Gertrude Bell (26 page)

The message came. Her small bag was packed already. She snatched it up and ran for the car that would take her to the ferry. Arriving in London, she made her way to 29 Half Moon Street, raced up the steps, and rang the bell. The door opened, and they were face-to-face at last. They stood looking at each other for a moment, then he scooped up her suitcase with one hand and drew her inside with the other. They were together and alone for four nights and three days. Then he was gone, to join General Sir Ian Hamilton's staff as the forces gathered for the hopeless quest that was Gallipoli.

With the Great War stuck fast, a whole generation of young men were being killed in France on the Western Front without any advance being made against the Germans. To try to break the deadlock, British battleships in the Mediterranean were ordered through the narrow Dardanelles to pound Constantinople and Germany's allies, the Turks. If a new battle front could be opened in the south-east, Germany would be forced to divert troops from the Western Front. In the event, tragically, the British ships ran straight into mines. Three battleships sank, and the
navy retreated. The hasty fall-back plan for opening the new front was to land the British army on the beaches at Gallipoli. It would become a suicide mission for the men, strafed continuously by Turkish machine-guns as they struggled out of the water and up the beaches.

The happiest romantic moments in Gertrude's life were also the most poignant and painful. A modern woman will find it hard to understand that she still had not consummated her love in the full physical sense, but she had not. It could be argued that her inviolable principles, the same ones that had brought her safely through the desert and a thousand other dangers, would not allow her to become an adulteress. But it is not necessary to make that case. A letter that the distraught Gertrude wrote to Dick a few days after their parting makes it clear that she was not afraid of the consequences in terms of a possible pregnancy, but she had not been able to overcome an inborn prudishness. She so much wanted to consecrate their union in sex, and at the same time she could not prevent herself from recoiling at the last moment. What she really wanted, she had to explain, was that he override her reluctance and her protests and make forceful love to her. But for all his experience, he was a gentle and fatally compromised lover, and could not bring himself to do it.

She sent letters after him, terrified at her inability, panicking, consumed with regret:

Someday 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 . . . 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 . . . But I couldn't say to you, Exorcise it. I couldn't. That last word I can never say. You must say it . . . Fear is a horrible thing . . . 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 was terribly afraid. Then at the last I knew it was a shadow. I know it now.

He wrote back: “Was it perhaps some subtle spirit of foreknowledge that kept us apart in London? The risk to you was too great—the risk to your body, and to your peace of mind and pride of soul . . .” She was prepared to “meet the bill,” she replied, however high the cost—pregnancy,
disgrace, or social exclusion. Now she thought that a baby, far from being the worst of consequences, might have been the best:

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.

Her letters grew out of hours of suffering and regretting, as she promised him that she would never hold back again. “If I had given more, should I have held you closer, drawn you back more surely? I look back and rage at my reluctance . . . I've had a few resplendent hours. I could die on them and be happy. But you, you've not had what you wanted.”

For Gertrude, intrepid as she was, sex was the final frontier. She should not be judged too harshly—she was certainly punished for her reluctance every day for the rest of her life. She had only really known Dick well since those happy days in London in the spring of 1912. In the three years since then, despite the rising tempo of their letters, she had spent only a handful of days with him. Time and again they would glimpse each other across a crowded, eventful world, stretch out their hands to each other and be snatched apart. Gertrude and Dick were in some ways no different from those many wartime couples who married on the brink of war, were parted when the man left for the front, then reunited long afterwards as husband and wife—and almost complete strangers. They should have got to know each other when they were young, amid family and friends, and drifted towards an intimacy that would have led inexorably to bed; but such gradual progressions rarely happened in the violent, confusing world of 1915. They were thrust together for a moment, barely got to know each other again during those four nights in London, and then he was gone, leaving her even more in love, and even more bereft.

She had not believed her suffering could get any worse, but it had increased tenfold. What she wrote to him was an ultimatum:

I can't sleep—I can't sleep. It's one in the morning . . . You and you and you are between me and any rest . . . out of your arms there is no rest. Life, you called me, and fire. I flame and am consumed . . . Dick, it's not possible to live like this. When it's all over you must take your own . . . Before all the world, claim me and take me and hold me for ever and ever . . . Furtiveness I hate—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 . . . 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 . . . But don't miss the camp fire that burns in this letter—a clear flame, a bright flame fed by my life.

Do you think I can hide the blaze of that fire across half the world? Or share you with any other. If you die, wait for me—I am not afraid of that other crossing; I will come to you.

He had told her, when they were together, that Judith had threatened suicide by using the “morphia tubes” available in the hospitals. He had not dared to explain to his wife about Gallipoli or what it might mean, but he kept no such secrets from Gertrude. He trusted her to be calm and resilient. Now—no doubt, to his horror—he read that she was considering that same way out. She wrote in April 1915:

I am very calm about the shot and shell to which you go. What takes you, takes me out to look for you. If there's search and finding beyond the border I shall find you. If there's nothingness, as with my reason I think, why then there's nothingness . . . life shrinks from it . . . but I'm not afraid. Life would be gone, how could the fire burn? But I'm brave—you know it—as far as human courage goes.

Oh Dick, write to me. When shall I hear? . . . I trust, I believe, you'll take care of me—let me stand upright and say I've never walked by furtive ways. Then they'll forgive me and you—all the people that matter will forgive
. . . But it's you who should be saying this, should be saying it now, not I. I won't say it any more.

Poor Doughty-Wylie, caught between a distraught wife and a lover bent on following him into the afterlife. From Gallipoli he answered Gertrude:

My dear, don't do what you talked of—it's horrible to me to think of it—that's why I told you about my wife—how much more for you—don't do anything so unworthy of so free and brave a spirit. One must walk along the road to the end of it. When I asked for this ship, my joy in it was half strangled by that thing you said, I can't even name it or talk about it . . . Don't do it. Time is nothing, we join up again, but to hurry the pace is unworthy of us all.

And again, reminding her of her own earlier conviction that death ends all, “As to the things you say of some future in far places, they are dreams, dream woman. We must walk along the road—such heavenly madness is for gods and poets—not for us except in lovely dreams.” His letters now became a little remote. After all, the time for Gertrude to offer herself was past. He knew very well that the battle ahead was little short of a suicide mission, and he had much to think about.

In the archives of the Imperial War Museum there is a final letter from Dick Doughty-Wylie. Written neither to his lover nor to his wife, it holds the key to the indecisiveness of his attitude towards Gertrude. It is a letter written to Judith's mother, Mrs. H. H. Coe—Jean—in Llandysul, Wales. It was dated 20 April 1915, six days before he was killed at Gallipoli, and written from General Headquarters Mediterranean Expeditionary Force. A careful and sober letter, it speaks of his concern for his wife and his anxiety about her state of mind.

My dear Jean,

Lily [Judith] tells me that I never wrote to you . . . I wanted to tell how she was when I saw her in France, both coming and going. She was very full of work, and doing I think rather too much herself, as she always is prone to do, but on the whole well. It is a very good work very well done, in the middle of many difficulties of all sorts. Her nursing staff I liked and thought well
of, and also her two English doctors. I didn't care so much about the French doctor but he has been changed.

Now I want you to do something for me. I am going to embark tomorrow on what is certainly an extremely dangerous job, namely the wreck ship of which you will see in the papers. If the thing went wrong, Lily would feel intolerably lonely and hopeless after her long hours of work—which tell sorely on anybody's spirits and vitality. She talks about overdoses of morphia and such things. I think that in reality she is too brave and strong minded for such things, but still the saying weighs on my spirits. If you hear I'm killed go over at once to France with H.H. and seek her out. Telegraph to her at once that you are coming and want her to send Frank Wylie and a car to meet you at Boulogne—don't lose any time, but go and look after her. Don't take her away from her work, for it will be best for her to work, but manage to stay somewhere near and see her through. Tell her what is perfectly true that the work cannot go on without her. I haven't told her yet of this wreck ship because I don't want her to know till it's over.

This is only by way of precaution. She has a great friend with her, one Sister Isobel Stenhouse, and a Miss Sandford sister of my helper in Abyssinia, a very good girl indeed—and on the whole she is in the best place possible—and I am unduly worried about her.

This is a very interesting show from every point of view—but it runs a great many chances however one looks at it. It may be a really startling success, and is certainly bold enough an idea.

I hope you and H.H. are both well. I was only in England as I think you knew under 3 days and I had no time to see anybody at all—or in fact to get fit of which I stand in need.

So don't be unduly anxious over this business—it's all in the day's work as far as I am concerned—and her hospital is the very best place in the world for Lily if anything did happen.

Love to you both
Yrs. Affectionately Dick

He was not, of course, telling the truth when he told his mother-in-law that he had not been able to see anybody in London. More important, the letter casts a new light on him and on his attitudes towards the two women in his life. It suggests that the letters that Gertrude had found so hard to understand, seeming to declare his love on the one hand and
avoiding any kind of commitment on the other, were compromised by his wife's instability and his continuing responsibility and care for her. Perhaps he knew that Judith would not be able to cope without him. When not losing herself in her demanding hospital work, she was evidently in disarray. As he had not dared to tell her about the “wreck ship,” it is quite likely that she was actually threatening suicide if he abandoned her for Gertrude. In any case, he saw that if he was killed she would probably break down.

It seems that he had come to love Gertrude as much as she could have wished, sex or no sex, but had never been able to bring himself to leave his wife. What is certain is that he now found himself in a terrible dilemma. He could shore up his wife's mental health, and cause Gertrude continued suffering; or he could make his love for Gertrude plain and bring that suffering home to his fragile wife. He was, perhaps, exhausted by the struggle. For the moment, he did not have to make that decision: his own life was in the balance.

His last words to Gertrude as he embarked on the
River Clyde
were “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.” These letters of hers that followed him to Gallipoli he addressed back to her, the day before he expected to storm V beach.

There were two thousand men on the boat—all the Munsters, two companies of Hampshires, one company of Dublins, a few Royal Naval Division troops, Doughty-Wylie, and another member of Hamilton's staff, Lieutenant-Colonel Weir de Lancy Williams. That night, before leading the invasion against the Turks, for whom he held such affection, Doughty-Wylie was very quiet. A colleague, Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, said he seldom spoke but “seemed to think so much.” Colonel Weir Williams wrote: “I am firmly of the opinion that poor Doughty-Wylie realised he would be killed in this war.”