GERTRUDE BELL
The Earlier Letters of Gertrude Belt. Collected and edited by Elsa Richmond. (Ernest Bean. f5s.) DURING the War, Gertrude Bell's career as a British official in the East was much punctuated by questioning protests. Could a woman really be a member of a British general's staff ? Her immediate chiefs were never troubled with any doubt about that. They replied that they would treat her like a man, turn her into a man if necessary, anything, in fact, but they would not let her go. And she also had a will of iron, so she stayed in Baghdad as an official until the very end of her life. The unique story of Gertrude Bell is told fully in Lady Bell's edition of her collected letters, and we have in them a full-length portrait ; in this collection we see the calm process of her development.
The volume under review, admirably edited by Gertrude Bell's half-sister, is not perhaps to be recommended to those who know nothing of the subject, but, rather, to those who are already familiar with Lady Bell's book. To the latter this close inspection of the least eventful part of her life is fascin- ating. We see her spring to maturity at the age of twelve. Her amiability is at once apparent, and it is the same mature rational amiability which informed her character always. There is very little that is out of the ordinary in these long letters of a happy girlhood : only that she gives no sign of girlish sentimentality, that the observation in them might be that of a woman of thirty, and their great length. The length is characteristic of all her letters, as is their large number, of her life. At a first glance one might call this profusion gar- rulity—a charming garrulity, but a dim recollection of Gertrude Bell, her- piercing dark eyes, her never drooping attention and undauntable interest, her animated spate of conversation which represented always the grand fullness of her being, corrects this easy misjudgement. She was not an " overwhelming " person, and she could even loosen the tongue of a very shy boy. She was strong and talkative—like the Duke of Wellington.
Strengthrtroubled, but ever so little, by a passion for know- ledge, is what we see impressively in aertrude Bell's girlhood. Her will occasionally gleams hard in the gentle colours of her happy youth" no bullying " she seems to warn calmly and sternly her adoring father and step-mother. Her strength and her will are our only clues, in this book, to the rest of her life, unless we count one odd impulsive utterence when she writes home on her first day in Tiflis ;
"Tiflis is a muddy uncivilised town, darkened rather than lighted by night by petroleum lamps. I am so enormously interested by all this!"
In most of the other, letters we might be watching the growth
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