Desert Queen (31 page)

Sir Percy Cox negotiating with Ibn Saud over the border between Iraq and Kuwait, 1920.

Gertrude’s servants and her saluki dogs stand in the walled garden of her house in Baghdad, 1920.
(University of Newcastle)

Gertrude in her feathered hat and fur boa.
(University of Newcastle)

C
HAPTER
F
OURTEEN

A Tragic End

I
n the seaside town of Boulogne, France, Gertrude rented a room in a small hotel and settled into a daily routine, taking a brisk walk each morning near the water, then hurrying along the cobblestone streets to 36 bis Rue Victor Hugo. Her work was at the Red Cross; the call of the suffragists (for and against) had been blotted out by the cries of war. Like many, she had volunteered to help and followed her friend Flora Russell to France.

She found her office dreary and choked with papers, and try as she might to cover over the drabness with wallcloth and chintz, or brighten it with jars of fresh lilac and narcissus, the job itself was too gloomy to allow much room for cheer. Each day was a painful struggle to trace soldiers who were wounded or lost in battle. From nine in the morning to nine at night, and sometimes later, she filed and indexed names and corresponded with the families of missing soldiers. Heart-rending letters from parents drove her to search for their loved ones. Often the task was impossible—their sons were missing or, worse, no longer alive—but she wrote to the families, gently, struggling to find any good news to report. And by Christmas 1914 she had taken charge of the office and reorganized the files.

It was only a way of marking time. She still ached for Dick, and no amount of work could numb the pain of being apart from him. He remained at his post in Ethiopia, and although her family encouraged her to return to Rounton, Gertrude rejected the notion of going home without him. “I shall not come to England for the present,” she wrote to Domnul. “At any rate 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.”

If she wished to be anywhere else, it was in the East. The Turks were now in alliance with Germany (despite attempts by the British Government to neutralize them), and by December 1914, British troops in Egypt were prepared for a Turkish attack on the Suez Canal. In Mesopotamia, a fleet of forty-seven troop transports—the largest ever—sent from India, had already seized the vital city of Basrah from the Turks, and the British army was now on its way to try to take Baghdad as well. Only a few months before, Gertrude had felt so at home in Iraq; now there seemed to be no place for her out there. She wrote to Domnul, who was traveling through the Orient: “If only I were arriving in Mesopotamia at this moment! I do so long to hear of the occupation of Baghdad. You will see there will be little opposition.… I pine for details.”

What details she did hear were the grisly fragments of the bloody tapestry of war. At her desk in the dreary office or over lunch at the cafés in town where some of the soldiers gathered, she listened to wrenching stories about the men at the front. They are “knee-deep in water in the trenches, the mud impassable,” she reported. “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 to the wrist.” Although the women who worked for the Red Cross were not allowed at the local hospital, Gertrude talked her way in and saw the horrors: adolescent soldiers, too innocent to grasp what the bombs had blown away, missing arms or legs or blinded by shrapnel. “A happier New Year,” she wished her parents on January 1, 1915. She celebrated the evening at work at her desk, pausing only to eat some chocolates.

A few doors down from the office, in her small room at the Hôtel Meurice, she spent most nights overwrought, reading letters. A note from Dick arrived, filling her with ardor, and she answered feverishly:

“Dearest dearest,” she wrote, “I give this year of mine to you and all the years that shall come after it. Will you take it, this meagre gift—the year and me and all my thought and love.… You fill my cup, this shallow cup that has grown so deep to hold your love and mine. Dearest when you tell me you love me and want me still, my heart sings—and then weeps for longing to be with you. I have filled all the hollow places of the world with my desire for you; it floods out, measured to creep up the high mountains where you live. And when you walk in your garden I think it touches your feet. No, don’t thank me. Take your own, hold it and keep it—fold me into your heart.”

As poetic as her words were, his were filled with lust and wanting. But in his own crude way he tried to respond to her fears. “Is sex so much?” he asked, “and the senses and the contact and those bewildering things. They can be much—but not the best, they are only the landscape, the other thing is the sun we see it by—You once said you would still love me if I had a dozen wives—they would not matter—and that is true my dear that thing you knew by sunlight.… it’s not a great thing sex—not really—it’s always grossly overrated like chastity—which is only the faint beginning of a virtue and often a positive view.…”

“Ah Dick love me,” she answered. “I live only for you.”

A
nd then, like a starving waif suddenly handed a box filled with chocolates, she turned from despair to joy. Dick was coming back from Ethiopia. He would probably stop in France before going on to England to receive new orders, he wrote, but it was his wife whom he would see in Boulogne (ironically, Judith was working in the same city as a nurse). Never mind: there was no reason for concern; Judith would not leave her work, he reassured Gertrude, urging her to be with him in London.

Thrilled with the news, she left for England in mid-February so that they could have four intoxicating days together. Seeing him, touching him, she was enraptured, more certain than ever that he was everything she ever wanted: intelligent and understanding, gentle and caring, protective and strong. She took refuge in his arms. As they embraced, her smoldering dreams of the last year burst into flame. His lips pressed against hers, and she melted against his soldier’s muscular body. He told her she was life itself, a fire that burned with passion. He needed her. He hungered for her. She listened in ecstasy, and more than anything, she wanted to give herself to him. Willingly, she began to yield, but as she did, some force, even stronger than all the desire burning inside her, rose up and held her back. In a panic, she recoiled. Then once more the yearning and the lust overwhelmed her, and they embraced and kissed. But again the force rose up and held her back. At the end of their tryst their love remained unconsummated.

In agony, a few days later she wrote to him:

Someday I’ll tell you, 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: no man can really understand it; you must know all about it because I tell you. Every time it surged up in me and I wanted you to brush it aside—it’s only a ghost, the shadow of a ghost. But I couldn’t say to you, Exorcise it. I couldn’t. That last word I can never say. You must say it and break this evil spell. Fear is a horrible thing—don’t let me live under the shadow of it. It’s a shadow—I know it’s nothing.… Only you can free me from it—drive it away from me, I know now, but till the last moment I didn’t really know—can you believe it? I was terribly afraid. Then at the last I knew it was a shadow. I know it now.

Tormented, she continued:

I can’t sleep—I can’t sleep. It’s 1 in the morning of Sunday. I’ve tried to sleep, every night it becomes less and less possible. You and you are between me and any rest, but out of your arms there is no rest. Life, you called me—fire. I flame and live and am consumed. Dick it’s not possible to live like this. When it’s all over you must take your own. You must venture—is it I who must breathe courage into you, my soldier? Before all the world claim me and take me and hold me for ever and ever.… Furtiveness I hate—in the end I should go under, and hate myself and die. 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.…

The people who love me would stand by me if I did it that way—I know them. But not the other way. Not to deceive and lie and cheat and at the last be found out, as I should be. Yet I shall do that too, use all the artifices and run to meet the inevitable end.… If it’s honour you think of, this is honour and the other dishonour. If it’s faithfulness you think of, this is faithfulness—keep faith with love.… Because I held up my head and wouldn’t walk by diverse ways perhaps in the end we can marry. I don’t count on it, but it would be better, far better for me.…

Now listen—I won’t write to you like this any more … I’ve finished. If you love me take me this way—if you only desire me for an hour, then have that hour and I will have it and meet the bill. I’ve told you the price. Whatever happens, whatever you decide, I will come to you and have that—I’m not afraid of that other crossing.… But don’t miss the camp fire that burns in this letter—a clear flame, a bright flame fed by my life.