Page 184 - Gertrude Bell (H.V.F.Winstone)_Neat

164 GERTRUDE DELL
the organisation must be in Egypt and ‘under the control of His
Excellency the High Commissioner, but endowed with a con-
siderablc measure of indcpcndcnce\ On January 6th, the Prime
Minister asked for an Interdepartmental Committee to sit
urgently to consider the formation of an ‘Islamic Bureau*, and it
met under the chairmanship of the Director of Military Intelli­
gence, Brigadier-General G. M. W. Macdonogh. It was agreed at
that meeting that Sykes’s original objectives were satisfactory
and that the organisation should be called the ‘Arab Bureau*. On
the 20th of the month, Lord Kitchener’s secretary Colonel
Fitzgerald wrote to Clayton: ‘Many thanks for your letter of 28
December, and all its news, which was interesting to both Lord K
and myself... India has been very suspicious but Herschell
[Hirtzel], who was the IO representative of the Inter-Depart­
mental Committee, is sympathetic, and will put it to India in such
a way that I do not think we shall have any trouble from them in
the future.’ While all tills was going on Sykes was engaged with
M. Georges Picot of France in negotiating an agreement which
divided Ottoman Asia into mandates and spheres of influence.
Chirol was in India as the correspondent of The Tims, and on
January 16th Gertrude wrote to her father: ‘I rather hope that I
may hear this week from Domnul in reply to a cable I sent him
saying I might come out to India at the end of the month. My
chief here is warmly in favour of the idea.’ On January 24th: ‘I
can’t write through censors and I must therefore send you a
private word by bag enclosed to the Hogarths to tell you what I
am doing —it is of course only for Mother and Maurice ... When
I got Lord FI’s message through Domnul I suggested that it
might be a good plan if I, a quite unimportant and unofficial
person, were to take advantage of the Viceroy’s invitation and go
out to see what could be done by putting this side of the case
before them ... ’ The next day to her mother: ‘The news about
Maurice filled me with such immense relief... The knowledge
that he is safely at home makes me feel indifferent as to going to
India which did seem a fearfully long way from home ... Anyhow
I think I ought to go and that’s an end. I have practically finished
the Tribal book I have been doing as far as it can be finished here,
but I look forward to getting a lot of fresh material in India ... ’
She had summarised her work in Cairo and the drift of events in
the East in a letter to Lord Robert Cecil, a month before. On
December 20th she had written: