Tormented, she continued:
I can’t sleep—I can’t sleep. It’s 1 in the morning of Sunday. I’ve tried to sleep, every night it becomes less and less possible. You and you are between me and any rest, but out of your arms there is no rest. Life, you called me—fire. I flame and live and am consumed. Dick it’s not possible to live like this. When it’s all over you must take your own. You must venture—is it I who must breathe courage into you, my soldier? Before all the world claim me and take me and hold me for ever and ever.… Furtiveness I hate—in the end I should go under, and hate myself and die. 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. Yet I shall do that too, use all the artifices and run to meet the inevitable end.… 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.…
Now listen—I won’t write to you like this any more … I’ve finished. If you love me take me this way—if you only desire me for an hour, then have that hour and I will have it and meet the bill. I’ve told you the price. Whatever happens, whatever you decide, I will come to you and have that—I’m not afraid of that other crossing.… But don’t miss the camp fire that burns in this letter—a clear flame, a bright flame fed by my life.
Horrified, Gertrude found herself facing the one person she did not want to see; Dick’s wife appeared in her office in Boulogne. The two women had corresponded since the days in Turkey, and now they lunched together, talking casually about their work. Judith gave no hint that she knew of the relationship between her friend and her husband, but the meeting took a terrible toll on Gertrude. She begged Dick to discourage his wife from coming again. “I hated it,” she wrote him; “don’t make me have that to bear.” She was torn with regret and desire and guilt. “Don’t forget me—you won’t leave me? It’s not possible. It’s torture, eternal torture, which loses its edge. Oh my dear it might be ecstasy.”
Over and over she wrestled with what had happened in England during those four exquisite, excruciating days; questioning what she had done, trying to reconcile her feelings with her own behavior. If pregnancy had once been a fear, it now seemed a blessing. Gertrude, for years an atheist, now suddenly sounded devout: “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 reached him while he was on his way to war. When Turkey announced its alliance with Germany, the British reacted at once. A campaign was organized by Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, to cut off Turkish forces on their way to Baghdad: thirty thousand Australian troops were sent to make a surprise landing at Gallipoli. The purpose was to open the Dardanelles for the British navy, capture Constantinople, and provide supplies for allied Russian troops while cutting off Turkey from German assistance. Dick Doughty-Wylie, already familiar with the Turks from his days as vice-consul in Anatolia, and decorated for his heroic actions in saving Armenians from Turkish slaughter, was chosen as one of the British officers to lead the attack.
In mid-March 1915, as Dick made his way to the Dardanelles, Gertrude was asked to supply the War Office with her unpublished maps of Syria. By the end of the month she was in London, called back to brief officials about the East; and at the behest of her friend Lord Robert Cecil, the Red Cross director, she was organizing the main Red Cross office in England. Once again the days were long and tiring, and as she walked from her gray townhouse at 95 Sloane Street to Norfolk House, her office across Piccadilly, she was haunted by memories of Dick.
A letter arrived from Doughty-Wylie just as his troops were about to embark for Gallipoli, and she knew he still cared deeply: “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.”
For Gertrude their love was a genesis. On April 21 she revealed to him: “ … there is an eternal secret between you and me. No one has known, no one will ever know, the woman who loves you. Mind and body, a different creature from her who walks the common earth before the eyes of men—new born and new fashioned out of our joined love. Only you know her and have seen her … you gave her life but I made her, bone by bone; having begotten her you may love her without fear. And you will.”
Little information came from the front. War Office censors blocked out reports that might even have hinted at events, and letters that reached England were so blackened with ink that, except for the salutation and the signature, they were hardly legible. But at a dinner party with friends on the first day of May 1915, a casual conversation brought Gertrude shocking news of Gallipoli. The landing had not gone well. British forces had been unable to carry off the surprise attack; as they landed on the crescent of open beach, they were met by Turkish troops, who riddled them with machine-gun and rifle fire. In the bloodbath that followed, Dick Doughty-Wylie had been shot in the head and killed.
Gertrude was stunned. Quickly and quietly, she left the table and rushed off to see her sister Elsa. Months ago, Elsa had reassured her that, in spite of the difficulties, Gertrude had kept her integrity and done the right thing. Now, in the comfort of her sister’s home, Gertrude allowed herself to weep.
After a while the crying stopped and a calm seemed to come over her, but a few minutes later she turned her head away, losing control again. She had coped with death before: at the age of three she had lost her mother; at twenty-five she had lost her fiancé, Henry Cadogan, and by the age of thirty she had lost both her favorite aunt, Mary Lascelles, and her closest school friend, Mary Talbot. But now the loss of Dick Doughty-Wylie was more than she could bear. She had lost the greatest gift that life had given her. She could hardly keep from speaking of Dick, and she shared her secret with Domnul, Lord Robert, her sisters Elsa and Molly, and her chum, Elizabeth Robins. No one revealed a word. Yet there was no one among her friends or family who could give her solace, and for days she refused to see anyone except Domnul. “I can’t, I can’t bear the anguish of it, except alone,” she wrote to Lisa Robins.
For a few brief day, Gertrude retreated to Rounton. For her, the familiar lair in the northeast was always a place of respite, its gardens a source of repair. It was her England, a bulwark graced by brushwood in leaf, pear trees in blossom. It was home, and as her grandfather’s friend John Ruskin had written, “the place of peace; the shelter not only from injury, but from all terror, doubt and division.” In her childhood, Rounton had been the home of her grandparents, a comforting place for a child who was forced to wear black at the age of three.
Now, with Hugh and Florence to console her, Gertrude tried to regain her strength. She seemed a little better, Florence noted to Lisa Robins, but she was still “speaking hopelessly of the situation.” Florence had little tolerance for such an attitude: “It’s no good doing that. It’s the business of the women of England to say ‘Never say die’—and to stiffen up the whole country by saying ‘yes, it’s very bad—but will be better.’ ” But Gertrude was in far too much pain to mouth platitudes.
On a day when Lisa came to
Rounton, Gertrude strode with her across the moors. She confided to her friend how much Dick had wanted her to go away with him; his greatest sorrow had been that she had refused to live with him, even while he was married to Judith. Gertrude stopped for a moment and paused. Her throat wrapped in a pink scarf, her arms crossed, her face tense, she looked up and described a recent dream: “I was falling into that pit of blackness, piercing a sword against my breast—and going down, down, me and my sword.…”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Escape to the East
The London skies turned more somber than usual in the autumn of 1915, clouded with enemy aircraft and spattered with enemy bombs. The sound of the German planes, rumbling over Hampstead on one September day, drew Gertrude’s attention as she watched the raid from Elsa’s balcony. “We saw nothing, but the bursting shells,” she wrote to Florence. “I gather they didn’t do much harm.”
A few words hastily scribbled, her note showed neither fear nor a sense of relief. Gertrude, who had routinely composed lengthy, picturesque letters, was no longer able to express much feeling at all. She was numbed by the terrible loss of Dick. As her sister Molly wrote in her own diary: “It has ended her life—there is no reason now for her to go on with anything she cared for.… It is difficult to see how she can build up anything out of the ruins left to her. Hers is not a happy nor a kindly nature, and sorrow instead of maturing her mellow has dried up all the springs of kindliness.”
Friends could offer little comfort, and as content as she once had felt in solitude, she now ached from isolation. “It is intolerable,” Gertrude had written to Florence, “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.” England had become a place of heartbreak, its cold damp air clinging to her.
By November 1915, as the war against the Turks extended on the Eastern Front from Gallipoli to Mesopotamia, Gertrude was more anxious than ever to be back in the East. The people, the climate, the sense of urgency about the region all made her eager for a summons, but until now, it was considered too dangerous for a woman, and the Government had refused to let her go. Toward the middle of the month, however, she strode into work at Norfolk House and, rushing across the office, seized the arm of her friend Janet Hogarth, and drew her aside. “I’ve heard from David,” she told his sister excitedly; “he says anyone can trace the missing but only I can map Northern Arabia. I’m going next week.”
David Hogarth had written to Gertrude from Cairo, where he was in charge of gathering information for the office of Military Intelligence. The small espionage bureau, established only a year earlier, was staffed with a handful of political officers, archaeologists and journalists. Like Gertrude, they had previously supplied the Foreign Office with relevant details from their everyday work in the field. Now, with the growing momentum of war and an increasing need for information about the Arabs, Hogarth urged Reginald Hall, the Director of Naval Intelligence, to draft Gertrude as a spy.
She had waited impatiently for this moment; after more than a year of marking time, filling her hours with bureaucratic busy work, she could at last return to the part of the world that welcomed her as a Person. What’s more, she would go not as an observer, but as a participant, not as a bothersome traveler but as a knowledgeable practitioner, indispensible now to the same British officials who had tried so hard two years before to prevent her journey to Arabia. Her traveling expenses would be paid, and she would be given a billeting allowance. “I think I’m justified in accepting that, don’t you?” she asked her father.
In the house on Sloane Street, her maid Marie packed a steamer trunk with tunics and peg-topped skirts, satin corsets, knickers, petticoats and silk stockings, adding capes and coats for the cool Cairo evenings and parasols to protect her from the hot Egyptian sun. A week later, clothing, books and toiletries in order, Gertrude said farewell to Florence and Hugh, not knowing how long she would be away nor how far she would travel beyond Egypt. That was enough.
Her spirits high, she boarded the SS Arabia on November 19, 1915, and set sail from Southampton. Storms raged all the way from Marseilles to Port Said; the rough seas pitched the boat day and night, tossing it dangerously, turning most of the passengers green with seasickness. It was a “horrible journey,” Gertrude confessed, but she survived “triumphantly.” Five days later, on the night of Thursday, November 25, 1915, the ship reached Port Said. The following afternoon Gertrude arrived in Cairo, invigorated by the sight of her mentor, David Hogarth. By his side was his subordinate, the fair-haired, blue-eyed young man named T. E. Lawrence.
“Gerty!” the young man exclaimed.
“My dear boy!” Gertrude called in return. Lawrence had come—sloppily dressed, as always, his belt missing and his buttons unpolished—to meet her carriage and welcome her to Egypt. A ride on the dusty streets took them through a blend of East and West—a Levantine atmosphere thriving with Bedouin Arabs, Turkish traders, Jewish merchants, Sudanese servants, British officials and soldiers recalled from Gallipoli—until they reached the fashionable quarter of Ismailiya and the Hotel Continental, where Hogarth and Lawrence were billeted.
Gertrude surveyed the luxurious gardens and sumptuous surroundings, a whimsical combination of English gingerbread and Oriental elegance, and glanced at the guests sipping mint tea on the swag-covered verandahs. Egyptian bellboys in long nightshirts took her luggage, and she settled into her room, a well-appointed suite with modern fittings, private bath and covered balcony. After changing into a gown, she joined the two men and went down to her first dinner as a Staff Officer on the Military Intelligence team. There was much to catch up on, and as Gertrude sipped her Turkish coffee and puffed on a cigarette, she filled them in on news from home while Hogarth outlined the work to be done and Lawrence amused her with gossip.
When morning came, she marched to the telegraph desk to pen an urgent message home: send at once my new white skirt and purple chiffon evening gown, she wrote. That done, she was keen to start her day.
The local office of Military Intelligence, soon to be renamed the Arab Bureau, was installed in three rooms at the nearby Savoy. In peacetime, the hotel rivaled Shepheard’s as a stylish meeting spot for women as well as men, but now, as headquarters for the War Office, it had become a bastion of uniformed British males—khaki-clothed officers in high suede boots, swatting the air with fly sticks. Gertrude marched through the Savoy, tall and erect, her head topped with a feathered hat, her confidence overbrimming, but her high spirit was met with a stony reception. “The military people here are much put about how she is to be treated and to how much she is to be admitted,” Hogarth had written to his wife a few days before Gertrude arrived. “I have told them but she’ll settle that and they needn’t worry!”
He was right; Gertrude was impervious. Ignoring their suspicions, she stared them down and plunged into work, and after months of severe depression, her old enthusiasm reappeared. She was in her element, surrounded by males, toiling like a schoolgirl and excelling at her assignment. She was no longer a deflated balloon, left on the floor of a party, but a bubble floating higher and higher over the heads of the guests. On November 30, 1915, only a few days after her arrival, she wrote to Florence excitedly, “It’s great fun.” That same day Hogarth sent another letter to his wife: “Gertrude … is beginning to pervade the place.”
If there were sidelong glances from the military, there were welcoming smiles from others. Most of the members of the Intelligence staff—“Intrusives,” as they were code-named, for their unorthodox ways—were old acquaintances who had come to Cairo in December 1914 to carry out new jobs: Lawrence, who had been digging at Carchemish, was now making maps and writing geographical reports; Leonard Woolley, another Oxford archaeologist who had worked at Carchemish, was now in charge of propaganda for the press. Several people were her friends from the embassy in Constantinople: Wyndham Deedes was an expert on Turkish affairs and had received her report after the trip to Hayil
; George Lloyd, a family friend and financial expert, had provided her years before with her most loyal Armenian servant, Fattuh; the Times correspondent Philip Graves, an authority on the Turks, had often invited her to his Constantinople home to dine. Still others she had met on her earliest travels: the brilliant Aubrey Herbert, who spoke at least seven languages, had lunched with her in Japan in 1903 when she was on a round-the-world trip; the pragmatic Mark Sykes, now on a fact-finding mission for the War Office, was the fellow adventurer she had first met in Jerusalem in 1905; the erudite Ronald Storrs had been Oriental Secretary in Egypt, a position he described as “the eyes, ears, interpretation and Intelligence … of the British Agent, and … much more.” In charge of them all was General Gilbert Clayton, a fatherly figure who believed in an Arab revolt. He had been working on the idea since November 1914, when he encouraged the ruler of Asir, near Yemen, to rebel against the Turks.
The office bustled with activity: men rushed about, bells rang and the air was charged with excitement.
On the Eastern Front, the war had begun with the battle at Gallipoli. It had been a strategic attempt to stave off the Turks before they could make two serious strikes: one at Egypt and the Suez Canal; the other at Mesopotamia (Iraq) and the nearby oil refineries in Abadan on the Persian Gulf. The interests of Military Intelligence in Cairo had centered, at first, on Gallipoli: on the size and whereabouts of the Turkish army in the Dardanelles, where the regiments were, how large they were, who commanded them and what ammunition they held. But with the British defeat at Gallipoli, the bureau’s focus had soon shifted to Mesopotamia, Arabia and the Gulf.
Success depended upon help from the Arabs. Years earlier, Gertrude had scoffed at the notion of Arab unity and denied the idea of Arab nationalism. But several factors had brought a change in Arab attitudes and, with it, an incipient Arab nationalist movement. The increasing weakness of the Ottoman Empire had caused the Sultan to reclaim his role as Caliph, the chief religious leader of the Muslims, threatening the religious leaders in Arabia. Concerned about competition from the Arabs, the Sultan had even exiled the Sharif Hussein, custodian of the holy places in Mecca and Medina and supervisor of the holy pilgrimage, to Constantinople. In addition, the desperate state of the Ottoman economy had resulted in higher taxation and deep inflation for the Arabs, while at the same time the thinly spread Ottoman army, engaged in too many costly wars, had relied on compulsory recruitment of Arabs. In Constantinople the Turkish reformers had forced a “Turkification” of the Ottoman world: Turkish rather than Arabic became the official language, angering the masses throughout the empire who spoke Arabic, the students and scholars who used Arabic as the language of education and the Muslims who considered Arabic the language of Islam. The reformers banned new political and ethnic organizations and shut down existing non-Turkish clubs, causing more resentment and pushing the Arab activists underground. Now that England was at war with the Turks, the Arab nationalists were a potential ally against the Ottomans.
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