Gertrude Bell’s experience of war work in the south of England and in France was brief, but formative. It began just a few months after the outbreak of the Great War in the summer of 1914. It’s an intriguing story, able to be told primarily because we have her surviving letters as a central part of the archive. Bored and frustrated at Clandon Park Hospital in the south of England - which has been, to date, a little-discussed episode in her life - with no role to speak of except taking round reading materials to wounded Belgian troops, she maneuvered her way over to France to fill a secretarial position. Bell, while there, awkwardly met with Lilian (‘Judith’) Doughty-Wylie, the experienced, respected field nurse who was the wife of the man she hoped to marry; had an epiphany about life being too short; set up a filing system to help distraught relatives better trace missing and wounded boys and young men; and came home just a few months later. Within a year Gertrude Bell was called to the Middle East to serve the British administration – where, in Baghdad, after a series of notable geo-political accomplishments, she died just a decade later by her own hand.