Gertrude Bell (37 page)

Gertrude, at Rounton, took the letter from the breakfast table straight into her study, cleared her desk in her time-honoured way by sweeping all the books and papers onto the floor, and sat down to write. The report that she produced, in response to the War Office's request, showed her sensitive grasp of a complicated political situation. The gist was this:
Syria was pro-British, with a dislike of the growing French influence in the region. In the circumstances, Syria would be perfectly content to come under British jurisdiction:

On the Baghdad side we weigh much more heavily in the scale than Germany because of the importance of Indian relations—trade, chiefly. The presence of a large body of German engineers in Baghdad, for railway building, will be of no advantage to Germany, for they are not popular. On the whole I should say that Iraq would not willingly see Turkey at war with us and would not take an active part in it. But out there, the Turks would probably turn . . . to Arab chiefs who have received our protection. Such action would be extremely unpopular with the Arab Unionists who look on Sayid Talib of Basra, Kuwait, and Ibn Saud, as powerful protagonists. Sayid Talib is a rogue, he has had no help from us, but our people (merchants) have maintained excellent terms with him . . .

The import of her report was fully corroborated for the War Office by their inspectors on the ground, who knew their own Arab
vilayets
,
*
although they could not see the bigger picture that Gertrude could so easily supply after her epic journey to Hayyil. For the first time, Whitehall was recognizing her formidable knowledge and making use of it. From now on, her future was to be bound up with the British government.

The “Bell Report” was swiftly passed to Cairo and also to the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey. Grey was already, like so many of the Liberal statesmen and politicians of the day, well known to the Bells. Hugh had sat with him on the board of the London and North Eastern Railway, and Grey's gentle treatise on fly-fishing was one of the books Gertrude had taken with her to the desert in 1911 to remind her of the temperate English countryside—she had told him so on her return from Hayyil, when Grey had been one of the first visitors to Sloane Street.

Life everywhere was changing, for some less than for others. The magazines were full of photographs of society beauties in uniform: Countess Bathurst in her Red Cross outfit, the Marchioness of Londonderry in the uniform of the Women's Service Legion. The new British
Vogue
, of which Gertrude would later become an occasional reader, showed the Duchess of Wellington knitting a sock for a soldier. Mrs. Vincent Astor, photographed in a fetching garden hat, was quoted as wishing to open a convalescent home near Paris. Lady Randolph Churchill had “organized some very beautiful tableaux vivants.” Gertrude, who was well aware of the silliness of this, longed to find work commensurate with her abilities. “I have asked some of my friends at the Red X to join me in the first suitable job abroad that falls vacant,” she wrote to a friend, “. . . and I have written to friends in Paris asking whether I could be of use to them in any way . . . Arabia can wait.”

For the moment, all she could do was to join the influx of well-born ladies into the workplace, and take a genteel clerking job in a hospital at Lord Onslow's at Clandon Park in Surrey, one of the many grand houses now occupied by the wounded. There were a hundred Belgian soldiers in the wards there but, to her bitter disappointment, she was restricted to the routine paperwork and not allowed to do any nursing. She complained to Florence that she had not got nearly enough to do. Sundays were particularly boring. On one, she went for a walk and stopped for tea with some Surrey friends, the John St. Loe Stracheys, who had also filled the bedrooms of their large house with convalescents. At Rounton, Florence was making ready to do the same. She told Gertrude that there would be twenty at first, more later, and Gertrude wondered how they could all be fitted in. She told Florence about one of the Stracheys' first inmates, a Congolese soldier who was parted with difficulty from a large knife he insisted on keeping beside him in bed: he explained that in his part of Africa, prisoners were killed and eaten. “St. Loe remarked ‘It is a curiously unexpected result of the war to have one's best bedroom occupied by a cannibal.' ”

It was after only three weeks at Clandon, on 21 November, that she was asked to go at once to Boulogne, to work in the new Red Cross Office for the Wounded and Missing.

The Wounded and Missing Enquiry Department had opened in Paris at the outbreak of war, to help answer the questions of families whose men had gone to war and whose letters had ceased. These families had no idea whether their men were wounded, missing, or dead. News reached them only by means of the so-called “fear telegram” whereby the War Office let them know the man had been killed, or by
finding his name among the casualties list published in
The Times
. The War Office being unable to cope with the flood of enquiries, the families' only recourse was to write to the Red Cross for information. The task of the W&MED was to try to trace three categories of men: those who were dead but not yet known to be dead, the men wounded so seriously that they were in hospital and not well enough to write home, and those who had been taken prisoner. At first it concerned itself with only the higher ranks. Not until December was a satellite Enquiry Office opened to deal with letters from the families of non-commissioned officers and men, who were harder to trace.

In the early stages of the conflict, liaison with the French hospitals in Paris was paramount. Since the British were fighting in the north of France, the new Red Cross branch was placed as near to them as possible, alongside the British hospitals that had been set up in Boulogne. When Gertrude arrived, the office was only three weeks old. The German army had recently marched through Flanders, and the British expeditionary force sent to Ypres to stop them had lost some fifteen thousand men. Mired in the trenches, with barbed wire and machine-guns separating them, the protagonists settled into a war of attrition punctuated by intermittent attempts to break through the line. These offensives pitted fifty to a hundred thousand men at the enemy, with no lasting gain. The fighting had reached deadlock, with the hundred yards gained on one day lost a day or a week later. Each Allied offensive brought appalling loss of life and new waves of casualties, with wounded men on stretchers arriving by every ambulance train, and piling up at the station for transfer to hospital.

Gertrude would be taking her place in the W&MED office alongside her childhood friend Flora Russell, who was already employed there, and Flora's sister Diana. The sisters worked turn and turn about, so that one of them was always in the office and the other on leave. Flora was at present in London, and Gertrude was able to meet up with her, to be told of the dreadful chaos and dirt that she was about to encounter. Flora scribbled a list of clothes that Gertrude would need, and went off to enjoy her leave. Given just three days to get herself to Boulogne, Gertrude sent a flurry of letters via Florence to Marie Delaire, her long-suffering maid, demanding underclothes, watches, jackets, and her riding boots to cope with the mud. Her messages to Marie were abrupt,
albeit sifted through Florence's tactful intervention. But Marie's affection and loyalty for Gertrude knew no bounds: she would stay with her, through thick and thin, all of her mistress's life.

Naturally impatient, Gertrude was suffering, as always, from Dick's absence. He had now admitted that he loved her, but in Addis Ababa he could hardly be further away. When would she see him? She knew that if he came home, he was likely to offer his services once more to the army, and then he would be gone again. She packed the locked box of his letters at the bottom of her suitcase.

She was almost the only woman on the Folkestone steamer among the crowd of subdued uniformed men returning to the front after their seventy-two hours' leave. She stepped onto the quay at Boulogne in heavy November rain, scarcely recognizing this grey town as the starting point for so many of the Bells' European holidays. There used to be a crowd of eager porters; now there was no one. Turning up her collar, she picked up her case and followed the soldiers, who had shouldered their kit and were making for the station yard. There they climbed aboard the fleet of London omnibuses co-opted to take the troops to the front. Although they had been in France for only four or five weeks, these vehicles were so mud-spattered that barely a trace of the original colour was visible. Those that had broken down had been turned into makeshift shelters from the rain. Under the encrustation Gertrude could just make out a couple of the original destinations—Putney and Kilburn. She walked past the ranks of Red Cross ambulances to the goods sheds, now converted into a hospital crisply run by the Army Medical Service. The only other women on the street were nurses going to work or leaving after their shifts, wearing the grey ankle-length uniform of the Army Sisters.

She found the office car waiting for her by the rest station, where an ambulance was unloading the wounded. Those able to walk looked as if they were made of clay, their faces and greatcoats, too, plastered with mud. They limped and shuffled like old men, looking neither left nor right. Others were being carried away on stretchers, or smoking cigarettes while awaiting the next stage of repatriation. The car splashed away through the puddles, and through the smeared windows she saw dirt and discomfort everywhere she looked. They pulled up at the run-down lodging house where she had been assigned a room in the attic, reached by a long, steep staircase smelling of old food. Diana, who shared a room
downstairs with Flora, came to find her and agreed that it was an awful hole. Gertrude changed her shoes and the two of them went straight off to get her a passport. She told Dick in a letter: “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.”

She was given a desk and introduced to the volunteers, a group of dedicated but disorganized ladies who staffed the office. The gaunt, high-ceilinged room was darker than the grey view through the windows. The four or five desks, and the floor around them, were almost hidden under heaps of dog-eared papers. Several times a day a messenger would arrive with more boxes of letters and lists, which would throw everyone into feverish activity. Sometimes a name on a letter would strike a chord, and inspire them to burrow through five or six piles. Gertrude noted that they soon gave up and sat down again to pore over a fresh pile of enquiry letters from families and newspaper cuttings.

Everyone tried to explain to her what they were doing, but their explanations varied so much and they themselves seemed so confused that in the end she worked it out for herself. As the letters arrived, the staff took note of the names and tried to trace them through the various listings. She saw at once that they had no system: they had begun the work when there was just a trickle of letters, and they were continuing to tackle it in the same way although the trickle had turned into a torrent. They were trying to match fresh enquiries to names on lists often a month or two old: lists of hospital admissions, reports from the searchers in the hospital wards, lists of prisoners, and casualty and missing lists from the newspapers. When they could verify a name, a rare occurrence, they would write to the families concerned to tell them that their man was either wounded or missing, dead or taken prisoner. Working from scribbled notes and from memory, deluged with documents from so many sources while close to the cutting edge of a battle that no one was winning, the volunteers' morale had slumped and their sense of purpose was being eroded daily. With more than fifteen thousand British men killed, wounded, or missing in the recent Mons campaign, the small office was not so much overwhelmed as washed away in the flood.

Gertrude realized that, to put in a workable system, she would have to begin at the beginning. She set her mind to the job and took it up with all her energy. This heiress who had lived her entire life for adventure
and self-education, now dedicated her days to working at a modest desk as though her life depended on it: “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 proved to be a formidable administrator.

The well-meaning volunteers soon found themselves bossed about by the newcomer, who first interrogated them about their methods and then produced a new way of doing things that they felt obliged to follow. Her first object was to create a database from which the whole office could work. She made an alphabetical card index of all officers admitted to the base hospitals in France, recording dates of admission, transfers to other hospitals, evacuation back to Britain, or return to the front. Names from the letters of enquiry could then be quickly checked against it for a match. As soon as she finished the database, she began sorting through the enquiries and finding names on the hospital admissions lists. She then classified the enquiries in another card index, this one divided into wounded or missing, with all available details. She worked on the card stacks during her lunch hour and after work when the office was supposed to be shut. When that had been completed, she was able to cross-reference, so that new information coming in from any source could be compared, corroborated, and verified. She was pleased with her efforts: “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.”

She weeded out those names that had been on the books for five months or more. These men would remain in a kind of no-man's-land entitled “Missing Presumed Dead” until there was verification of their deaths, when their unfortunate families could finally give up hope. Then they would receive the dreaded form from the War Office, and the soldier's name would appear on the official casualty list.