Page 201 - Life of Gertrude Bell

ORIENTAL SECRETARY i»3
him to see the Van Esses. Even then he had the delicate, effete
manner which made him such an oddity among the gregarious
Arabs of the desert, physically repelled as he was even by the
shaking of hands. ‘He was an unimpressive young man at this
time, and had very little influence on the Arabs of Iraq/ Mrs Van
Ess wrote in her diary.
Two other acquaintances of this period were to help Gertrude
over the dark days of her first year in the country, when the
British army was trying to reorganise and to stabilise its position
after the disaster of Kut. H. St John Philby, a young Political
Officer just arrived in Basra to reinforce the civil side, proved
welcome company with his keen and controversial mind, and
both the Van Esses and Gertrude took to him immediately, though
their friendship was to receive some hard tests as time went on.
But Major Reader Bullard was perhaps her favourite among the
Political Officers of the period. Gertrude found him a stimulating
conversationalist and an agreeable companion on her early morn­
> ing riding and swimming expeditions. As she approached her
fifties she kept remarkably fit and must have looked some years
younger than her actual age. In June 1916a young officer stationed
at Nasiriyah, John (later Sir John) Jardine wrote to his brother
Lionel, himself a Political Officer in the post-war period: ‘This
evening we had a thrill. A Miss Gertrude Lothian [sic] Bell (41)
came to tea with the C.O. She is to do Intelligence work here as
she has travelled among the Arabs. A woman fairly knocked us
over after 6 months. As she walked through the camp, the guard
turned out by mistake and wept tears on their bayonets. I see a
\
fool of a bishop has been preaching about sex hatred. He wouldn’t
find much of it in IEF “D”. She wore a green hat and scarf, white
blouse and fawn tussore skirt... ’
In the hot summer months she worked with fiendish energy
compiling intelligence reports and information summaries, and
contributing some brilliant articles to the Arab 'bulletin which
became popular reading-matter in high places. Among the dozens
of intelligence reports she filed in her first few months there was
an eye-witness account of the continuing atrocities against the
Armenians, obtained from a captured Turkish soldier:

The battalion left Aleppo on 3 February and reached Ras-ul-Ain
in twelve hours ... Some 12,000 Armenians were concentrated
under the guardianship of some hundreds of Kurds, drawn not