Page 134 - Life of Gertrude Bell

120 GERTRUDE DELL

Railway tracks and even the roads of the main towns were
littered with corpses of innocent victims. Doughty-Wylie put on
his military uniform, gathered up a small group of Turkish
troops, and rode through the centre of the storm in the towns of
Mersin and Adana in pursuit of the rebels. At this first attempt
to quell the angry mobs a bullet smashed his right arm. But a few
days later he was out on patrol again when the killing resumed.
His action, according to Press reports, had saved hundreds and
perhaps thousands of lives. He was awarded the C.M.G. and the
Turkish Order of Mcjidich for his bravery. Messages of thanks
and congratulations came to him from all over the world, includ­
ing the governments whose nationals had been saved by his action.
He immediately set to work to organise relief for 22,000 refugees,
while his wife organised three makeshift hospitals for the treat­
ment of the seriously maimed and sick. It may be assumed that
one of the letters of praise that followed the Adana Massacre as
it came to be called was from Gertrude, for she kept a Press
cutting describing his actions. They may have been in corre­
spondence before, but if they were no letters have survived. In
1909, when an uneasy peace had been restored to the area covered
by the Konia vice-consulate, he returned to the post which he had
occupied for a year before going to Asiatic Turkey, that of consul
in Addis Ababa. There are suggestions in later letters that he and
Gertrude were writing to each other fairly regularly at this stage,
she describing her journeys to Ukhaidir and Babylon and her
return to the Anatolian plain, he presumably discussing his
consular activities. Their friendship was warm, perhaps feeding
on mutual admiration and Gertrude’s skill as a letter writer, but
no more. Then in 1912, the year in which Gertrude remained so
contentedly tied to England, he arrived in London to take up an
appointment as Director-in-Chief of the Red Cross relief organisa­
tion founded in Constantinople during the recent Balkan War,
I as a result of which Turkish power in Europe was virtually ended.
They may have met in the late spring in London, when she was
staying at Sloane Street, ‘grappling with the problem of clothes’,
lecturing at the behest of Herbert Richmond’s brother Ernest,
who was director of antiquities in Jerusalem, and visiting a
music hall with her Stanley cousins. It was a light-hearted period.
She spent Christmas with the family at Rounton and a few days
later, on January 2nd, 1913, she wrote to Domnul telling him that
she had given up a plan to accompany the Italian writer and