During
the First World War she drove an ambulance in France for two years. From 1917 to 1918, she travelled in Asia with another unhappy military wife, Armorel Meinertzhagen, visiting 30 countries. After the war, she and Meinertzhagen travelled in North Africa, "with little money but much ingenuity." The result was her first book,
Unconducted Wanderers (1919). The next year, she disguised herself as an Arab woman named "Sitt Khadija" to visit the Kufra Oasis in 1921, the first European woman (and only the second European) known to have seen that location. The way she portrayed the expedition's organiser,
Ahmed Hassanein, as a minor part of the journey was criticized by her book's reviewers and his colleagues, who pointed out that he was an Oxford-educated diplomat. In 1937, Forbes was the second Westerner and first Western woman to visit places from Sahara to Samarkand, which is today are in Libya to Uzbekistan. She had a gift of a genuine traveller; she lived and mixed with the locals, made friends with the Afghans, Indians, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Kazaks and Afghans and bonded well with the natives although she was, most of the time, the only woman during the journey. The journey is described in her travelogue called
The Sahara to Samarkand. Rosita Forbes found an audience as a daring and witty travel writer and lecturer between the wars, and as a novelist; but her reputation was further tarnished in the 1930s by her description of walking through a flower garden with
Adolf Hitler, and her meetings with
Benito Mussolini. She published a book of interviews in 1940,
These Men I Knew, insisting that she was only reporting their politics, not endorsing them; she also lectured in support of the British war effort in Canada and the United States. Soon, the McGraths went to live in the Bahamas to avoid further controversy. ==Personal life==