Page 172 - Life of Gertrude Bell

154 GERTRUDE BELL
schemes which had a particular need of her experience and know­
ledge. Even the emotional turmoil which still raged in her
through the last months of 1914 and the early part of 1915
pointed with almost sinister insistence towards the East.

In February 1915, when she was working for the Red Cross in
France, a telegram was dispatched from Intelligence Cairo to the
War Office in London. It read: ‘Major Doughty-Wylie, former
Consul at Adana, arrived from Abyssinia. I suggest I might keep
him here for employment. Do you concur? He is cn route for
England. I have not yet mentioned this to him. Maxwell, C-in-C.’
It was the period of the Turks’ abortive attempt to cross the Suez
Canal, of the reinforcement of enemy forces outside Ismailia and
on the Tigris in Mesopotamia. German intelligence agents were
swarming through Syria. The propaganda of the Young Turks
and the Committee of Union and Progress, and of the Germans,
was proving effective in Jerusalem, Damascus, Baghdad, Basra
and other centres of the Pan-Islamic movement. The systematic
murder and abduction of the Armenians had begun again, for the
third time in half a century. On February 14th Britain’s ambassador
at Petrograd wired that according to Russian intelligence a strong
Turkish force was on its way to Baghdad. On February 20th Lord
Kitchener told General Maxwell that a naval force was on its way
to bombard the Dardanelles and later the same day Maxwell was
told that he should warn a force of 30,000, made up of Australian
and New Zealand contingents, ‘to prepare for service’. Major
Dick Doughty-Wylie was thought an ideal intelligence officer for
the campaign being planned; a campaign which, according to
Kitchener’s telegram to Maxwell, would demand ‘specially com­
petent officers’ who would have to be capable of ‘acting inde­
pendently’ until the main force under Birdwood joined them.
However, he was allowed to proceed to London on leave and
Gertrude rushed from France to meet him.
A month before she had written from her office in Boulogne:

Dearest, dearest, I give this year of mine to you, and all the
years that shall come after it, this meagre gift —the year and me
and all my thought and love ... You fill my cup, this shallow
cup that has grown so deep to hold your love and mine.
Dearest, when you tell me you love me and want me still, my
heart sings-and then weeps with longing to be with you. I