She telegraphed Sir Percy Cox, asking when she might join him, and meantime cleared her desk and visited wounded Turkish soldiers. As the temperature rose to eighty degrees, she wrote to her stepmother and sisters to send her cotton and tussore dresses. Basra, March 10, 1917 We are now hourly awaiting the news of our entrance into Bagdad. I had a letter from Sir Percy to-day, from the Front, full of exultation and confidence. I do hope I may be called up there before very long. It’s a wonderful thing to be at the top of the war after all these months of marking time, and say what you will, it’s the first big success of the war, and I think it is going to have varied and remarkable consequences. We shall, I trust, make it a great centre of Arab civilisation, a prosperity; that will be my job partly, I hope, and I never lose sight of it. In early April, she sent a two-word telegram to her parents, saying simply: “Address Bagdad.”
