A Woman in Arabia
Page 18
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.
As early as December 16, 1914, Gertrude wrote to her parents: “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.”
The efficiency of the Boulogne office was soon recognized, and Gertrude became the official head of department. She asked for, and was given, the task of responding to the inquiries. She replaced Form B101-82 sent by the War Office and its dreaded telegram—“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”—with a more sensitive letter:
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, 1914. The cause of death was Killed In Action.
Added to her anxieties about Doughty-Wylie were worries for her brother Maurice, who was now heading for the front. A lieutenant colonel of the Green Howards, he distinguished himself in the attack on German soldiers breaking through the Belgian border but was wounded a few months later and was invalided out in June 1917, almost totally deaf. He never regained his hearing.
One of the grimmest parts of her work entailed locating the graves of men hastily buried on the battlefield, whose relatives wanted to know whether there was proof of death. The Red Cross searchers would often find that the grave or pit containing the particular soldier they were trying to trace also contained a number of other bodies. Gertrude had recorded a grave containing ninety-eight men, of whom only sixty-six still wore their identity discs. Still suffering from depression, she took on more and more work, preferring to do it herself than delegate it to slower colleagues in the office.
December 27, 1914, Letter to Chirol
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 bayonneted—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. . . .
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.
Boulogne, December 30, 1914
. . . There’s no real forgetting and care rides behind one all the day. I sometimes wonder if we shall ever know again what it was like to be happy.
Undated Letter, to Chirol
When 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.
Sir Robert Cecil, head of the British Red Cross, had at last persuaded the War Office to let him establish a communication line with regiments at the front. Major Fabian Ware and his team were to be the new recipients of the inquiry lists from the Red Cross office. The first of the team, a Mr. Cazalet, arrived in Boulogne on New Year’s Eve with a bundle of papers to be sorted.
Boulogne, New Year’s Day, 1915
We saw the New Year in after all. It happened this way. Yesterday morning there “débouchéd” in our office Mr. Cazalet, who is working with Fabian Ware out at the front. Mr. Cazalet brought a tangled bundle of letters and lists from which he had been working to compare with ours and to be put straight for him. We had 24 hours for the work before he returned to the front. It was just like a fairy story only we hadn’t the ants and the bees to help us in a mountain of work. Diana ran out got a great ledger and proceeded to make it into an indexed ledger which we couldn’t find here.
We only had two hours off from 7 to 9 to dine. . . . At 9 we went back to the office. By 9.30 everything was sorted out and I began to fill in the ledger, Diana keeping me supplied. We could not have done it if I had not prepared all that was possible beforehand. At midnight we broke off for a few minutes, wished each other a better year and ate some chocolates. . . . By 2 a.m. we were within an hour or two of the end so we came home to bed. I was back at 8.15 prepared the ordinary day’s work . . . returned to the ledger. By 12.30 it was finished with just an hour to spare and I took it to Mr. Cazalet. It had been an exciting time but we won it and now this really important thing is set going.
On the same day, Gertrude made a special visit to the Secunderabad Hospital for Indian residents and met Sikhs, Gurkhas, Jats, and Afridis.
. . . The cooks [were] preparing Hindu and Muhammadan 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 over his bed, and Princess Mary’s box of spices lying on the table beneath it.
Only to Chirol did she express the depth of her misery over Doughty-Wylie and the trenches.
December 16, 1914, Letter to Chirol
I can work here all day long—it makes a little plank across the gulf of wretchedness over which I have walked this long time. Sometimes even that comes near to breaking point. I must talk to you of this. 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.
January 12, 1915, Letter to Chirol
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.
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 passes 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 up to the wrist. Half the cases that come down into hospital are rheumatism and forms of frostbite. They stay in the trenches twenty-one days, sometimes thirty-six days, think of it.
In her short time at the W&MED, Gertrude came to understand trench warfare as few people did who had not themselves been on the front line. The British public were kept in the dark about the true numbers of casualties, while Gertrude had a clear vie
w of the reality and of the duplicity that went on. It was the beginning of a disenchantment with government and authority that informed the attitude she held later in her life.
February 2, 1915, Letter to Chirol
They reckon the average duration of an officer at the front at about a month, before he is wounded. . . . 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. . . .
April 1, 1915, Letter to Chirol
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.
It was only when Doughty-Wylie’s letters arrived that her pain was briefly alleviated. Writing to her from Addis Ababa, his convoluted but increasingly loving messages had followed her from the desert to London and now Boulogne. Deprived of sex in Judith’s absence, Dick could think of little else. “Tonight I should not want to talk. I should make love to you,” he wrote. “Would you like it, welcome it, or would a hundred hedges rise and bristle and divide?—but we would tear them down. . . . You are in my arms, alight, afire. . . . But it will never be. . . .” He continued: “Women sometimes give themselves to men for the man’s pleasure. I’d hate a woman to be like that with me. I’d want her to feel to the last sigh the same surge and stir that carried me away. She should miss nothing that I could give her.”
Gertrude wrote back letters full of infinite passion and longing.
Dearest, dearest, I give this year of mine to you, and all the years that shall come after it, this meagre gift—the year and me and all my thoughts and love . . . Dearest, when you tell me you love me and want me still, my heart sings—and then weeps with longing to be with you. I have filled all the hollow places of the world with my desire for you; it floods out to creep up the high mountains where you live.
Without warning, at the end of the year, Dick had sent the most unwelcome news. Judith, a former nurse, had also arrived in northern France to work in a hospital. Before long Gertrude had a letter from her, suggesting a meeting. Gertrude wanted to avoid Judith at all costs, but did not want to arouse her suspicions with a refusal. Gertrude was no dissembler. Asked the question, she would have told the truth. It seems from Gertrude’s letter to Dick after the acrimonious meeting that Judith told her that Dick would never abandon his wife or his marriage.
I hated it. Don’t make me have that to bear. . . . You won’t leave me? . . . It’s torture, eternal torture.
Now, just as Gertrude was in the depths of despair, Dick wrote that he was coming home. He would reach Marseilles in February, visit Judith in France, then travel on to London. Gertrude should wait to hear from him and be ready to join him there. He could not stay long. He had volunteered for the front line “with joy” and was on his way to Gallipoli. They could have four nights and three days together.
It is a sad fact that the happiest romantic moments in Gertrude’s life were also the most poignant and painful. The story of her passionate love for Dick, and of his for her, is the account of two people constantly separated, divided by her inviolable sense of honor as much as by convention and geography. The long-anticipated few days together at Half Moon Street passed, and still she had not consummated her love in the full physical sense. Her distraught letters to him afterward convey that she had not been able to overcome an inborn prudishness. She wanted to do so but could not stop herself from recoiling at the last moment, and he would not force himself on her. They met and parted, inconclusively, and she sent anguished letters after him to Gallipoli, consumed with regret, trying to explain her inability to consummate their union.
Someday I’ll try to explain it to you—the fear, the terror of it—oh you thought I was brave. Understand me: not the fear of consequences—I’ve never weighed them for one second. It’s the fear of something I don’t know. . . . Every time it surged up in me and I wanted you to brush it aside. . . . But I couldn’t say to you, Exorcise it. I couldn’t. That last word I can never say. You must say it. . . .
I can’t sleep—I can’t sleep. It’s one in the morning. . . . You and you and you are between me and any rest . . . out of your arms there is no rest. Life, you called me, and fire. I flame and am consumed. . . . Dick, it’s not possible to live like this. When it’s all over you must take your own . . . Before all the world, claim me and take me and hold me for ever and ever . . . Furtiveness I hate—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. . . . If you die, wait for me—I am not afraid of that other crossing; I will come to you.
Increasingly desperate, tortured by regret and knowing he could die at Gallipoli, Gertrude wrote Dick a passionate ultimatum:
March 7, 1915
I am very calm about the shot and shell to which you go. What takes you, takes me out to look for you. If there’s search and finding beyond the border I shall find you. If there’s nothingness, as with my reason I think, why then there’s nothingness. . . . Oh, but life shrinks from it . . . but I’m not afraid. Life would be gone, how could the fire burn? But I’m brave—you know it—as far as human courage goes. . . . I’ll do anything you ask and not think twice of it . . . you may do anything you like with what is yours—what’s given is given, there is no taking back, no shadow of it. And no reproach. I wish I had given more, except that more of giving is still in my hand for you to take.
March 9, 1915
Oh Dick, write to me. When shall I hear? . . . I trust, I believe, you’ll take care of me—let me stand upright and say I’ve never walked by furtive ways. Then they’ll forgive me and you—all the people that matter will forgive. . . . But it’s you who should be saying this, should be saying it now, not I. I won’t say it anymore.
March 11, 1915
If I had given more, should I have held you closer, drawn you back more surely? I look back and rage at my reluctance.
March 12, 1915
I’ve had a few resplendent hours. I could die on them and be happy. But you, you’ve not had what you wanted.
But Dick had already told her that he could never leave Judith, who had threatened suicide if he left her, by using the morphia tubes available in the hospitals. In the archives of the Imperial War Museum there is a final letter from him to Judith’s mother, Jean Coe, making clear that if he was killed she should go to her daughter at once in France and “see her through.” Gertrude told him that she was not afraid of death, either, and also threatened suicide if he died.
When my heart quales I remember the morphia tubes and I know there is a way out. . . . If I can’t sleep in your arms I’ll sleep this way.
As Doughty-Wylie departed for Gallipoli, he found himself in a terrible dilemma. He could make his love for Gertrude plain and bring suffering to his wife, or he could support Judith and bring Gertrude unbearable pain. Both threatened suicide. Dick was exhausted by the conflict.
Having seen what Gertrude had achieved in Boulogne in only three months, Lord Robert Cecil brought her back at the end of March to organize the center of Red Cross operations in Pall Mall, London, where he asked her to combine all information about the wounded and missing on one record.
Gertrude, already fatigued in body and mind, set to work with a staff of twenty plus four typists. Even more work soon descended on her from the Foreign Office, which requested that the Red Cross should take on all the gathering and tabulating of information with regard to British prisoners. Her letters became fewer and terser.
Boulogne, March 22, 1915
Don’t let anyone know I’m coming. I shall have no time and I don’t want to be bothered with people.
Pall Mall, April 1, 1915, Letter to Chirol
On April 26, 1915, predictably and agonizingly, she heard that Dick Doughty-Wylie had died a hero’s death in Gallipoli. As she was neither kith nor kin to him, she had received no official letter. It is said that she heard this devastating news mentioned casually at a lunch party. She sat there ashen-faced, then quietly excused herself and left the table. Hardly knowing what she did, she made her way to the home of her half-sister Elsa. Her other half-sister, Molly, was to write “It has ended her life—there is no reason now for her to go on with anything she cared for.”
The breakdown she suffered made it impossible for her to go into the office for many weeks. When she finally returned, she was pale and vulnerable. Her parents were deeply concerned about her, but she brushed off their suggestions that she should return to Rounton. Now that the love of her life was dead, she had no life other than work.
In July, Florence offered to come up to London to be with her on the sad three-month anniversary of Doughty-Wylie’s death. Gertrude wrote back:
It’s very dear of you, . . . but you mustn’t do it. . . . Nothing does any good. . . .
August 5, 1915
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.
August 20, 1915
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.
Her friend from Oxford, Janet Hogarth Courtney, arrived in Pall Mall to share the burden of the Red Cross work with her and wrote: “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.”*