Page 219 - Life of Gertrude Bell

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the matter. A shrewd womanly comment was made by an earlier
biographer:
It is noteworthy that Gertrude knew herself to be merely
‘carrying on an existence’, in however worthwhile a manner.
Nothing but the love of husband and children, for which she
had always longed and which had always been denied, could
enable her to live fully and completely; and at the age of forty-
eight she was still alone.
By late 1917 the Secretary of State for India, Austen Chamberlain,
had resigned, taking on himself an unfair burden of the blame for
the scandal of Kut and the incompetence of generals and medical
authorities which had resulted in the unnecessary deaths from
wounds and starvation of so many British troops. Edwin Montagu,
another of Gertrude’s close acquaintances in power, took over at
the India Office. General Allenby, fresh from the indecisive Arras
offensive, had been appointed C.-in-C. of the Egyptian Expedi­
tionary Force which, after the success of 1916 in Sinai under
General Murray had met with determined opposition from the
Turks at Gaza and so was held up in its bid to advance into
Palestine. The ‘Bull’ as they called him in France was to roll up
the Ottoman carpet over the long and difficult Syrian front during
the coming year by patient, brilliant generalship which produced
one of the great victories of die war with less loss of life than was
incurred in any other campaign; and die credit was to go to
others.
Gertrude seems to have required little but the affection of her
family at this time, except for riding boots, and maps and diction-
aries; ‘I would so much like Roget’s Thesaurus ... I have so often
to dress up the same theme in new words,’ she wrote to Lady Bell.
In 1918 she had a brief holiday in Persia and contracted two bouts
of malaria, which left her painfully thin but no less energedc than
before. Only one event of the period roused her to anger, the
Balfour Declaration which added another strand to Britain’s web
of promises. Three years earlier, after visiting a hospital for Indian
troops at Le Touquet in France, she had written to Doughty-
Wylie: ‘I told you how Herbert Samuel wrote and asked me if I
thought we could turn Palestine into a Jewish state under British
protection? ... I told him I had always wanted to create a neutral
belt, if Turkey broke up, between French Syria and the Egyptian
frontier. Alliances are not imperishable ... Then I plotted out for