Page 175 - Life of Gertrude Bell

TI-IE ARAB BUREAU i57
Was it perhaps some subtle spirit of foreknowledge that kept
us apart in London? As I go now I am sorry and glad, but on
the whole glad-the risk to you was too great—the risk to
your body, and to your peace of mind and pride of soul... I
must stop. Now, as I write, I know also that you will do
nothing to yourself. Peace be upon you; for you have still the
garden and the trees to walk under, where there is nothing but
peace and understanding ... Ave valeqnc.

The rest is history. The story of the carnage of Gallipoli, the
harvest of Churchiirs insistence and Kitchener’s vacillation, has
been told time and again. And no story of gallantry among all the
gallant acts of those days in April 1915 outshines that of Lt-
Colonel ‘Dick’ Doughty-Wylie, as he led his Australian troops
from the wreck-ship River Clyde, jumping on to the backs of dead
men as they landed, to make the final assault on the old Turkish
fort at Hill 141 under heavy artillery fire. He was shot through
the head at the moment of victory as the Turks ran away and his
men stood and cheered him. His last request was said to have been
that someone tell the authorities of the bravery of the Royal Navy
Commander Unwin and the boy Drewry. In the late afternoon
of April 29th his body lay stretched out on the beach. They
buried him where he was and Lt-Colonel Williams said the Lord’s
Prayer over his grave and bade him farewell.
He had won the highest commendation of the Ottoman
Empire for his initiative and bravery during the Armenian
massacres. His own countrymen awarded him the Victoria Cross
posthumously. It is said that Gertrude was at dinner with friends
when she heard the news and that she concealed her anguish.
But in the days and weeks that followed she was numbed and
inconsolable, though she found comfort in the calm and affection­
ate attendance of her sister Elsa, whose good sense, reinforced
perhaps by Gertrude’s own fundamental atheism which precluded
any serious hope of reunion in an afterlife, prevented the suicide
that she threatened before and after Doughty-Wylie’s death.
There was a strange aftermath to the story of heroism which
marked the death of one of the bravest of British soldiers and
which so affected the lives of two remarkable women. His wife
Lilian, or Judith, a member of the Union des Dames Fran$aises,
and a nurse at St Valery-sur-Somme at the time that Gertrude was
in France, wrote in her diary: ‘The shock was terrible. I don’t