Boulogne Jan 16
My dear, your letter is delayed this week, & I am consumed with anxiety, though I know your letter when it comes, will not set it at rest. I heard last week from your wife (it was a letter which had been long on the way, after the manner of the posts here) that Mr Thesiger was going back to Abyssinia at the beginning of February, and your [sic] coming home when he arrived. Then I realised by the manner in which my heart stood still while I read, how unbelievably terrible it will be to have you at the front – how profoundly I have rested on the thought that if you are far away you are safe. Dearest this letter at least must reach you 35 before Mr T. arrives - & next letter too I hope. When you leave, if you leave, you must telegraph to me here, Hotel Maurice, Boulogne – that will reach me & me only, just to say when you leave & when will arrive in England. For I suppose you would go straight to London? If that were so, I would take my first & only leave & come there too, to see you in peace as I could not see you here. Will you contrive to let me know beforehand so that I may make arrangements? I have someone in London who would at any time come out & take my place for a week – Mrs Buckler, who used to run the Paris office. She is familiar with all this work. You will let me know & stop my letters to Abyssinia. They must go wandering to fall into any hands when I write, as I do so always, from my heart to yours. Oh Dick, I’m afraid – I’m horribly afraid of you coming back to go into that fearful carnage. Perhaps & probably, K. will set you first to train his army – then I shall be torn with longing to be near you in England, but at least I shall not strain my ears for the unheard sound of battle where you are. My dear, my dear – that I should say I don’t want you back, or set my soul against any desire of yours – your eager desires to return – it is worse, so much worse than if I were your wife. For then I should have the good right to be with you, to come to you at any moment & I must stand aloof & trust to chance. But it shall not be quite chance – you will not let it be all chance will you? We will make our meeting sure. This news came 3 days ago & while I read the letter I wondered how I could bear to think of the prospect it opened. And then came, blindly, a flood of work, which has kept me some evenings till 11 at night, & left me no time, even for fears. I am doing a long job for the W. O. now – revising this last monthly list of missing, which I find to be full of errors & omissions. If I prove this to them, I mean to suggest that we should leave the final of the proof each month, & so constitute ourselves the ultimate authority for their official lists, which we are well qualified to be. I think that will give us an additional status with them - & moreover I believe the work will be more efficiently done. That’s the idea I cherish. Flora Russell has gone to Rouen, Tiger Howard is here with me, & I feel as if I were happily swimming downstream instead of breasting a strong current! It makes a world of difference. She has taken over a lot of the routine – it’s all routine but some needs more attention and that I keep in my hands. And I have a second typewriter & am going to reorganise the filing of information so as to save myself a lot of useless manual labour. It will be an uphill task this week, but when it is done I shall have freed my hands a great deal & cleared space with which I can fit all the additional correspondence which is going to be thrown on me from Paris. I had Mr Cazalet down last 36 week, full of enthusiasm for the way we have arranged his books for him. He says his work is going to develop to an enormous extent – the finding & marking of graves - & that makes his cooperation immensely more valuable to us, so I’m glad we have won his heart & accustomed him to lean on us. I am now going to make him a geographical index of the missing – by plan instead of by name or regiment. So that he may look for their graves or trace of them on the actual spot, so far as we know it, where they were buried or lost. He is enchanted with this simple scheme & I’m longing to be at it. As soon as the W. O. task is done I shall have some midnight sittings & make his geography book before he comes down again. I expect it will be Mr Carlile who comes in this week – I like him too, but not with quite such a warm liking as I have for Mr Cazalet. I gather from [?] that our army is going to move up north, taking the lines from the sea southwards towards Ypres – the Yser & those districts. Its an infernal country for it is now completely under water, but it is more geographical for us, for we can work in cooperation with our fleet which seems the sensible arrangement. Tiger & I have been dining tonight at a restaurant with the good old Colonel Gascoigne, who is a [?] – not neighbour, but acquaintance. He runs a motor for the women’s hospital at Wimeraux & I rather love him. There was another old thing, Col . Needham, our Red X censor (but he doesn’t censor my private letters because I don’t send them through his office) & an old man called Maké, the Prince de Maké [?], but he’s an Englishman, though you wouldn’t think it, & a transport officer. He is in charge of railway service between Boulogne, Rouen & the front. Also we had a very nice woman out here for a day or two last week, Lady Evelyn Farquhar. Her husband is C. O. of Princess Pat’s regiment. She is coming out at regular intervals and I shall always like having her. She comes to our hotel & we look after her & she has motors & permits & all she wants. I must go to bed my very dear; goodnight.
Jan. 20. I have wakened broad awake at 6 a.m. & will seize the favourable occasion to write to you. What are you doing? It’s a little after 9 with you. Nine o’clock & clear sun & you are beginning your work on Christian doctrine, or Moslem intrigue or what. Is that it? Your letter has definitely missed this week I fear – confound all postmen. Will there be two next week or has one dropped into the sea & gone for ever? I still hope it may come, belated. Tiger Howard is a delightful colleague, so helpful & such a dear. Yesterday we had to struggle with typewriters of various descriptions. Then arrived one from London on Saturday from the Red X – I was to have a second clerk in my office. He was an offhand gentleman in khaki, from Scotland, very slow at his job. Yesterday he announced that he desired more constructive work. I replied that I should be happy to see him a Major General but the only work I personally could give him was the construction of my reports on the typewriter & sent him up to the commissioners office to lay his views before them. They told him that if he did not stay with me, he would be returned to England & bade him come back to me for a week before he made his choice. He came & may turn out all right, but I don’t know. I think he was discouraged by the amount of work we do. When he returned from the commissioner, rather crestfallen poor man, I told him that in this country we all did what we were told & for as many hours as the work demanded, & sent him back to his typewriter again. You can’t think what they are like, these causal people who are suddenly thrust into a uniform & sent out to this country – chauffeurs, clerks, what not. There is a nice old Colonel at the Commandant’s who told us that one of them had come i8nto his office for a pass or something & while he was sorting it, the gentleman sat on the corners of the table & whistled. “I have 35 years’ service” said Colonel Gheara “I said to him since you are in uniform would you mind not sitting on the table on which I’m writing?” Meanwhile (to return to my secretaries) Mr Malcolm had sent a hysterical lady from Paris. I have left her too for a week but she won’t stay anymore. Tiger Howard spent the greater part of the afternoon running round Boulogne to find lodgings for her & when she had got her an excellent room – no east thing to find here – our friend rejected it because it had no electric light. She settled herself somewhere, I don’t care where, & Tiger & I sat together & confided the whole female set to the devil. Lord Lamington dropped in this afternoon & we took him out to tea with us. He had got a week’s leave from his yeomanry & permission to pay a short visit to General Wilcocks at the Indian headquarters. He goes there tomorrow. He didn’t really bring any news but then he wouldn’t be likely to know any. He is a dull dog, though amiable. It’s a sea of mud, a bottomless slough, at the front. No one can move. They wade waist deep through rain soaked clay – it’s like a circle in the Inferno. Above all the cavalry are helpless, useless. No one knows why they brought out so much, & I believe it was a profound mistake to bring the second Indian cavalry division here where they cannot stir, instead of sending them to Mesopotamia where they would have been of great value – (Oh dear I’ve just upset the greater part of my ink bottle into my bed! What a misfortune. But there is still enough ink left to finish my letter to you.) I hear terrible rumours about the Indian convalescents in England. The India Office began by making a very wise regulation that no one was to visit them without a pass & the pass was to be given very sparingly. Then Sir Walter Lawrence proceeded to distribute the [?] broadcast, & since A had one, it was impossible to refuse another to B, with the result that the pass system has broken down & the succeeding disaster that the Indian troops have not found the female population of Great Britain to be unapproachable salub people of a clay different from their own. And these stories, carried back to India will do us no good. My dear, you & I know the difficulty of mixing East & West – these unseen barriers which must soon be overstepped. But what do English villagers know of the? I blame Sir Walter Lawrence, he at last ought to have known. My dear my dear, when shall I see you? Yet I don’t want to see you lest it should be on the way to muddy trenches. If it is not to be till the end of the war that may be a year or more. You will have forgotten me – shall I have forgotten too? Shall we meet like people who have some faded acquaintance chief, or worse than that, some intimacy stifled beneath its own ashes? Do you think this my beloved? Or perhaps this dark hour of the morning blinded me or hides the mountain tops to which I have reached too often to doubt that they are there. Love me even when I grope along the lifeless sodden valley. For I am yours,
Gertrude