Desert Queen (32 page)

H
orrified, Gertrude found herself facing the one person she did not want to see; Dick’s wife appeared in her office in Boulogne. The two women had corresponded since the days in Turkey, and now they lunched together, talking casually about their work. Judith gave no hint that she knew of the relationship between her friend and her husband, but the meeting took a terrible toll on Gertrude. She begged Dick to discourage his wife from coming again. “I hated it,” she wrote him; “don’t make me have that to bear.” She was torn with regret and desire and guilt. “Don’t forget me—you won’t leave me? It’s not possible. It’s torture, eternal torture, which loses its edge. Oh my dear it might be ecstasy.”

Over and over she wrestled with what had happened in England during those four exquisite, excruciating days; questioning what she had done, trying to reconcile her feelings with her own behavior. If pregnancy had once been a fear, it now seemed a blessing. Gertrude, for years an atheist, now suddenly sounded devout: “And suppose the other thing had happened, the thing you feared—that I half feared—must have brought you back. If I had it now, the thing you feared, I would magnify the Lord and fear nothing.… Not only the final greatest gift to give you—a greater gift even than love—but for me, the divine pledge of fulfilment, created in rapture, the handing on of life in fire, to be cherished and worshipped and lived for, with the selfsame ardour that cherishes and worships the creator.”

H
er letters reached him while he was on his way to war. When Turkey announced its alliance with Germany, the British reacted at once. A campaign was organized by Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, to cut off Turkish forces on their way to Baghdad: thirty thousand Australian troops were sent to make a surprise landing at Gallipoli. The purpose was to open the Dardanelles for the British navy, capture Constantinople, and provide supplies for allied Russian troops while cutting off Turkey from German assistance. Dick Doughty-Wylie, already familiar with the Turks from his days as vice-consul in Anatolia, and decorated for his heroic actions in saving Armenians from Turkish slaughter, was chosen as one of the British officers to lead the attack.

In mid-March 1915, as Dick made his way to the Dardanelles, Gertrude was asked to supply the War Office with her unpublished maps of Syria. By the end of the month she was in London, called back to brief officials about the East; and at the behest of her friend Lord Robert Cecil, the Red Cross director, she was organizing the main Red Cross office in England. Once again the days were long and tiring, and as she walked from her gray townhouse at 95 Sloane Street to Norfolk House, her office across Piccadilly, she was haunted by memories of Dick.

A letter arrived from Doughty-Wylie just as his troops were about to embark for Gallipoli, and she knew he still cared deeply: “So many memories my dear queen, of you and your splendid love and your kisses and your courage and the wonderful letters you wrote me, from your heart to mine—the letters, some of which I have packed up, like drops of blood.”

For Gertrude their love was a genesis. On April 21 she revealed to him: “ … there is an eternal secret between you and me. No one has known, no one will ever know, the woman who loves you. Mind and body, a different creature from her who walks the common earth before the eyes of men—new born and new fashioned out of our joined love. Only you know her and have seen her … you gave her life but I made her, bone by bone; having begotten her you may love her without fear. And you will.”

L
ittle information came from the front. War Office censors blocked out reports that might even have hinted at events, and letters that reached England were so blackened with ink that, except for the salutation and the signature, they were hardly legible. But at a dinner party with friends on the first day of May 1915, a casual conversation brought Gertrude shocking news of Gallipoli. The landing had not gone well. British forces had been unable to carry off the surprise attack; as they landed on the crescent of open beach, they were met by Turkish troops, who riddled them with machine-gun and rifle fire. In the bloodbath that followed, Dick Doughty-Wylie had been shot in the head and killed.

Gertrude was stunned. Quickly and quietly, she left the table and rushed off to see her sister Elsa. Months ago, Elsa had reassured her that, in spite of the difficulties, Gertrude had kept her integrity and done the right thing. Now, in the comfort of her sister’s home, Gertrude allowed herself to weep.

A
fter a while the crying stopped and a calm seemed to come over her, but a few minutes later she turned her head away, losing control again. She had coped with death before: at the age of three she had lost her mother; at twenty-five she had lost her fiancé, Henry Cadogan, and by the age of thirty she had lost both her favorite aunt, Mary Lascelles, and her closest school friend, Mary Talbot. But now the loss of Dick Doughty-Wylie was more than she could bear. She had lost the greatest gift that life had given her. She could hardly keep from speaking of Dick, and she shared her secret with Domnul, Lord Robert, her sisters Elsa and Molly, and her chum, Elizabeth Robins. No one revealed a word. Yet there was no one among her friends or family who could give her solace, and for days she refused to see anyone except Domnul. “I can’t, I can’t bear the anguish of it, except alone,” she wrote to Lisa Robins.

F
or a few brief day, Gertrude retreated to Rounton. For her, the familiar lair in the northeast was always a place of respite, its gardens a source of repair. It was her England, a bulwark graced by brushwood in leaf, pear trees in blossom. It was home, and as her grandfather’s friend John Ruskin had written, “the place of peace; the shelter not only from injury, but from all terror, doubt and division.” In her childhood, Rounton had been the home of her grandparents, a comforting place for a child who was forced to wear black at the age of three.

Now, with Hugh and Florence to console her, Gertrude tried to regain her strength. She seemed a little better, Florence noted to Lisa Robins, but she was still “speaking hopelessly of the situation.” Florence had little tolerance for such an attitude: “It’s no good doing that. It’s the business of the women of England to say ‘Never say die’—and to stiffen up the whole country by saying ‘yes, it’s very bad—but will be better.’ ” But Gertrude was in far too much pain to mouth platitudes.

On a day when Lisa came to Rounton, Gertrude strode with her across the moors. She confided to her friend how much Dick had wanted her to go away with him; his greatest sorrow had been that she had refused to live with him, even while he was married to Judith. Gertrude stopped for a moment and paused. Her throat wrapped in a pink scarf, her arms crossed, her face tense, she looked up and described a recent dream: “I was falling into that pit of blackness, piercing a sword against my breast—and going down, down, me and my sword.…”

C
HAPTER
F
IFTEEN

Escape to the East

T
he London skies turned more somber than usual in the autumn of 1915, clouded with enemy aircraft and spattered with enemy bombs. The sound of the German planes, rumbling over Hampstead on one September day, drew Gertrude’s attention as she watched the raid from Elsa’s balcony. “We saw nothing, but the bursting shells,” she wrote to Florence. “I gather they didn’t do much harm.”

A few words hastily scribbled, her note showed neither fear nor a sense of relief. Gertrude, who had routinely composed lengthy, picturesque letters, was no longer able to express much feeling at all. She was numbed by the terrible loss of Dick. As her sister Molly wrote in her own diary: “It has ended her life—there is no reason now for her to go on with anything she cared for.… It is difficult to see how she can build up anything out of the ruins left to her. Hers is not a happy nor a kindly nature, and sorrow instead of maturing her mellow has dried up all the springs of kindliness.”

Friends could offer little comfort, and as content as she once had felt in solitude, she now ached from isolation. “It is intolerable,” Gertrude had written to Florence, “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.” England had become a place of heartbreak, its cold damp air clinging to her.

By November 1915, as the war against the Turks extended on the Eastern Front from Gallipoli to Mesopotamia, Gertrude was more anxious than ever to be back in the East. The people, the climate, the sense of urgency about the region all made her eager for a summons, but until now, it was considered too dangerous for a woman, and the Government had refused to let her go. Toward the middle of the month, however, she strode into work at Norfolk House and, rushing across the office, seized the arm of her friend Janet Hogarth, and drew her aside. “I’ve heard from David,” she told his sister excitedly; “he says anyone can trace the missing but only I can map Northern Arabia. I’m going next week.”

David Hogarth had written to Gertrude from Cairo, where he was in charge of gathering information for the office of Military Intelligence. The small espionage bureau, established only a year earlier, was staffed with a handful of political officers, archaeologists and journalists. Like Gertrude, they had previously supplied the Foreign Office with relevant details from their everyday work in the field. Now, with the growing momentum of war and an increasing need for information about the Arabs, Hogarth urged Reginald Hall, the Director of Naval Intelligence, to draft Gertrude as a spy.