E.M. Forster and the War’s Colonial Aspect

  • Claire Buck
Chapter

Abstract

In October 1915, K.E. Royds, a Red Cross Relief worker, sailed through the Strait of Gibraltar and through the Mediterranean to Salonika. Her diary records the African coast, “an unknown world” no more than “a grey outline,” “dim in the morning mist.” “This is really heavenly! But there is nothing to say about it,” notes Royds.1 On past Algiers seen in moonlight, “an unsubstantial faery thing,” and through Malta’s “narrow streets (some up steps) with overhanging balconies, and Eastern looking shops,” Royds arrives in Salonika and its “Turkish quarter” with “overhanging windows … narrow-latticed shutters … the harems, the gardens green, but enclosed with high walls.”2 Royds, a war worker, writes while en route to a Greek city occupied by both British and French troops stationed there to support the Serbs in their fight for survival against invasion by German, Austro-Hungarian, and Bulgarian troops.3 By spring 1916, the infamous Serbian retreat would have seen losses of around 200,000 troops and civilians.4 Across the Aegean Sea, British, French, Indian, and ANZAC soldiers still fought in the disastrous Gallipoli campaign at the cost of some 250,000 casualties on the Allied side alone.5 Yet Royds’s production of the exotic and the picturesque comes straight from the writings of Victorian and Edwardian travelers, such as Isabel Burton, Florence Nightingale, or Amelia Edwards. It is not that Royds is either ignorant or nave; she comments in the very same entry on the bad news from the Serbian war zone that “it is hard to realize what is happening north, above the hills.”6 Neither is she atypical. For Royds and many others, whether soldiers or non-combatants, the war was an opportunity to travel on the edges of Europe’s borders and beyond.7

Keywords

Middle East Military Hospital Original Letter Wounded Soldier Arabian Desert 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in to check access.

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Notes

  1. 2.
    Royds, Diary, 14 October 1915, 15 October 1915, 23 October 1915.Google Scholar
  2. 4.
    Simon Forty, ed., World War I: A Visual Encyclopedia (London: PRC Publishing, 2002), 350.Google Scholar
  3. 6.
    Royds, Diary, 23 October 1915.Google Scholar
  4. 8.
    Trevor Wild, A Social History of the Countryside (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004), 17.Google Scholar
  5. 10.
    John E. Mack, A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of T.E. Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).Google Scholar
  6. 11.
    Janet Wallach, Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell (New York: Doubleday, 1996), 180, 192, 290–301.Google Scholar
  7. 12.
    P.N. Furbank, E.M. Forster: A Life (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1978), vol. 2, 19–20.Google Scholar
  8. 13.
    Scripting is a term used by Derek Graham to capture the connections between travel writing and colonial administration, “Scripting Egypt: Orientalism and the Cultures of Travel,” in Writes of Passage: Reading Travel Writing, ed. James Duncan and Derek Gregory (New York: Routledge, 2002), 115.Google Scholar
  9. 14.
    Gertrude Bell, Syria: The Desert and the Sown (London: William Heinemann, 1907), 65.Google Scholar
  10. 22.
    See Wallach, Desert, 73–6, and Georgina Howell, Gertrude Bell: Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations (New York: Macmillan, 2010), 117.Google Scholar
  11. 30.
    Publisher’s Note, in Bell, Syria: The Desert and the Sown (London: William Heinemann, 1919), np.Google Scholar
  12. 31.
    E.M. Forster, “The Government of Egypt,” in Mohammed Shaheen, E.M. Forster and the Politics of Imperialism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 172–3.Google Scholar
  13. 33.
    Graham Dawson, “The Blond Bedouin: Lawrence of Arabia, Imperial Adventure and the Imagining of English-British Masculinity,” in Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain since 1800, ed. Michael Roper and John Tosh (New York: Routledge, 1993), 113–14.Google Scholar
  14. 35.
    Lowell Thomas, “’The Uncrowned King of Arabia’: Colonel T.E. Lawrence, the Most Romantic Career of Modern Times,” The Strand Magazine 59 (January-June 1920): 40–53, 141–53, 251–61, and 330–8.Google Scholar
  15. 36.
    Lowell Thomas, With Lawrence in Arabia (New York and London: Century, 1924).Google Scholar
  16. 37.
    Dawson, “Blond,” 114 and Stephen E. Tabachnick and Christopher Matheson, Images of Lawrence (London: Jonathan Cape, 1988), dustjacket and 22.Google Scholar
  17. 38.
    Malcolm Muggeridge, “Poor Lawrence,” New Statesman 62, 27 October 1961: 604, qtd in T.E. Lawrence: Soldier, Writer, Legend: New Essays, ed. Jeffrey Meyers (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), 133. Muggeridge was responding to a biography by Anthony Nutting, Lawrence of Arabia: The Man and the Motive (1961), one of a series of books re-evaluating the Lawrence legend after 1945 and the 1956 Suez crisis.Google Scholar
  18. 45.
    H.E. Marshall, Our Island Story: A History of England for Boys and Girls (London: Jack, 1905).Google Scholar
  19. 57.
    Eliezer Tauber, The Arab Movements in World War I (London: Frank Cass, 1993), 8.Google Scholar
  20. 63.
    T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph (1922) (New York: Doubleday, 1935), 188.Google Scholar
  21. 84.
    Billie Melman, Women’s Orients: English Women and the Middle East, 1718–1918: Sexuality, Religion and Work (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 166. Reeves does not visit Palestine, but he does record that his first sight of Egypt brings to mind “the story of the Children of Israel in the land of Goshen” (Reeves, Diary, 49).Google Scholar
  22. 92.
    Following the publication of Howards End in 1910 Forster was described as “one of the handful of writers that count” in the Athenaeum and as “one of the great novelists” in The Daily Telegraph. Qtd in Wendy Moffat, A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E.M. Forster (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010), 104.Google Scholar
  23. 93.
    E.M. Forster, “The Lost Guide,” in Alexandria: A History and a Guide and Pharos and Pharillon, ed. Miriam Allott (London: Andre Deutsch, 2004), 354.Google Scholar
  24. 95.
    Hala Halim, “Forster in Alexandria: Gender and Genre in Narrating Colonial Cosmopolitanism,” Haawa: Journal of Women of the Middle East and the Islamic World 4.2-3 (2006): 237–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  25. 96.
    Robert Mabro, “Alexandria 1860–1960,” in Alexandria: Real and Imagined, ed. Anthony Hirst and Michael Silk (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 250.Google Scholar
  26. 98.
    Amerdeep Singh, “Reorienting Forster: Intimacy and Islamic Space,” Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 49.1 (Winter 2007): 35–54; Halim, “Forster,” 237–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  27. 100.
    See Tamera Dorland, “‘Contrary to the Prevailing Current’? Homoeroticism and the Voice of Maternal Law in ‘The Other Boat,’” in Queer Forster, ed. Robert K. Martin and George Piggford (University of Chicago Press, 1997), 217 n. 18.Google Scholar
  28. 103.
    E.M. Forster, Alexandria: A History and a Guide (1922), in Alexandria, 1–179.Google Scholar
  29. 113.
    Ambreen Hai, Making Words Matter: The Agency of Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009), 101, and Furbank, Forster, vol. 2, 27–9.Google Scholar
  30. 140.
    E.M. Forster, “The Other Boat” (1972), in Life to Come and Other Stories (New York: Norton. 1987), 166–97.Google Scholar
  31. 141.
    E.M. Forster, “Higher Aspects,” in The Prince’s Tale and Other Uncollected Writings, ed. P.N. Furbank (London: Andre Deutsch, 1998), 188–91.Google Scholar
  32. 143.
    E.M. Forster, “Unfinished Short Story,” in Arctic Summer and Other Fiction, Abinger Edition 9, ed. Elizabeth Heine and Oliver Stallybrass (London: Edward Arnold, 1980), 216–25 (all page numbers in text).Google Scholar
  33. 144.
    Patrick Deer, Culture in Camouflage: War, Empire, and Modern British Literature (Oxford University Press, 2009), 69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  34. 147.
    E.M. Forster, “Incidents of War Memoir, Alexandria (1915–1917),” in The Journals and Diaries of E.M. Forster, vol. 3, ed. Philip Gardner (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011), 9–19 (all page numbers in text).Google Scholar
  35. 148.
    Philip Gardner, “General Introduction,” in The Journals and Diaries of E.M. Forster, vol. 1, ed. Philip Gardner (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011), xi.Google Scholar
  36. 149.
    Forster, “Appendix A: Memoir: Mohammed El Adl,” in Alexandria, 322–46.Google Scholar
  37. 151.
    See, for example, Singh, “Reorienting Forster,” 39 and Jesse Matz, “’You Must Join My Dead’: E.M. Forster and the Death of the Novel,” Modernism/Modernity 9.2 (2002), 307–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  38. 158.
    Peter Simkins, Kitchener’s Army (1988) (Barnsley: Pen & Sword Military, 2007), 159.Google Scholar
  39. 159.
    Peter Burroughs, “Crime and Punishment in the British Army, 1815–1870,” English Historical Review 100.396 (July 1985): 547, 549.Google Scholar
  40. 160.
    Phillipa Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (London: Routledge, 2003), 145–76Google Scholar
  41. Erica Wald, “Health, Discipline and Appropriate Behaviour: The Body of the Soldier and Space of the Cantonment,” Modern Asian Studies 46.4 (2002): 817.Google Scholar
  42. 176.
    Joseph Boone, “Vacation Cruises: Or, the Homoerotics of Orientalism,” PMLA 110.1 (1995): 89–107.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  43. 180.
    Moffat, Unrecorded History, 344 n. 151. In a letter to William Plomer, Cambridge, 20 November 1963, E.M. Forster writes, “I think you know that the scraps … surviving from him are gathered in a box, together with some ‘memories’ of him, shymaking and threnodic.” Selected Letters, vol. 2, 1920-1970, ed. Mary Largo and P.N. Furbank (London: Collins, 1985), 287. The word “scraps” recalls the phrase about el Adl’s decomposing body.Google Scholar

Copyright information

© Claire Buck 2015

Authors and Affiliations

  • Claire Buck
    • 1
  1. 1.Wheaton CollegeUSA

Personalised recommendations