A Woman in Arabia (20 page)

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!

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

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.