Her coffin was borne from the gate of the cemetery to the graveside by the group of young men on the High Commissioner's staff, whose names recur so often in her letters, her intimate friends and comrades, to whom her house was always a beloved centre, a meeting place and haven. Her death had come to them as an unbelievable catastrophe.
The High Commissioner, Gertrude's chief, issued an official notification of her death, in which a sense of acute grief is felt to underlie the dignified and restrained wording. I quote from it two sentences which seem to me to sum up all that can be said about her services in the East.
"She had for the last ten years of her life consecrated all the indomitable fervour of her spirit and all the astounding gifts of her mind to the service of the Arab cause, and especially to Iraq. At last her body, always frail, was broken by the energy of her soul."
"Her bones rest where she had wished them to rest, in the soil of Iraq. Her friends are left desolate."
But let us not mourn, those who are left, even those who were nearest to her, that the end came to her so swiftly and so soon. Life would inexorably have led her down the slope — Death stayed her at the summit.
Gertrude from a drawing by Sargent
Gertrude's House in Bagdad
Kadbimain
At Bagdad
Sir Hugb Bell in Gertrude's sitting-room at Bagdad
H. M. King Faisal of Iraq
The Conference at Cairo
Gertrude with Haji Naji in his garden
Group with King Faisal and Fahad Beg
A view of Bagdad
Naqib's House
Standard of the Anazeh
King Faisal among the Dulaim
Sheikhs of the Desert
Kamadi — the Standard of the Dulaim
Gertrude at the age of fifty-three
Gertrude's aeroplane
Arrival
Gertrude beside her aeroplane
A picnic with King Faisal
Opening of the railway by King Faisal
Auda
Dividing the finds
Gertrude looking out at the Desert
Letters From Baghdad Page 81