Gertrude Bell

by Georgina Howell

  It was almost Christmas. Hugh had asked her if she wanted a car to help her with the work, but she had turned it down, explaining that she could always borrow one if she wanted. He sent her £50 instead, and hoped she would be back for the holiday. She wrote to thank him and tell him that she wanted to stay in Boulogne, for fear that her new system would fall to pieces if she were not there to enforce it. The great advantage she had over Flora and Diana, she said, was that she could be there all the time; and as long as she was hard at work, it kept her from dwelling on her anxieties.

  She told Hugh how she would be spending his £50. Realizing that he had a good lieutenant in Gertrude, Cecil had told her how much he appreciated her reorganization of the work. She was the obvious choice for head of the department, and was invited to take over a room for her private office. She chose one of the empty rooms in the property, all of them gloomy, had it cleaned and repapered, and put in a mat and new chintz curtains. It looked as charming as it could, thanks to Hugh. “In spite of dirt and gloom I have made my office cheerful enough, with jars of lilac and narcissus which I buy in the market. I wonder they can bring up flowers to Boulogne in war time, and I bless them for it,” she told Chirol. And she still had plenty of money to spend on books and files and ledgers. It was good, she told her father, to feel it all cost the Red Cross nothing.

  Her Christmas passed almost unnoticed. On 27 December she sat down to write home about a curious phenomenon that was the talk of the town:

  I hear that on Xmas Day there was almost the peace of God. Scarcely a shot was fired, the men came out of the trenches and mixed together, and at one place there was even a game of football between the enemies . . . Strange, isn’t it . . . Sometimes we recover lost ground and find all our wounded carefully bound up and laid in shelter; sometimes we find them all bayoneted—according to the regiment, or the temper of the moment, what do I know? But day by day it becomes a blacker weight upon the mind.

  Cecil had at long last managed to persuade the War Office to let him establish a communication line with the front. Major Fabian Ware and his team were to be the new recipients of the enquiry lists from the Red Cross office: it was hoped that they would be able to get information that was beyond the reach of the W&MED.

  One of the team, a Mr. Cazalet, arrived in Boulogne on New Year’s Eve and brought with him a huge bundle of lists and crumpled letters taken from the pockets of the dead, some of them bloodstained. Fresh information coming in from the front line was of great value, with the proviso that all checking had to be done during the next twenty-four hours, after which Cazalet would return to the front. He would then have to hand the letters over, for return to the families, together with any other personal effects. Only Gertrude and Diana were staffing the office over the New Year. They sat down immediately to sort and check and enter the results in a ledger. They worked the rest of the day, then returned to the office after dinner and worked until 2 a.m.: “At midnight we broke off for a few minutes, wished each other a better year and ate some chocolates.”

  Gertrude was back in the office at 8:15 a.m., and the work was finished by 12:30, with just an hour to spare. She took the office car and delivered it in person. Major Ware was impressed, and it was not long before he visited the office. He had a long talk with Gertrude and left promising that in future he would send her all the details he could collect. Then, in January, for the first time Cecil sent her the War Office’s monthly list of missing men for her comments. “It was full of errors, both of commission and omission,” she wrote to Chirol. As the W&MED knew so much more about the missing than the WO did, she wrote back, why didn’t she simply take the work over?

  But in spite of her limitless capacity for work, she was worn thin. With Maurice now at the front and Dick inclined to return to the fighting, she was trying hard to resist depression. The appalling weather became a metaphor for the constant haemorrhaging of life and the profitless state of the war. Unusually, she had admitted her low spirits to Chirol: “I feel tired . . . I’m too near the horrible struggle in the mud. It’s infernal country, completely under water . . . you can’t move for mud.”

  As the numbers of the wounded and missing proliferated, the War Office did hand over much of what had originally been their responsibility to the efficient Red Cross operation in Boulogne. Gertrude toiled on—and all aspects of the work now flooded into her capable hands. She asked for, and was given, the task of responding to the enquiries that would entail the Red Cross informing the families of the deaths of their relatives. Her style was in sharp contrast to the dreaded Form B101–82 sent by the War Office:

  Madam,

  It is my painful duty to inform you that a report has this day been received from the War Office notifying the death of Number 15296 Private Williams, J. D. which occurred at Place Not Stated on the 13th of November, 1915 The cause of death was Killed In Action

  The “fear telegram” was even more succinct:

  Deeply regret to inform you that E. R. Cook British Grenadiers was killed in action 26th April Lord Kitchener expresses his sympathy Secretary War Office

  She did all she could to convey the news in the gentlest and most sympathetic manner. Having worn out one typewriter with the sad work, she was awarded a newer model. The Joint War Committee Report paid tribute to Gertrude’s work, without naming her, and described her approach:

  Official forms and methods should be, as far as possible, discarded, so that each enquirer might feel that a certain personal interest was taken in his or her case . . . and it was abundantly proved that no labour was wasted which might convince the families of the missing of the wide and assiduous research which had been made on their behalf.

  Gertrude wrote to Chirol on 12 January:

  They have put all the correspondence into my hands, Paris, Boulogne and Rouen. I am glad because the form in which we convey terrible tidings—that is mostly what we have to convey—matters very much, and when I have it to do, I know at least that no pains will be spared over it . . . I lead a cloistered existence and think of nothing but my poor people whose fortunes I am following so painfully . . .

  The letters I receive and answer daily are heart-rending. At any rate, even if we can give these people little news that is good, it comforts them I think that something is being done to find out what has happened to their beloveds. Often I know myself that there is no chance for them, and I have to answer as gently as I can and carefully keep from them horrible details which I have learnt. That is my daily job.

  Now, at her lowest ebb, she received the letter that brought her back to life. Dick wrote to say that he was on his way back to London. She should wait for his message and come straight there to meet him.

  Her office colleagues were taken aback: the boss who never took a holiday—who seldom took a lunch-break or left when the office shut—had suddenly gone absent without a word of explanation.

  These were the four nights and three days that Gertrude was to spend with the man she loved before he set off for Gallipoli. She knew she might never see him again. When he had gone, she caught the Folkestone steamer in the rain for Boulogne, her heart heavier than she had ever known it. Already depressed, she was now entering one of the darkest periods of her life.

  Occasionally, sitting alone at her desk in the empty building after supper, alongside the full ashtray and the jug of spring flowers from a world far away in the sun, she would put her head down on her arms and weep. Every list of wounded and missing might now include the names of Dick or Maurice. She was sure that she would never know happiness again. From now on, her letters home sound a note of enduring pain:

  My work goes on—quite continuous, very absorbing, and so sad that at times I can scarcely bear it. It is as though the intimate dossier of the War passed through my hands. The tales that come in to me are unforgettable; the splendid simple figures that live in them people my thoughts, and their words, brought back to me, ring in my ears. The waste, the sorrow of it all.

  Here we sit
, and lives run out like water with nothing done. It’s unbelievable now at the front—the men knee deep in water in the trenches, the mud impassable. They sink in it up to the knee, up to the thigh. When they lie down in the open to shoot they cannot fire because their elbows are buried in it to the wrist. Half the cases that come down to the hospital are rheumatism and forms of frost bite. They stay in the trenches twenty-one days, sometimes thirty-six days, think of it.

  Walking on the beach in the pouring rain, she would think about these soldiers, catapulted into war, each one a lover, a brother, a husband, or a son. She must have reflected too on her early enthusiasm for the war, and on the probable fate of those young Yorkshiremen she had exhorted to join up. In her three months at Boulogne she had come to understand trench warfare as few people did who were not themselves in the front line. Every day, in her head, she heard the bombardment that was the prelude to an infantry assault, saw the men run out from the shafts and dive for the shell craters, setting up their machine-guns while three or four more waves of men climbed out of the shafts behind them and surged towards the German line. She saw them running forward at a steady pace, the signal rockets being fired, then the lines advancing into a hurricane of shells from the German batteries. She saw figures tossed into the air, limbs going in all directions. She saw the ones that fell motionless to the ground, and she heard the screams of the wounded as they thrashed the ground in their agony. She saw the broken lines regroup, then advance in short rushes until they were at point-blank range of the German trenches. She heard orders being shouted and the shrill cheers as the British charged, the bursting of bombs and the fusillade of machine-guns. And she heard the moans and cries as the remnants of the British line were beaten back yet again. The dead, the wounded, the missing, all of them, all the mud and the blood, to be reduced to names on lists on a desk in Boulogne. “They reckon the average duration of an officer at the front at about a month, before he is wounded,” she wrote to Chirol on 2 February. “. . . The taking, losing and retaking of a trench is what it comes to; and 4000 lives lost over it in the last 6 weeks. Bitter waste.”

  On 24 April, Maurice distinguished himself at the front. A lieutenant-colonel of the Green Howards, he played a major part in the attack on the village of Fortuin, over the Belgian border north-west of Lille, where the Germans had broken through the line. When Lieutenant-Colonel G. H. Shaw commanding the 4th East Yorks was shot, fighting alongside him, Maurice took command of both battalions and attacked the Germans, driving them back more than a mile. He would be wounded in March of the following year. He did not recover quickly from the subsequent operation, but went back to the front after a few months. He was invalided out again in June 1917, almost totally deaf.

  The British public were largely kept in the dark about the true numbers of casualties, while Gertrude had a clear view of the reality, and of the duplicity that went on. She knew that entire battalions could be wiped out in a day, down to the last man, following orders from staff officers who might never have been to the front themselves. It was the beginning of a disenchantment with government and with authority in general that she was as yet too loyal to express openly. It informed an attitude she would come to hold later in her life. “The Pyrrhic victory of Neuve Chapelle showed more clearly than before that we can’t break through the lines. Why they concealed our losses it is hard to guess. They were close on 20,000; and the German casualties between 8 and 10,000.”

  At the end of March she returned to London. Cecil had set up a new W&MED office in Pall Mall in response to the enormous numbers of unrecorded wounded men now lying in British hospitals throughout the country. This main office would act as the clearing house for all of the enquiries from families, sending them on to the appropriate Red Cross office abroad—the south-eastern front included. Now there would be one central record, one focus for information from all sources, and one office from which to respond to the families. There was no longer any reason for anywhere but London to be the centre of operations—except that the woman who had control of it all was stationed in Boulogne. Having seen what she had achieved in France, Cecil told Gertrude that she was needed to run his new office. She would have a staff of twenty, plus four typists, and he would be on hand, working out of the same office, available at all times for discussion and advice.

  Her last letter from Boulogne was to Florence. Her mind was full of Dick and her work: she felt too vulnerable for any kind of social life. “Don’t let anyone know I’m coming. I shall have no time and I don’t want to be bothered with people.”

  It was, at least, a change. She was out of the dirt and discomfort of Boulogne and living at 95 Sloane Street, being looked after again by Marie Delaire. She walked across Hyde Park four times a day, coming back for lunch and returning to Arlington Street, where the expanding office was soon rehoused. The exercise and the novel comforts of domestic life brought a slight improvement to her spirits, but the state of confusion in the office was beyond anything she had encountered even in Boulogne. Some of her old humour returned, to lighten her letters to Chirol:

  I love Lord Robert. He resembles a very large elf, and elves, as every reader of fairy stories knows, are good colleagues on an uphill job . . . but it’s a job for Hercules. I never knew what chaos meant till now.

  I go nowhere and see no one, for I am at the office from 9 am till 7 pm . . . I have some 20 ladies under me, 4 type-writers (not near enough) and 2 boy scouts who are an infinite joy.

  In spite of the daunting hours she was now working, she tried hard to be stoical and good-humoured, no matter the stress she was under. She had always exhibited grace under pressure, at least to her family. But now her world came to an end.

  Predictably, agonizingly, she heard that Dick had died a hero’s death in Gallipoli. Her half-sister Molly wrote: “It has ended her life—there is no reason now for her to go on with anything she cared for.”

  Little was seen of her for a while and then, pale and thin, she returned to work. She had always worked harder and longer than anyone else, but now she had no other life. “I get rather tired towards the end of the week. But the quiet day in the office on Sunday sets me up again.”

  In vain Florence tried to coax her away for a rest, fearful of the consequences of her stepdaughter’s personal tragedy combined with her ferocious workload. Gertrude’s spontaneous humour and quick intimacies had been completely extinguished under this heaviest of blows, and her uncomprehending staff must have begun to dislike her, even fear her. But instead of breaking down she worked on, for the sake of people like her lover and her brother. She was short-tempered and impatient even with Florence, countering with unusual irritation her attempts to distract her: “I could not possibly get away next week. I am having a horrible time, with a lot of new people, all to be taught and all making mistakes at every moment. There is no one in whose hands I could leave the office even for a day. It’s being rather intolerable altogether. I hate changing and changes.”

  In such pain that she often forgot to spare other people’s feelings, she would sadly acknowledge her shortcomings. Three months after Doughty-Wylie’s death, Florence wrote from Rounton to ask if Gertrude would like her to come up and be with her at this sad time. Gertrude replied: “It’s very dear of you . . . but you mustn’t do it. Nobody does any good really . . . Nothing does any good.”

  And now even more work descended on her from the Foreign Office, who requested that the Wounded and Missing Enquiry Department should take on the gathering and tabulating of all information with regard to German prison camps. She wrote home on 20 August:

  It is of vital importance that we should have this knowledge properly arranged, for it shows us how best to help our prisoners who stand in most need of it. But it means more files, more archives, more people working on them.

  I’ve been bitterly alone this month. It’s intolerable not to like being alone as I used, but I can’t keep myself away from my own thoughts, and they are still more intolerable.

&nbs
p; Janet Courtney—Janet Hogarth of her Oxford days—was one of the women who came to help her in the London office. Janet wrote some time later of that period: “I was greatly struck by her mental weariness and discouragement, little as she ever let either interfere with the work. But she would not, she said she could not, rest. The War obsessed her to the exclusion of every other consideration . . . She would let no personal griefs lessen her capacity for doing. She faced a sorrow and put it behind her.”

  Janet’s brother David had seen Gertrude shortly before going out to Cairo to help organize a branch of the Admiralty Intelligence Service, dealing specifically with Arab peoples. He suggested that she might follow him but, absorbed in her Red Cross work, she had hardly listened. Once in Cairo he wrote again. This time he practically insisted that she join him in his work.

  One day, when Janet went in to work as usual at Norfolk House in St. James’s Square—lent to the constantly expanding W&MED by the Duke of Norfolk—Gertrude immediately seized her arm in her old impulsive way and drew her aside. “I’ve heard from David; he says anyone can trace the missing but only I can map Northern Arabia. I’m going next week.”

  As this chapter of her life closed, with all its toil and misery, she could at least look back with satisfaction on a part of the war effort that she had made definitively her own. For hundreds of thousands of families, she had shone a light into the darkness and played some part in enabling them to get on with living. Her work for the W&MED was to be formally acknowledged as beyond value by HRH the Princess Christian and the other members of the War Executive Committee.