Page 178 - Gertrude Bell (H.V.F.Winstone)

t58 GERTRUDE BELL

quite know what I did for the first sixty seconds. Something
seemed to tear at the region of my heart. All my life was so much
of his life, all his life mine. I suppose I shall have to pick up the
pieces ... just a lonely widow ... ’
On November 17th a woman is said to have landed at Gallipoli
and laid a wreath on his grave. Though hostilities were still in
progress the Turks ‘fired neither bullet nor shell’ during the
ceremony, according to the report of two British naval officers
who said they witnessed the event. Gertrude boarded a troopship
on that very day, bound for Cairo. Doughty-Wy lie’s ghostly
dream seems to have pursued him beyond the grave.

Field-Marshal Lord Kitchener, when he was British Resident in
Cairo before the outbreak of war, had engaged in secret talks with
Abdullah the son of Husain the Sharif of Mecca, the exact details
of which were never disclosed, though it is known that Abdullah
sounded out the Resident on Britain’s attitude should the Arabs
rebel against their Turkish overlords. Kitchener, the leonine,
imperious bachelor on whom an ill-prepared British Empire
looked as saviour and guide in the war, had been a law unto
himself in Cairo. Succeeding Sir Eldon Gorst but inheriting
Cromer’s mantle he was virtually the ruler of that country whose
importance to the Powers lay not in itself but in the Suez Canal
which divided it from Sinai and the Arabian peninsula and
provided access from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea. Great
though his power in Egypt was, Kitchener regarded it as a
second-best prize for his valiant work in the Boer War and other
notable campaigns of the British army. He had expected to be
made Viceroy of India after Curzon with whom he fought an
unceasing and vitriolic battle during his time as Commander-in-
Chief of the Indian army; it is said that he even built himself a
private residence in Simla to await his return. But he was offered
Cairo and he made do with it. From his vantage point at the north
of the Arabian peninsula he set out to devise an ‘Islamic’ policy
of his own in total disregard of all the schemes of the Indian
Government connected with Arab lands, and he gathered round
him a group of admiring assistants of whom the chief were
‘Fitz’, Colonel Oswald Fitzgerald his devoted Secretary, and
Ronald Storrs his Oriental Secretary. When war was imminent
in the summer of 1914 Kitchener was home on leave. As soon as a
declaration of hostilities seemed inevitable he decided to hurry