Page 182 - Life of Gertrude Bell

164 GERTRUDE BELL
the organisation must be in Egypt and ‘under the control of His
Excellency the High Commissioner, but endowed with a con-
sidcrable measure of independence’. On January 6th, the Prime
Minister asked for an Interdepartmental Committee to sit
urgently to consider the formation of an ‘Islamic Bureau’, and it
met under the chairmanship of the Director of Military Intelli­
gence, Brigadier-General G. M. W. Macdonogh. It was agreed at
that meeting that Sykes’s original objectives were satisfactory
and that the organisation should be called the ‘Arab Bureau’. On
*'jth of the month, Lord Kitchener’s secretary Colonel
wrote to Clayton: ‘Many thanks for your letter of 28
d all its news, which was interesting to both Lord K
Tndia has been very suspicious but Herschell
vas the IO representative of the Inter-Depart-
e, is sympathetic, and will put it to India in such
ot think we shall have any trouble from them in
ie all this was going on Sykes was engaged with
cot of France in negotiating an agreement which
*nan Asia into mandates and spheres of influence,
.v^as in India as the correspondent of The Times, and on
.iry 16th Gertrude wrote to her father: ‘I rather hope that I
may hear this week from Domnul in reply to a cable I sent him
saying I might come out to India at the end of the month. My
chief here is warmly in favour of the idea.’ On January 24th: ‘I
can’t write through censors and I must therefore send you a
private word by bag enclosed to the Hogarths to tell you what I
am doing — it is of course only for Mother and Maurice ... When
I got Lord H’s message through Domnul I suggested that it
might be a good plan if I, a quite unimportant and unofficial
person, were to take advantage of the Viceroy’s invitation and go
I out to see what could be done by putting this side of the case
before them ... ’ The next day to her mother: ‘The news about
Maurice filled me with such immense relief... The knowledge
that he is safely at home makes me feel indifferent as to going to
India which did seem a fearfully long way from home ... Anyhow
I think I ought to go and that’s an end. I have practically finished
the Tribal book I have been doing as far as it can be finished here,
but I look forward to getting a lot of fresh material in India
She had summarised her work in Cairo and the drift of events in
the East in a letter to Lord Robert Cecil, a month before. On
December 20th she had written:
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