Amurath to Amurath came from her 1909 six-month journey through Syria and along the unexplored banks of the Euphrates. The Palace and Mosque at Ukhaidir and The Vaulting System at Ukhaidir contained her meticulous drawings and measurements of the enormous ruined palace she discovered in the desert near Karbala. The Churches and Monasteries of the Tur Abdin took her back to Ukhaidir and north to Turkey in 1911. Gertrude’s handbook The Arab of Mesopotamia, written by request as an introduction to the region for the military officers and civil servants who were posted there after World War I, is a collection of essays. Some of these are rigorously informative and some are eccentric and amusing. A book-length white paper for the British government, Review of the Civil Administration of Mesopotamia, explained the problems and solutions that confronted the High Commission when it arrived in Basra, and then in Baghdad, after the Turkish retreat.

From the time she took up her post as “Major Miss Bell” in the Intelligence Bureau in Cairo in 1915, and no longer had time to keep a diary, she told her father that her letters to the family would in future be her diary and asked him to keep them. Her work at the bureau was secret, and there was much she omitted to tell, but she continued to write home two or three times a week. The letters were so regular over so many years that their rare cessation signaled an interval of a few days during which she was doing something secret. There are three missing days and nights in November 1915, which give the clue to a mystery that has perplexed historians for a hundred years (see “The Lover”). The second time, during the period in which she was an intelligence officer in Basra, was April 16–27, 1916. Those were exactly the days in which her friends T. E. Lawrence and Aubrey Herbert—with whom she had discussed “vast schemes for the government of the universe” the previous week—were entrusted with the attempt to break the Turkish siege of Kut, in which starving British soldiers and townspeople were reduced to eating rats and dogs. According to Gertrude’s letters home, she went “up the Shatt al’ Arab to check the maps.” After her death, King Faisal referred to further unrecorded adventures in which she nearly lost her life, saying, “She could play a man’s part in the action. . . . She ventured alone and disguised into the remotest districts . . . Death held no fear for her. Her personal safety was her last consideration.” In the same interview he added the extraordinary assertion that she had on one occasion led some tribesmen in an attack on the Turks and on another been taken prisoner by the Turks but had managed to escape. Even in her midfifties, when she and Haji Naji, a gardener and great friend, were harassed by a mad dervish with an iron staff, she snatched it up and struck him with it. He left.

During her lifetime she made seven expeditions into the vast regions of the Middle East and Turkey, first as a wealthy tourist but soon as an archaeologist, explorer, and information gatherer for the British government. They were possibly the happiest times of her life. Once she was based in an office, whether engaged on war work or administration, she worked harder and longer than anyone but occasionally yearned for adventure again. “It’s sometimes exasperating to be obliged to sit in an office when I long to be out in the desert, seeing the plans I hear of and finding out about them for myself . . . one can’t do much more than sit and record if one is of my sex, devil take it,” she wrote from Basra. And, in 1924 when she was fifty-six, “I’m planning a two days’ jaunt by myself in the desert. I want to feel savage and independent again instead of being [Oriental] Secretary in a High Commissioner’s office. The truth is I wonder how I bear being so civilised and respectable after the life I’ve led.”

The wisdom of establishing a nation as conflicted as Iraq is often questioned. Gertrude soldiered on, year after year, as political officer and then Oriental secretary with her self-imposed mission to grant as complete a measure of autonomy to her beloved Arabs as was compatible with some temporary British guidance and support. Her dream was that Iraq should gain ultimate independence. She dedicated her life in Baghdad to the championing of the Arab cause, reaching the very limits of her purview as a loyal administrator employed and paid by Britain. She placed little faith in politicians: the British who betrayed the promise to give the Arabs self-determination; the French who bombed their way to control of Syria; and the Americans who proposed a benevolent world order, including a League of Nations, and then did nothing to support it.

She had to fight her corner every inch of the way, and she often had to fight her own side.