Gertrude Bell

by Georgina Howell

  In the early stages of the conflict, liaison with the French hospitals in Paris was paramount. Since the British were fighting in the north of France, the new Red Cross branch was placed as near to them as possible, alongside the British hospitals that had been set up in Boulogne. When Gertrude arrived, the office was only three weeks old. The German army had recently marched through Flanders, and the British expeditionary force sent to Ypres to stop them had lost some fifteen thousand men. Mired in the trenches, with barbed wire and machine-guns separating them, the protagonists settled into a war of attrition punctuated by intermittent attempts to break through the line. These offensives pitted fifty to a hundred thousand men at the enemy, with no lasting gain. The fighting had reached deadlock, with the hundred yards gained on one day lost a day or a week later. Each Allied offensive brought appalling loss of life and new waves of casualties, with wounded men on stretchers arriving by every ambulance train, and piling up at the station for transfer to hospital.

  Gertrude would be taking her place in the W&MED office alongside her childhood friend Flora Russell, who was already employed there, and Flora’s sister Diana. The sisters worked turn and turn about, so that one of them was always in the office and the other on leave. Flora was at present in London, and Gertrude was able to meet up with her, to be told of the dreadful chaos and dirt that she was about to encounter. Flora scribbled a list of clothes that Gertrude would need, and went off to enjoy her leave. Given just three days to get herself to Boulogne, Gertrude sent a flurry of letters via Florence to Marie Delaire, her long-suffering maid, demanding underclothes, watches, jackets, and her riding boots to cope with the mud. Her messages to Marie were abrupt, albeit sifted through Florence’s tactful intervention. But Marie’s affection and loyalty for Gertrude knew no bounds: she would stay with her, through thick and thin, all of her mistress’s life.

  Naturally impatient, Gertrude was suffering, as always, from Dick’s absence. He had now admitted that he loved her, but in Addis Ababa he could hardly be further away. When would she see him? She knew that if he came home, he was likely to offer his services once more to the army, and then he would be gone again. She packed the locked box of his letters at the bottom of her suitcase.

  She was almost the only woman on the Folkestone steamer among the crowd of subdued uniformed men returning to the front after their seventy-two hours’ leave. She stepped onto the quay at Boulogne in heavy November rain, scarcely recognizing this grey town as the starting point for so many of the Bells’ European holidays. There used to be a crowd of eager porters; now there was no one. Turning up her collar, she picked up her case and followed the soldiers, who had shouldered their kit and were making for the station yard. There they climbed aboard the fleet of London omnibuses co-opted to take the troops to the front. Although they had been in France for only four or five weeks, these vehicles were so mud-spattered that barely a trace of the original colour was visible. Those that had broken down had been turned into makeshift shelters from the rain. Under the encrustation Gertrude could just make out a couple of the original destinations—Putney and Kilburn. She walked past the ranks of Red Cross ambulances to the goods sheds, now converted into a hospital crisply run by the Army Medical Service. The only other women on the street were nurses going to work or leaving after their shifts, wearing the grey ankle-length uniform of the Army Sisters.

  She found the office car waiting for her by the rest station, where an ambulance was unloading the wounded. Those able to walk looked as if they were made of clay, their faces and greatcoats, too, plastered with mud. They limped and shuffled like old men, looking neither left nor right. Others were being carried away on stretchers, or smoking cigarettes while awaiting the next stage of repatriation. The car splashed away through the puddles, and through the smeared windows she saw dirt and discomfort everywhere she looked. They pulled up at the run-down lodging house where she had been assigned a room in the attic, reached by a long, steep staircase smelling of old food. Diana, who shared a room downstairs with Flora, came to find her and agreed that it was an awful hole. Gertrude changed her shoes and the two of them went straight off to get her a passport. She told Dick in a letter: “I had a hideous interview with the passport people at the Red Cross . . . age 46, height 5 foot 5½ . . . no profession . . . mouth normal . . . face, well . . . I looked at the orderly: ‘Round’ she said.”

  She was given a desk and introduced to the volunteers, a group of dedicated but disorganized ladies who staffed the office. The gaunt, high-ceilinged room was darker than the grey view through the windows. The four or five desks, and the floor around them, were almost hidden under heaps of dog-eared papers. Several times a day a messenger would arrive with more boxes of letters and lists, which would throw everyone into feverish activity. Sometimes a name on a letter would strike a chord, and inspire them to burrow through five or six piles. Gertrude noted that they soon gave up and sat down again to pore over a fresh pile of enquiry letters from families and newspaper cuttings.

  Everyone tried to explain to her what they were doing, but their explanations varied so much and they themselves seemed so confused that in the end she worked it out for herself. As the letters arrived, the staff took note of the names and tried to trace them through the various listings. She saw at once that they had no system: they had begun the work when there was just a trickle of letters, and they were continuing to tackle it in the same way although the trickle had turned into a torrent. They were trying to match fresh enquiries to names on lists often a month or two old: lists of hospital admissions, reports from the searchers in the hospital wards, lists of prisoners, and casualty and missing lists from the newspapers. When they could verify a name, a rare occurrence, they would write to the families concerned to tell them that their man was either wounded or missing, dead or taken prisoner. Working from scribbled notes and from memory, deluged with documents from so many sources while close to the cutting edge of a battle that no one was winning, the volunteers’ morale had slumped and their sense of purpose was being eroded daily. With more than fifteen thousand British men killed, wounded, or missing in the recent Mons campaign, the small office was not so much overwhelmed as washed away in the flood.

  Gertrude realized that, to put in a workable system, she would have to begin at the beginning. She set her mind to the job and took it up with all her energy. This heiress who had lived her entire life for adventure and self-education, now dedicated her days to working at a modest desk as though her life depended on it: “I think I have inherited a love of office work! A clerk was what I was meant to be . . . I feel as if I had flown to this work as one might take to drink, for some forgetting.” She proved to be a formidable administrator.

  The well-meaning volunteers soon found themselves bossed about by the newcomer, who first interrogated them about their methods and then produced a new way of doing things that they felt obliged to follow. Her first object was to create a database from which the whole office could work. She made an alphabetical card index of all officers admitted to the base hospitals in France, recording dates of admission, transfers to other hospitals, evacuation back to Britain, or return to the front. Names from the letters of enquiry could then be quickly checked against it for a match. As soon as she finished the database, she began sorting through the enquiries and finding names on the hospital admissions lists. She then classified the enquiries in another card index, this one divided into wounded or missing, with all available details. She worked on the card stacks during her lunch hour and after work when the office was supposed to be shut. When that had been completed, she was able to cross-reference, so that new information coming in from any source could be compared, corroborated, and verified. She was pleased with her efforts: “I’ve very nearly cleared away the mountain of mistakes which I found when I came. Nothing was ever verified, and we went on piling error on to error, with no idea of the confusion that was being caused . . . If we are not scrupulously correct we are no good at all.”

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nbsp; She weeded out those names that had been on the books for five months or more. These men would remain in a kind of no-man’s-land entitled “Missing Presumed Dead” until there was verification of their deaths, when their unfortunate families could finally give up hope. Then they would receive the dreaded form from the War Office, and the soldier’s name would appear on the official casualty list.

  Now, she told Florence, all she had to do was persuade the W&MED in London and Paris to adopt her system and to make sure that all information was constantly updated. When she had time for lunch, she went with Diana or Flora to a tiny restaurant packed with soldiers, everybody taking everybody else for granted. It was, she told her family, the oddest world.

  Her office hours, as yet rather less than modern staffers put in in an average week, were considerable for a woman who had never worked in an office before: “It is fearful the amount of office work there is. We are at it all day from 10 till 12:30 and from 2 to 5 filing, indexing and answering enquiries . . . The more we do, the more necessary it is to keep our information properly tabulated . . . I need not say I’m ready to take it all. The more work they give me the better I like it.” Would Florence, she added, request on her behalf a complete list of the Territorial battalions? And could she have a London address book for the office—an old telephone directory would do nicely.

  The Boulogne lists were soon acknowledged to be as complete as they could be made, and Paris began sending its own lists of admissions and discharges there, instead of the other way round. Flora and Diana departed to run a new office in Rouen, along Gertrude’s lines. She had also instigated a “watching list” of some fifteen hundred names registered as “enquiries,” so that hospitals themselves could check their admissions against it as soon as they arrived.

  In time, she thought, they would have one of the best-run offices in France. But the job was not being made any easier by those in command. The head of the W&MED, Lord Robert Cecil, had recently asked to have a W&MED representative permanently at the front, only for the army to refuse. The Red Cross had also asked the Army Council to let their searchers go to the front after each offensive and make early enquiries about the dead and missing among the wounded at field hospitals and rest stations. The military authorities did not see their way to permitting this either, and ordered that the W&MED should remain well behind the line. Undeterred, Gertrude cooked up a plan to create their own channels through army chaplains. It was soon understood that the military agenda was to hide from civilians not only the true catastrophic course of the war in the trenches, but also the miscalculations of the commanders, who continued to order escalating offensives when it should have been abundantly clear to them that the strategy was not working. For more obscure reasons, the Red Cross had decided not to let any women make enquiries at the hospitals. “Very silly,” sniffed Gertrude, determining to make friends with the nurses and go in, albeit unofficially, whenever she liked.

  She would walk along the seafront from 8:30 to 9 a.m. At 5, after her work in the office had finished, she began defiantly visiting out-stations and hospitals, talking to the men in the wards. She made a special trip in the office car to Le Touquet, to visit the Secunderabad Hospital for Indian regiments. She was warmly received by the medical staff, who told her how isolated they felt. For her, this short visit was like a home away from home. They gave her tea and escorted her around the wards to meet Sikhs, Gurkhas, Jats, and Afridis, most sitting cross-legged on their beds and playing cards: “The cooks [were] preparing Hindu and Mohammadan dinners over separate fires, and the good smell of ghee and the musty aromatic East pervading the whole . . . Every man had the King’s Christmas card pinned up above his bed, and Princess Mary’s box of spices lying on the table beneath it.”

  In the centre of Boulogne itself, the Casino, a riot of bright lights and gilded paintwork, had been taken over by the War Office and turned into a military hospital. The American Bar, she was amused to see, was now an X-ray room, and the Café Bar served as a dispensary for bandages and carbolic lotion. She was interested to find that the British soldiers sharing wards with the wounded Germans were perfectly pleasant and friendly to their former enemies. On 11 December she wrote to Chirol:

  There is a recent order, direct from Kitchener, that no visitor is to go into hospitals without a pass. It’s unspeakably silly. The reason given out is that spies get into the hospitals, question the wounded and gain valuable information concerning the position of their regiments! Anyone who has talked to the men in hospital knows how ridiculous that is. They are generally quite vague as to where they were or what they were doing.

  In November and December—December being Gertrude’s first month in the job—there were 1,838 enquiries from families. Her new card index listed 5,000 names, and she was able to resolve the fate of 127 men. Most of them were traced by the three male “searchers” attached to the Boulogne office, whose daily job it was to go to the hospitals and question the wounded about their missing colleagues. If these shell-shocked and disabled men could throw any light on their fate, the information was filed with the office. Where death was a certainty, the War Office was informed. The Boulogne section of a Joint War Committee Report, probably penned by Gertrude herself, reads:

  It should be appreciated at home that these enquiries from wounded men about their missing comrades are a most difficult part of our work. Men reach hospital from the trenches in such a nerve-racked condition that their evidence has to be checked and counterchecked by questioning other men, and thus every “enquiry case” may necessitate the catechism of four or five men.

  When the British fell back, their wounded were overtaken by the Germans, and either killed or taken prisoner. Nothing more would be known about them unless they could be found on one of the lists of prisoners coming from Germany through the Red Cross at Geneva. These lists, as they arrived in Boulogne, enabled the office to determine the fate of at least some of the missing.

  This was fighting unlike any that had been known before. The unknown soldier, as A. J. P. Taylor was to write, was the true hero in a war that resulted in nearly 192,000 men from the British Empire missing or taken prisoner. One shell could blow fifty men apart in such a way that they could never be identified. One of the grimmest parts of the work that Gertrude initiated at Boulogne consisted in finding wherever possible the graves of men hastily buried on the battlefield, whose relatives wanted to know whether there was proof of death, and if so, where they were buried. The exhumations were the work of the Red Cross searchers, the same men who normally went into the hospitals to interview the wounded. They often found that the grave which contained the colonel or captain they were trying to find would turn out to be a pit into which a number of other bodies had also been thrown. The most recent that Gertrude had recorded in mid-December contained 98 men. Of the 98, only 66 still wore their identity discs—but at least these deaths could be certified and their graves ascertained. After verification, the grave was lengthened, the bodies laid side by side and the burial service read over them. Gertrude told Valentine Chirol:

  Where we are under a cross fire of artillery, we have about 50 casualties a day . . . It’s miserable up there now—continuous rain . . . The roads beyond St. Omer are in an awful state. The cobbled pavement is giving way . . . and on either side of it is a slough of mud. The heavy motor transport, if it is pushed off the pavement into the mud can’t be got out and stays there for ever.

  She did not always succeed in putting Dick to the back of her mind, and now she had an extra worry. In the New Year Maurice was to be sent to the front. She dreaded that one day it might be his name that turned up on one of the lists on her desk. As usual she opened her heart only to Chirol, sheltering her family from the knowledge of her misery:

  I can work here all day long—it makes a little plank across the gulf of wretchedness over which I have walked this long long time. Sometimes even that comes near to breaking point . . . I ought not to write of it. Forgive me. There are days when it is
still almost more than I can bear—this is one of them, and I cry out to you . . . My dear Domnul, dearest and best of friends.

  At the beginning of the war the officers, being career soldiers, would have been older than most of the ranks, and more likely to have wives who would write in to the Red Cross to initiate a search if they disappeared. Since the War Office issued commissions and recorded promotions, they had the lists of officers to hand, while the names of the men in the ranks were known only to their regiments. As the Joint War Committee Report put it, “With the small staff at its disposal it was obviously impossible to keep a complete record of everybody, and this work was at first confined to officers.” While there is a deplorable aspect to this attitude, it is nonetheless true that the number of soldiers was astronomical. Recruitment offices collapsed under the applications of the two and a half million men who volunteered in response to Kitchener’s “Your Country Needs You” campaign.

  Shortly after the new Enquiry Office opened, dealing with non-commissioned officers and men, the army discontinued its practice of issuing the Red Cross with hospital lists, because the hospitals were inundated and worked off their feet. Without that lifeline, and without any searchers on the small staff, it was only a few weeks before the new office closed. The correspondence from the families went instead to Gertrude, whose work had been doubled already with the correspondence that was now re-routed from Paris. She and her staff readily took up the burden of the enquiries about the non-commissioned officers and men—“Some rather complicated business has been settled up, the result being that we take on privates as well as officers, for which I am very glad”—and brought news, good or bad, to at least some of these British families.

  She asked Florence to post to her the latest arrangements about allowances for soldiers and sailors. Having grown up with a keen family awareness of the straitened finances of working families such as those at her father’s ironworks, she knew what it would mean to them to lose the breadwinner. When families had to be informed that their husband or father had been disabled or killed, she wanted to be able to explain their entitlements and how they could apply for them.