Page 171 - Life of Gertrude Bell

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The Arab bureau

When the call came it was as though everything that had gone
before was but preparation for this moment. Politics were food
and drink to Gertrude’s alert mind. The Middle East was her
spiritual home. Though she was anxious to help her country in
any way that was open to her, service in some part of the Arab
world was inevitably her first wish. Her travels and her friend­
ships in government converged on that territory which, however
imprecisely, was called Arabia. Her connections with men of
power at home and in the Middle East pointed inexorably in that
direction. Sir Edward Grey, Sir Louis Mallet now back at the
F.O. as Permanent Under-Secretary, Lord Hardinge of Penshurst,
Viceroy and Governor General of India, Edwin Montagu and Sir
Arthur Hirtzel at the India Office, Winston Churchill and after
him Balfour at the Admiralty—all were long-standing friends or
acquaintances, some of them familiar since girlhood. Ambassadors
and consuls strung across the world from the Far East to America
were known to her personally. Politicians and diplomats on both
sides of the fence in the war now raging in Europe and the
Middle East had been her willing hosts over the years. Her
relatives the Trevelyans, Russells and Lascelles occupied positions
of authority in Whitehall and the legations of H.M. Government
overseas. Harold Nicolson, with whom she had become acquainted
at the Constantinople embassy, was now an under-secretary at the
Foreign Office. Her brother-in-law Rear-Admiral Sir Herbert
Richmond was deputy Director of Naval Operations. As the year
progressed and the toll of casualties mounted on the European
fronts, some of the Britishers she had met in the deserts and towns
of the Levant and Syria, Mesopotamia and Egypt, were busy with