring himself to leave his wife. What is certain is that he now found himself in a terrible dilemma. He could shore up his wife’s mental health, and cause Gertrude continued suffering; or he could make his love for Gertrude plain and bring that suffering home to his fragile wife. He was, perhaps, exhausted by the struggle. For the moment, he did not have to make that decision: his own life was in the balance.

  His last words to Gertrude as he embarked on the River Clyde were “So many memories, my dear queen, of you and your splendid love and your kisses and your courage and the wonderful letters you wrote me, from your heart to mine—the letters, some of which I have packed up, like drops of blood.” These letters of hers that followed him to Gallipoli he addressed back to her, the day before he expected to storm V beach.

  There were two thousand men on the boat—all the Munsters, two companies of Hampshires, one company of Dublins, a few Royal Naval Division troops, Doughty-Wylie, and another member of Hamilton’s staff, Lieutenant-Colonel Weir de Lancy Williams. That night, before leading the invasion against the Turks, for whom he held such affection, Doughty-Wylie was very quiet. A colleague, Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, said he seldom spoke but “seemed to think so much.” Colonel Weir Williams wrote: “I am firmly of the opinion that poor Doughty-Wylie realised he would be killed in this war.”

  The River Clyde was run aground on V beach, and the lighters were moved into position for use as a floating bridge. Doughty-Wylie and Williams waited until Captain Garth Walford arrived at midnight with orders from Major-General Aylmer Hunter-Weston that the advance on the castle and village of Sedd-el-Bahr be resumed. Walford went on shore in the morning of 26 April, to fight alongside the Hampshires. The plan was for one party to try to take the castle and village, a second to try and join up with the troops on W beach, while a third would drive through the barbed wire straight ahead towards Hill 141.

  The troops took the castle, but Walford was shot. The village was a different proposition. The Turks were hiding in cellars and behind the walls of every house and sniping at the invaders as they emerged from the castle. Sometimes they waited until they had passed, then fired into their backs. Doughty-Wylie had watched from the wreck ship and suffered until late morning. Then, he picked up his cane and headed for the village. His pistol, if he had brought it, was left on the River Clyde. Near the back gate of the castle, a bullet knocked off his cap. A Munster officer wrote later that Doughty-Wylie walked into houses that might have been full of Turkish soldiers as casually as though he were walking into a shop: “I . . . remember being struck by the calm way in which he treated this incident. He was carrying no weapon of any description at the time, only a small cane.” As he walked serenely on, he picked up a rifle lying beside a dead soldier, but within a few seconds, as if changing his mind, dropped it again. The village was eventually won. Doughty-Wylie now went for Hill 141. Carrying his cane and maintaining his eery calm, he walked up the hill leading a cheering crowd of Dublins, Munsters, and Hampshires. They reached the top, the Turks retreating before them. At the moment of victory, Doughty-Wylie was shot through the head.

  He was buried where he lay, by Williams and other soldiers. Williams said the Lord’s Prayer over his grave and bid him goodbye. Later, he had a temporary cross knocked up by a ship’s carpenter to mark the grave, and the Munsters’ chaplain read the burial service. Dick Doughty-Wylie was the most senior officer to win the Victoria Cross, the highest military award, during the Gallipoli campaign. His grave remains there to this day, surrounded by lavender bushes and two cypress trees, the only Allied cemetery on Gallipoli with just one grave. As Sir Ian Hamilton wrote, “Braver soldier never drew sword. He had no hatred of the enemy . . . Tenderness and pity filled his heart . . . He was a steadfast hero . . . Now as he would have wished to die, so he has died.”

  His death left questions. Why was he not carrying his pistol? Was he so reluctant to attack his Turkish friends that he was prepared to be shot rather than defend himself? Had he committed a form of suicide, having first counselled those he loved to “walk along the road to the end . . . to hurry the pace is unworthy”?

  Perhaps he thought that if he survived Gallipoli, his life from then on would be untenable. Gertrude had given him a passionate ultimatum: “Before all the world, claim me . . . It’s that or nothing. I can’t live without you.” Judith had reached breaking point. Perhaps, like Gertrude when she started for Hayyil, he did not care if he lived or died, and would do nothing to protect himself. Essentially, as Hamilton had said, “tenderness and pity filled his heart”: he would rather walk clear-eyed to his death than hurt either of the two women he loved.

  When Judith heard the news she wrote in her diary: “The shock was terrible. Something seemed to tear at the region of my heart . . . I suppose I shall have to pick up the pieces . . . just a lonely widow.”

  Gertrude was to learn of his death in an even more shocking way. She had continued to write to him, for no one had told her what had happened: she was, after all, neither kith nor kin. She was at a lunch party with friends in London when, having no idea of her connection with him, someone at the table remarked what a pity it was that Dick Doughty-Wylie had been killed. They talked on about his courage while she sat there, ashen-faced, and the room whirled around her. Quietly, she rose from the table and excused herself. Hardly knowing what she did, she made her way to Hampstead to the home of her half-sister Elsa, now Lady Richmond. When she opened the door to a devastated Gertrude, she had immediately jumped to the conclusion that it was their brother Maurice who had been killed, and burst into tears herself.

  “No,” said Gertrude almost impatiently. “No—not Maurice.”

  She lay down on a sofa, where for a few minutes Elsa stroked her forehead. Then she turned her head away.

  Towards the end of 1915, a visitor was seen by soldiers at Dick Doughty-Wylie’s grave. There was no doubt that it was a veiled woman, but her identity has always been in doubt. According to L. A. Carlyon:

  On November 17, 1915, a woman stepped ashore at V Beach, which had become the main French base. She is thought to be the only woman to have landed during the Gallipoli campaign. She left the River Clyde, now being used as a pier, walked through the castle . . . past the line of tottery walls and unearthed cellars that had once been Sedd-el-Bahr village, past the fig and pomegranate trees that had survived the bombardment, and began to climb Hill 141. On the summit, she stopped at a lone grave fenced off with barbed wire, pla
ced a wreath on the wooden cross and left . . . We do not know what she was wearing . . . we do not even know for certain who she was. Most likely she was Lilian Doughty-Wylie, who at this time worked for the French hospital service. She may have been Gertrude Bell, the English writer and explorer. We do know the grave she visited . . . [that of] Lieutenant-Colonel Charles “Dick” Doughty-Wylie, Victoria Cross.

  Michael Hickey’s history of that fine and futile campaign offers a rather different version of events:

  A curious mystery attends this hero’s burial; towards the end of 1915, a woman landed from a boat sent ashore from a transport, and laid a wreath on the grave. Speaking to no one, but apparently seen by dozens of British and French troops, she then returned to her boat and departed. It is most likely that it was Mrs. Doughty-Wylie, who by then was working for the French Red Cross on the island of Tenedos. She had influence with the authorities and was thus able to arrange for passage to Gallipoli. There is, however, a persistent story that it was his old friend Gertrude Bell, also in the area at the time. She certainly visited the grave in 1919.

  Other books note that during the visit of this mysterious woman, not a shot was fired on either side.

  Where was Judith on 17 November 1915? According to her diaries, between December 1914 and September 1915 she was serving as director of the Anglo-Ethiopian Red Cross Hospital situated at Frévent, some seventy miles south of Calais, up to May, and then at St.-Valery-sur-Somme until September. Her diaries reveal her difficulties with the voluntary staff and the grave shortcomings of the French army medical services. In April 1916 she took up work as matron in charge of a hospital at Mudros West on the island of Lemnos.

  Doughty-Wylie was killed on 26 April 1915. Probably, Judith’s mother did as he had requested and arrived in Frévent after a few days to look after her daughter. He had cautioned Mrs. Coe not to take Judith away from her job, but her mother would no doubt have wanted to bring her home to Wales for a break from her difficult and demanding work. That might explain why Judith left Frévent in May and then took up work again at St.-Valery-sur-Somme (on an unspecified date). To believe that it was Judith who stepped ashore that November, you would have to assume that she was in the area six months before she needed to be. It is most unlikely that either the army or the French hospital service could or would have seen it their business to bring a widow into the war zone—thirty-nine VCs were awarded in all, and their widows would all have been entitled to the same consideration. It is also very doubtful that either body could or would have organized a ceasefire on the Turkish side during her visit to the grave.

  It is not until we consult a book published in 1975, Gallipoli by Captain Eric Wheeler Bush DSO, DFC, Royal Navy, that some of the facts can be established:

  The story told by several authors that Lily Doughty-Wylie, “the only woman to put a foot ashore during the occupation,” landed at Sedd-el-Bahr on the 17th November 1915 and laid a wreath on Dick’s grave, and that “the Turks fired neither bullet nor shell during the Ceremony,” may only have occurred in one of her dreams. Boatwork was impossible over that period because of gales. Though this visit is not mentioned in any official report, she certainly believed she had made it and there are two eye-witness accounts [Lieutenant Corbett Williamson, RM, and F. L. Hilton, RND] of a woman seen on Cape Hellen about that time. Lily wrote to the British Ambassador in Athens thanking him for “a success I owe in some measure to you” but never posted the letter . . .

  There is a suggestion between the lines that Doughty-Wylie’s misgivings about his wife’s stability were well founded, and that she had suffered some kind of breakdown. She either believed or wanted to prove that she, not Gertrude, was the woman on V beach. One way to do that would have been to suggest to the ambassador that it was indeed she who had made that journey; but in the end she was either too honest or too confused to send the letter.

  Eric Bush adds that poor Lily got to her husband’s grave in 1919. Even in peacetime she needed help from Headquarters British Army of the Black Sea, Constantinople, and from the advance base, Kilia Liman, to make the excursion. She was taken to the beach in a pilot boat and stepped ashore from the same River Clyde.

  The date of the legendary wreath-laying, 17 November, is vague. Bush, a naval man, says that on that date, boat landing was impossible because of the weather. Hickey, as we see, dates the event no more precisely than “towards the end of 1915.” In November, Gertrude was summoned to the office of the Director of Naval Intelligence, Captain R. Hall. The Cairo office, he told her, had cabled that they would like her to come out. Her old friend Dr. David Hogarth had suggested that her recently acquired knowledge of the tribes of northern Arabia would be invaluable to the Bureau. She responded without hesitation, and on 16 November was writing to Florence:

  I think it more than likely that when I reach Egypt I shall find they have no job that will occupy me more than a fortnight, and I may be back before Christmas. It’s all vaguer than words can say.

  As to any further journey nothing definite is said and I think the chances are strongly against it.

  On 17 November Gertrude was at 95 Sloane Street, packing up her kit. On Saturday the 20th she was embarking at Marseilles on board the P&O ship Arabia, writing to her father that it would sail at 4 a.m. the next day, and that she expected to arrive at Port Said on Thursday the twenty-fifth. But her first letter home from Cairo is dated Tuesday 30 November, and seems to have been written on the day of her arrival. She mentions the “horrible journey—almost continuous storm” and says “we reached Port Said after dark on Thursday night . . . Next morning I came up here.” Oddly, she also says: “I telegraphed to you this morning after my arrival and asked you to send me by Lady B another gown and skirt”—which sounds as if she made two arrivals, one on Friday the twenty-sixth and a second the following Tuesday. The rest of her letter describes nothing that happened after dinner on the twenty-sixth, when she was taken out by her two new colleagues, Hogarth and T. E. Lawrence. The days and nights of the twenty-seventh, twenty-eighth, and twenty-ninth are missing.

  The Cairo Bureau was the intelligence base with specific responsibility for the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force sent to Gallipoli. Besides Hogarth and Lawrence—himself in mourning for his much loved brother Will—two other acquaintances of hers were there: Leonard Woolley was the intelligence chief at Port Said, and another Captain Hall, brother of the one who had sent her to Cairo, was in charge of the railway. She was surrounded by friends. Did she, in fact, under their discreet aegis, catch the express train to Port Said early the next morning and board a transport ship carrying supplies for the Dardanelles, then take a lighter to V beach? If the Turkish guns were silenced, was it out of a combination of curiosity and respect both for the mysterious unaccompanied woman and for Doughty-Wylie, for whose grave she was clearly heading?

  Was it not Gertrude who, after all, made that “further journey” she had mentioned to Florence before she left England?

  *Miles Richmond, the last member of the family to live there, knows nothing of ghosts in the house.

  *The ruins of the Belka plain, near Salt.

  Eight

  LIMIT OF ENDURANCE

  Even before his death, Dick Doughty-Wylie had precipitated a significant turning point in Gertrude’s life. It was at the end of the summer of 1913, a few weeks after his visit to Rounton, that he burnt her letters and departed for Albania with Judith to take up his new post with the International Boundary Commission.

  Their affair, although unconsummated, had given her days of ecstatic happiness such as she had never known. There was the euphoria of sexual attraction that they both felt; and the novelty of being with a man who was not wary of her, nor alienated by her exploits, nor anxious to hide his ignorance of the subjects she discussed so knowledgeably. She had long outgrown the complacent English milieu in which she now swam like a rainbow fish among tadpoles. At forty-five, she was annoyed to find that despite the achievements for which she was internation
ally renowned, the society she inhabited in London and Yorkshire retained its stolidly Edwardian view of her as maiden aunt cum frightening intellectual. It was thirteen years since she had written, in a burst of exuberance, “I have become a Person!” but outside her large circle of family and friends she was merely a spinster oddity, albeit a beautifully dressed one trailing clouds of glory. Was it for this, she must have asked herself, that she had rocketed through a high-powered education, pioneered travels that would have been exceptional even for a man, and mastered archaeology, cartography, mountaineering, and six foreign languages? Dick, on the other hand, was critically aware of the significance of her expeditions and, knowing the Middle East as well as she did, could match her, story for story, adventure for adventure.

  Now that he had left for Albania, Gertrude was left utterly desolate. Her family would not be able to countenance her affair with a married man—there could be no doubt about that. Her society friends knew nothing of it. At any moment the name of Dick Doughty-Wylie could come up in the course of conversation, to twist the knife in the wound. Even worse, there was always a chance that at some London charity event or concert party she might suddenly come face-to-face with his wife. Forthright to the point of eccentricity, Gertrude hated the thought of evasion or subterfuge. She wrote to Chirol: “If you knew the way I had paced backwards and forwards along the floor of hell for the last few months, you would think me right to try any way out. I want to cut all links with the world . . . This is the best and wisest thing to do . . . I want the road and the dawn, the sun, the wind and the rain, the camp fire under the stars, and sleep, and the road again.”

  The last eighteen months had shaken her profoundly. Now there were only Dick’s letters to look forward to. Mentally and spiritually she sank into the deepest state of despair, one which might have caused a breakdown in a less robust individual. Now whenever she heard a piece of melancholy music, or read one of the aching poems of Hafiz, or remembered how she would look for him across a crowded drawing-room and count the moments until he reached her side, tears would blur her vision. Castigate herself as she might for behaving like the kind of “silly little woman” she so despised, she had to admit she couldn’t get him out of her mind. The last bastion of her self-respect lay in keeping from her father and Florence just how far she had allowed herself to drift into dependence on a man she could not have. Hugh, a most unusual Victorian, adored her for her independence, intellect, courage, and good Geordie sense. Those were the characteristics he most admired in a woman; and if in Mary Shield, Gertrude’s mother, he had chosen a beautiful local girl, he had picked for his second wife a woman whose intelligence and thoughtfulness far outweighed her plainer looks and unassertive nature. Gertrude’s entire life had been predicated on pleasing him and winning his support for her adventures. God forbid that he should see just how this affair had brought her to her knees.