Gertrude Bell (38 page)

Now, she told Florence, all she had to do was persuade the W&MED in London and Paris to adopt her system and to make sure that all information was constantly updated. When she had time for lunch, she went with Diana or Flora to a tiny restaurant packed with soldiers, everybody taking everybody else for granted. It was, she told her family, the oddest world.

Her office hours, as yet rather less than modern staffers put in in an average week, were considerable for a woman who had never worked in an office before: “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.” Would Florence, she added, request on her behalf a complete list of the Territorial battalions? And could she have a London address book for the office—an old telephone directory would do nicely.

The Boulogne lists were soon acknowledged to be as complete as they could be made, and Paris began sending its own lists of admissions and discharges there, instead of the other way round. Flora and Diana departed to run a new office in Rouen, along Gertrude's lines. She had also instigated a “watching list” of some fifteen hundred names registered as “enquiries,” so that hospitals themselves could check their admissions against it as soon as they arrived.

In time, she thought, they would have one of the best-run offices in France. But the job was not being made any easier by those in command. The head of the W&MED, Lord Robert Cecil, had recently asked to have a W&MED representative permanently at the front, only for the army to refuse. The Red Cross had also asked the Army Council to let their searchers go to the front after each offensive and make early enquiries about the dead and missing among the wounded at field hospitals and rest stations. The military authorities did not see their way to permitting this either, and ordered that the W&MED should remain well behind the line. Undeterred, Gertrude cooked up a plan to create their own channels through army chaplains. It was soon understood that the military agenda was to hide from civilians not only the true catastrophic course of the war in the trenches, but also the miscalculations of the commanders, who continued to order escalating offensives when it should have been abundantly clear to them that the strategy was not working. For more obscure reasons, the Red Cross had decided not to let any women make enquiries at the hospitals. “Very silly,” sniffed Gertrude, determining to make friends with the nurses and go in, albeit unofficially, whenever she liked.

She would walk along the seafront from 8:30 to 9 a.m. At 5, after her
work in the office had finished, she began defiantly visiting out-stations and hospitals, talking to the men in the wards. She made a special trip in the office car to Le Touquet, to visit the Secunderabad Hospital for Indian regiments. She was warmly received by the medical staff, who told her how isolated they felt. For her, this short visit was like a home away from home. They gave her tea and escorted her around the wards to meet Sikhs, Gurkhas, Jats, and Afridis, most sitting cross-legged on their beds and playing cards: “The cooks [were] preparing Hindu and Mohammadan 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 above his bed, and Princess Mary's box of spices lying on the table beneath it.”

In the centre of Boulogne itself, the Casino, a riot of bright lights and gilded paintwork, had been taken over by the War Office and turned into a military hospital. The American Bar, she was amused to see, was now an X-ray room, and the Café Bar served as a dispensary for bandages and carbolic lotion. She was interested to find that the British soldiers sharing wards with the wounded Germans were perfectly pleasant and friendly to their former enemies. On 11 December she wrote 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. 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.

In November and December—December being Gertrude's first month in the job—there were 1,838 enquiries from families. Her new card index listed 5,000 names, and she was able to resolve the fate of 127 men. Most of them were traced by the three male “searchers” attached to the Boulogne office, whose daily job it was to go to the hospitals and question the wounded about their missing colleagues. If these shell-shocked and disabled men could throw any light on their fate, the information was filed with the office. Where death was a certainty, the War Office was informed. The Boulogne section of a Joint War Committee Report, probably penned by Gertrude herself, reads:

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.

When the British fell back, their wounded were overtaken by the Germans, and either killed or taken prisoner. Nothing more would be known about them unless they could be found on one of the lists of prisoners coming from Germany through the Red Cross at Geneva. These lists, as they arrived in Boulogne, enabled the office to determine the fate of at least some of the missing.

This was fighting unlike any that had been known before. The unknown soldier, as A. J. P. Taylor was to write, was the true hero in a war that resulted in nearly 192,000 men from the British Empire missing or taken prisoner. One shell could blow fifty men apart in such a way that they could never be identified. One of the grimmest parts of the work that Gertrude initiated at Boulogne consisted in finding wherever possible the graves of men hastily buried on the battlefield, whose relatives wanted to know whether there was proof of death, and if so, where they were buried. The exhumations were the work of the Red Cross searchers, the same men who normally went into the hospitals to interview the wounded. They often found that the grave which contained the colonel or captain they were trying to find would turn out to be a pit into which a number of other bodies had also been thrown. The most recent that Gertrude had recorded in mid-December contained 98 men. Of the 98, only 66 still wore their identity discs—but at least these deaths could be certified and their graves ascertained. After verification, the grave was lengthened, the bodies laid side by side and the burial service read over them. Gertrude told Valentine Chirol:

Where 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.

She did not always succeed in putting Dick to the back of her mind, and now she had an extra worry. In the New Year Maurice was to be sent to the front. She dreaded that one day it might be his name that turned up on one of the lists on her desk. As usual she opened her heart only to Chirol, sheltering her family from the knowledge of her misery:

I can work here all day long—it makes a little plank across the gulf of wretchedness over which I have walked this long long time. Sometimes even that comes near to breaking point . . . I ought not to write of it. Forgive me. There are days when it is still almost more than I can bear—this is one of them, and I cry out to you . . . My dear Domnul, dearest and best of friends.

At the beginning of the war the officers, being career soldiers, would have been older than most of the ranks, and more likely to have wives who would write in to the Red Cross to initiate a search if they disappeared. Since the War Office issued commissions and recorded promotions, they had the lists of officers to hand, while the names of the men in the ranks were known only to their regiments. As the Joint War Committee Report put it, “With the small staff at its disposal it was obviously impossible to keep a complete record of everybody, and this work was at first confined to officers.” While there is a deplorable aspect to this attitude, it is nonetheless true that the number of soldiers was astronomical. Recruitment offices collapsed under the applications of the two and a half million men who volunteered in response to Kitchener's “Your Country Needs You” campaign.

Shortly after the new Enquiry Office opened, dealing with non-commissioned officers and men, the army discontinued its practice of issuing the Red Cross with hospital lists, because the hospitals were inundated and worked off their feet. Without that lifeline, and without any searchers on the small staff, it was only a few weeks before the new office closed. The correspondence from the families went instead to Gertrude, whose work had been doubled already with the correspondence that was now re-routed from Paris. She and her staff readily took up the burden of the enquiries about the non-commissioned officers and men—“Some rather complicated business has been settled up, the result being that we take on privates as well as officers, for which I am very
glad”—and brought news, good or bad, to at least some of these British families.

She asked Florence to post to her the latest arrangements about allowances for soldiers and sailors. Having grown up with a keen family awareness of the straitened finances of working families such as those at her father's ironworks, she knew what it would mean to them to lose the breadwinner. When families had to be informed that their husband or father had been disabled or killed, she wanted to be able to explain their entitlements and how they could apply for them.

It was almost Christmas. Hugh had asked her if she wanted a car to help her with the work, but she had turned it down, explaining that she could always borrow one if she wanted. He sent her £50 instead, and hoped she would be back for the holiday. She wrote to thank him and tell him that she wanted to stay in Boulogne, for fear that her new system would fall to pieces if she were not there to enforce it. The great advantage she had over Flora and Diana, she said, was that she could be there all the time; and as long as she was hard at work, it kept her from dwelling on her anxieties.

She told Hugh how she would be spending his £50. Realizing that he had a good lieutenant in Gertrude, Cecil had told her how much he appreciated her reorganization of the work. She was the obvious choice for head of the department, and was invited to take over a room for her private office. She chose one of the empty rooms in the property, all of them gloomy, had it cleaned and repapered, and put in a mat and new chintz curtains. It looked as charming as it could, thanks to Hugh. “In spite of dirt and gloom I have made my office cheerful enough, with jars of lilac and narcissus which I buy in the market. I wonder they can bring up flowers to Boulogne in war time, and I bless them for it,” she told Chirol. And she still had plenty of money to spend on books and files and ledgers. It was good, she told her father, to feel it all cost the Red Cross nothing.

Her Christmas passed almost unnoticed. On 27 December she sat down to write home about a curious phenomenon that was the talk of the town:

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 bayoneted—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.

Cecil had at long last managed to persuade the War Office to let him establish a communication line with the front. Major Fabian Ware and his team were to be the new recipients of the enquiry lists from the Red Cross office: it was hoped that they would be able to get information that was beyond the reach of the W&MED.

One of the team, a Mr. Cazalet, arrived in Boulogne on New Year's Eve and brought with him a huge bundle of lists and crumpled letters taken from the pockets of the dead, some of them bloodstained. Fresh information coming in from the front line was of great value, with the proviso that all checking had to be done during the next twenty-four hours, after which Cazalet would return to the front. He would then have to hand the letters over, for return to the families, together with any other personal effects. Only Gertrude and Diana were staffing the office over the New Year. They sat down immediately to sort and check and enter the results in a ledger. They worked the rest of the day, then returned to the office after dinner and worked until 2 a.m.: “At midnight we broke off for a few minutes, wished each other a better year and ate some chocolates.”

Gertrude was back in the office at 8:15 a.m., and the work was finished by 12:30, with just an hour to spare. She took the office car and delivered it in person. Major Ware was impressed, and it was not long before he visited the office. He had a long talk with Gertrude and left promising that in future he would send her all the details he could collect. Then, in January, for the first time Cecil sent her the War Office's monthly list of missing men for her comments. “It was full of errors, both of commission and omission,” she wrote to Chirol. As the W&MED knew so much more about the missing than the WO did, she wrote back, why didn't she simply take the work over?

But in spite of her limitless capacity for work, she was worn thin. With Maurice now at the front and Dick inclined to return to the fighting, she was trying hard to resist depression. The appalling weather
became a metaphor for the constant haemorrhaging of life and the profitless state of the war. Unusually, she had admitted her low spirits to Chirol: “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.”