Page 133 - Life of Gertrude Bell

ENCOUNTER IX9

it. I-Ic was not an intellectual in any accepted sense but he was
well aware of wliat was going on in the world at large and knew
of the fame that now attached to Gertrude, for The Desert and the
Sown had already been acclaimed in the Press and Professor
Hogarth had declared it to be not unworthy of a place alongside
Doughty’s Arabia Deserta: indeed, he pronounced it ‘among the
dozen best books of Eastern travel’. In any case her fame as a
traveller in the East went before her by now, among the natives
and the British communities of the Turkish coastal regions. His
distinction was of a different kind. Pie was by common consent
one of the bravest and most fearless of soldiers, and his presence
in the diplomatic world at that time was brought about by the
need for respite after a series of wounds which had won him
medals and acclaim in almost every battle in which Britain was
engaged from the time he joined the army in 1889 until the East
African campaign of 1903. Pie had fought at Hazara, Chitral,
Crete, and in the Nile Expedition, winning medals and clasps as
he went. In the Boer War he received severe injuries and was
awarded the Queen’s medal and three clasps. At Tientsin during
the Chinese rebellion he raised a corps of mounted infantry and
was again wounded. There were few more dashing or renowned
men in the British army. He was the same age as Gertrude, born
on July 23rd in 1868, nine days after her. And in 1904, a year
before Gertrude’s first visit to the plains of Anatolia, he had
married Lilian, the daughter of Mr John Wylie of Westcliffe
Hall, Hampshire, and widow of Lt Henry Adams-Wylie of the
Indian Medical Service. Doughty-Wylie was a hero figure,
Gertrude a rich and brilliant woman with connections at the
highest levels of government. The Doughtys of Theberton Hall,
Leiston in Suffolk, ranked high enough in a world where accept­
ability was the first hurdle in any acquaintanceship. There was
no more to the matter in 1907.
Then in the following year while Gertrude was between
journeys, Doughty-Wylie as he had become (Lilian Wylie, who
was always known as Judith, had insisted on her own surname
being attached to those of both her husbands) found himself in
the news. It was the year in which the mass-slaughter of the
Armenians began once again in the Ottoman dominions, as an
ugly accompaniment of the Young Turks’ rebellion. Mobs
roamed the area of his consulship murdering Christians with a
fanaticism bred of years of festering hatred and recrimination.