Page 161 - Life of Gertrude Bell

15

War

The journey to Hail ended in a mood of despondency. In March
she wrote from Baghdad: ‘The end of an adventure always leaves
one with a feeling of disillusion — don’t you know it? I try to
school myself beforehand by reminding myself of how I have
looked forward at other times to the end, and when it came have
found it —just nothing. Dust and ashes in one’s hand ... This
adventure hasn’t been successful either. I haven’t done what I
meant to do. But I have got over that now ... ’
She set out for Damascus and wrote to her parents in early May
to tell them that she expected to be in Constantinople on the 8 th,
and in London about a fortnight later. She was welcomed to the
Turkish capital by Sir Louis Mallet who had been sent there by
Sir Edward Grey in a last-minute effort to rescue from the fire that
charred chestnut of Liberal foreign policy, the consolidation of
Turkey’s Asiatic empire. ‘Sir Louis is perfectly delightful. He is
tremendously full of his job and we have talked for hours,’ she
wrote.
Sir Louis reported to the Foreign Secretary on May 20th,
giving his chief — to whom he had acted as private secretary and
assistant under-secretary of state for the past eight years—an
account of Gertrude’s journey and of her impression of the ruling
family of Hail:

Domestic intrigue in the Rashid family has been and is in­
creasing. During the past five or six years two convulsions
occurred at Hail and on each occasion the ruling Amir and as
many of the male members of the family as could be seized, had
been put to the sword. Since her departure, Miss Bell states,