Yesterday I demanded a private audience of Ibrahim and was received, again at night, in an upper hall of the qasr. I told him that I would stay here no longer, that the withholding of the money due to me had caused me great inconvenience and that I must now ask of him a rafiq to go with me to the ’Anazeh borders. He was very civil and assured me that the rafiq was ready. It does not look as if they intended to put any difficulties in my way. My plan is to choose out the best of my camels and taking with me Fattuh, ’Ali and the negro boy Fellah, to ride to Nejef [al-Najaf]. The Damascenes I send back to Damascus. They will wait a few days more to give the other camels longer rest and then join a caravan which is going to Medina [al-Madinah]—10 days’ journey. Thence by train. Since I have no money I can do nothing but push on to Baghdad, but it is at least consoling to think that I could not this year have done more. I could not have gone south from here; the tribes are up and the road is barred. Ibn Sa’ud has—so we hear—taken the Hasa,* and driven out the Turkish troops. I think it highly probable that he intends to turn against Hayyil and if by any chance the Amir should not be successful in his raid on [Jof], the future of the Shammar would look dark indeed. The Turkish Govt. are sending them arms . . . but I think that Ibn Saud’s star is in the ascendant and if he combines with Ibn Sha’lan (the Ruwalla ’Anazeh) they will have Ibn Rashid between the hammer and the anvil. I feel as if I had lived through a chapter of the Arabian Nights during this last week. The Circassian woman and the slaves, the doubt and the anxiety, Fatima weaving her plots behind the qasr walls, Ibrahim with his smiling lips and restless shifting eyes—and the whole town waiting to hear the fate of the army which has gone up with the Amir against Jof. And to the spiritual sense the place smells of blood. Twice since Khalil was here have the Rashids put one another to the sword—the tales round my camp fire are all of murder and the air whispers murder. It gets upon your nerves when you sit day after day between high mud walls and I thank heaven that my nerves are not very responsive. They have kept me awake only one night out of seven! And good, please God! please God nothing but good.
March 6, 1914
We have at last reached the end of the comedy—for a comedy it has after all proved to be. And what has been the underlying reason of it all I cannot tell, for who can look into their dark minds? On March 3 there appeared in the morning a certain eunuch slave Sa’id, who is a person of great importance and with him another, and informed me that I could not travel, neither could they give me any money, until a messenger had arrived from the Amir. I sent messages at once to ’Ali’s uncles and the negotiations were taken up again with renewed vigour. Next day came word from the Amir’s mother, Mudi, inviting me to visit them that evening. I went (riding solemnly through the silent moonlit streets of this strange place), and passed two hours taken straight from the Arabian Nights with the women of the palace. I imagine that there are few places left wherein you can see the unadulterated East in its habit as it has lived for centuries and centuries—of those few Hayyil is one. There they were, those women—wrapped in Indian brocades, hung with jewels, served by slaves and there was not one single thing about them which betrayed the base existence of Europe or Europeans—except me! I was the blot. Some of the women of the shaikhly house were very beautiful. They pass from hand to hand—the victor takes them, with her power and the glory, and think of it! his hands are red with the blood of their husband and children. Mudi herself—she is still a young woman and very charming—has been the wife of 3 Amirs in turn. Well, some day I will tell you what it is all like, but truly I still feel bewildered by it. I passed the next day in solitary confinement—I have been a prisoner, you understand, in the big house they gave me. Today came an invitation from two boys, cousins of the Amir’s to visit them in their garden. I went after the midday prayers and stayed till the ’asr. Again it was fantastically oriental and medieval. There were 5 very small children, all cousins, dressed in long gold embroidered robes, solemn and silent, staring at me with their painted eyes. And my hosts, who may have been 13 or 14 years old—one had a merry face like a real boy, the other was grave and impassive. But both were most hospitable. We sat in a garden house on carpets—like the drawings in Persian picture books. Slaves and eunuchs served us with tea and coffee and fruits. Then we walked about the garden, the boys carefully telling me the names of all the trees. And then we sat again and drank more tea and coffee. Sa’id the eunuch was of the party and again I expressed my desire to depart from Hayyil and again was met by the same negative—Not till the Amir’s messenger has come. Not I nor anyone knows when the messenger will come, neither did I know whether there were more behind their answer. Sa’id came to us after the ’asr and I spoke to him with much vigour and ended the interview abruptly by rising and leaving him. I thought indeed that I had been too abrupt, but to tell you the truth I was bothered. An hour later came in my camels and after dark Sa’id again with a bag of gold and full permission to go where I liked and when I liked. And why they have now given way, or why they did not give way before, I cannot guess. But anyhow I am free and my heart is at rest—it is widened.
March 17, 1914
I have not written any of my tale for these ten days, because of the deadly fatigue of the way. But today, as I will tell you, I have had a short day and I will profit by it. I did not leave Hayyil till March 8. I asked and obtained leave to see the town and the qasr by daylight—which I had never been allowed to do—and to photograph. They gave me full permission to photograph—to my surprise and pleasure, and I went out next day, was shown the modif* and the great kitchen of the qasr and took many pictures. Every one was smiling and affable—and I thought all the time of Khalil, coming in there for his coffee and his pittance of taman. It is extraordinarily picturesque and I make no doubt that it preserves the aspect of every Arabian palace that has ever been since the Days of Ignorance. Some day, inshallah, you shall see my pictures. Then I photographed the meshab and the outside of the mosque and as I went through the streets I photographed them too. As I was going home there came a message from my Circassian friend, Turkiyyeh, inviting me to tea at her house. I went, and photographed Hayyil from her roof and took an affectionate farewell of her. She and I are now, I imagine, parted for ever, except in remembrance. As I walked home all the people crowded out to see me, but they seemed to take nothing but a benevolent interest in my doings. And finally the halt, the maim and the blind gathered round my door and I flung out a bag of copper coins among them.
And thus it was that my strange visit to Hayyil ended, after 11 days’ imprisonment, in a sort of apotheosis!
THE WAR WORKER
Baghdad, April 5, 1914, Letter to Chirol
. . . I should perhaps come back via Athens. I don’t mind much either way, indeed I am profoundly indifferent. But I don’t care to be in London much, and if there is no reason for hurrying, I shall not hurry. . . .
You will find me a savage, for I have seen and heard strange things, and they colour the mind. You must try to civilise me a little, beloved Domnul. I think I am not altered for you, and I know that you will bear with me. But whether I can bear with England—come back to the same things and do them all over again—that is what I sometimes wonder. But they will not be quite the same, since I come back to them with a mind permanently altered. I have gained much, and I will not forget it. This letter is only for you—don’t hand it on to anyone, or tell anyone that the me they knew will not come back in the me that returns. Perhaps they will not find out.
Gertrude arrived back at Baghdad, mailed her diary for Dick Doughty-Wylie to Addis Ababa, and trekked wearily back across the Syrian Desert to Damascus. She had to have a period of convalescence with friends there before setting off again for London, arriving in a state of total depression. She would be awarded the Royal Geographical Society’s Gold Medal for this journey, but nevertheless she considered that her expedition had been a failure. It had proved to be an impossible proposition to get to Riyadh and Ibn Saud. Doughty-
Wylie was no nearer, and she didn’t know when they would meet again. Her future seemed bleak and hopeless.
March 26, 1914, to Doughty-Wylie
[It] always leaves one with a feeling of disillusion. . . . I try to school myself beforehand by reminding myself of how I have looked forward . . . to the end, and when it came have found it—just nothing. Dust and ashes in one’s hand.
In London, Dick had intended to bring the relationship with Gertrude to a close, but before he had been a month in Albania he was again writing to her every few days. Strangely, the months apart brought them closer than ever. Her letters to him had always been love letters, but now his to her became love letters too.
Finding himself in Addis Ababa without Judith, after a few months deprived of female company and perhaps drinking too much in the evening, Dick wrote Gertrude more passionate letters than ever before. Gertrude wrote love letters back, free from fear that what she said would fall into Judith’s hands. The emotional tie between them was strengthening. “What wouldn’t I give to have you sitting opposite in this all-alone house,” he wrote, and finally came 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? . . . Love like this is life itself.”
Things were not going well between the Doughty-Wylies at New Year, when he wrote of “my wife’s disappointment and of my relations too that I have not acquired more letters after my name” and wrote of “regret for things lost . . . and the dear love of you, all lost.”
Gertrude was at Rounton when war was declared on August 4, 1914. She went out into the countryside, climbing on carts to urge the laborers and the men in the mines to do what she would have done had she been a man—join the army.
Country by country, most of the world slipped into war. A single shot in a remote European capital precipitated the mobilization of 65 million men and women, and would cause 38 million casualties. For the moment, all Gertrude could do was join the influx of well-born ladies into the workplace and take a genteel clerking job in a hospital at Lord Onslow’s Clandon Park in Surrey, one of the many grand houses now occupied by the wounded. Rounton would soon follow and become a home for twenty Belgian convalescents. One weekend she called on friends, the St. Loe Stracheys, whose house was also a convalescent home.
Clandon Park, Surrey, November 17, 1914
One of their first [convalescents] was a coal black negro from the Congo. He succeeded in secreting a huge knife in his bed with him. His opening remark was: “En Afrique pas de prisonniers.” He drew his finger significantly across his throat and added: “Mange.”. . . St. Loe observed mildly: “It is a curiously unexpected result of the war to have one’s best bedroom occupied by a cannibal.”
November 1914
I have asked some of my friends at the Red X to join me in the first suitable job abroad that falls vacant. . . . Arabia can wait.
After only three weeks at Clandon, she was asked to report to the new Red Cross office for Wounded and Missing Enquiries, situated in Boulogne. Given three days to get to France, Gertrude scribbled a message to her maid, Marie Delaire, at Rounton, demanding underclothes, watches, jackets, and her riding boots to cope with the mud.
The job of the Wounded and Missing Enquiry Department (the W&MED) was to try to answer the questions of families whose men had gone to war and whose letters had stopped. These men were either not yet known to be dead, too wounded to write, or had been taken prisoner. When Gertrude arrived in France, the office was only three weeks old and run by volunteers, including two of her childhood friends, Flora and Diana Russell.
Boulogne, November 25, 1914, to Doughty-Wylie
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.
November 1914
The cat and I are the only two not in uniform. . . .
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 saw at once that there was no system: the volunteers had begun the work when there was just a trickle of letters, but the trickle soon turned into a torrent. The recent Mons campaign had taken its toll of fifteen thousand British men killed, wounded, or missing, and yet the ladies were still trying to work from scribbled notes and from memory. The heiress who had lived her entire life for adventure now began to work as if her life depended on it. She created a database that the whole office could follow, put in place alphabetical card indexes and cross references, and weeded out the names that had been on the books for five months or more. These would remain in a file marked “Missing Presumed Dead” until verification, when their unfortunate families would receive the dreaded form from the War Office. From her knowledge of the straitened finances of working families at the ironworks, she understood what it would mean for these families to lose the breadwinner. She wrote to these families explaining their entitlements and how they could claim them.
November 26, 1914
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.
She wrote home to complain that women were not allowed to make inquiries at the hospitals but, undeterred, set up her own channels through army chaplains and defiantly visited outstations and hospitals whenever she liked, talking to the men in the wards. She asked Florence to send her a list of the Territorial Battalions and a London address book.
November 27, 1914
I sometimes go into our big hospitals and talk to the men. . . . There are a good many Germans to whom I talk. Our men are exceedingly good and kind to them and try to cheer them as far as they can with no common language.
December 1, 1914
We have had the most pitiful letters and we see the most pitiful people.
December 11, 1914, Letter 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. I haven’t yet had occasion to ask for a pass—I’ve been too busy—but I don’t suppose I should have any difficulty in obtaining one. 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.
From a Joint War Committee Report, Written by Gertrude
A Woman in Arabia Page 17