E. M. Forster and The Egyptian Mail: Wartime Journalism and a Subtext for A Passage to India

131 E. M. FORSTER AND THE EGYPTIAN MAIL: WARTIME JOURNALISM AND A SUBTEXT FOR A PASSAGE TO INDIA By Martin Quinn Safaa Hejazi (Pennsylvania State University) (Al-Azhar University, Cairo) Overcome by urgings to do something more like war-work than cataloguing paintings at the National Gallery, Edward Morgan Forster volunteered in 1915 to serve in Alexandria, Egypt, with the British Red Cross as a hospital "searcher." The Khedival palace at Montazah had been converted into the largest Red Cross hospital outside of England, and with the Dardanelles campaign Alexandria had become a busy center for processing wounded soldiers. Though frustrated by orientalist Gertrude Bell in his initial effort to sign up, Forster eventually pulled enough strings until he got the job and took passage to Egypt in late October. The work itself involved searching the hospital wards for missing soldiers, preparing reports as each new wave of wounded arrived, and generally making himself useful writing letters for patients, taking their watches to be mended, and acting as unpaid solicitor with the status of an officer. Irritated, as he wrote, by his relation to the war rather than by the war itself - which he nonetheless perceived as a disaster for civilization - Forster had decided to absorb what experiences the conflict offered.*â– Rupert Brooke, in uniform early in the war when some Bloomsburyites were still pacifists, described the attitude of Forster and others in his circle as that of "nice and nasty children outside a circus, who alternately try to peep under the flaps and explain to each other how they despise circuses."2 Yet Forster had another reason for peeping under the tent flaps since he was still in the thralls of the creative cramp that interrupted his Indian novel two years before. Moreover, the completion of the unpublishable Maurice. his novel of homosexual catharsis, had proved less stabilizing than he had anticipated. Thus, the war provided a convenient though plausible excuse for the lapse in his powers of creation. Egypt in 1915 had been effectively under the administration of the British Consul-General (Lord Cromer, Gorst, Kitchener and their successors ) for more than thirty years since the Alexandria bombardment and the suppression of the Arabi revolt in '82. The British were uneasily tolerated in what they themselves regarded as a second-rate part of the Empire, but after the barbarity of the Denshawai incident their years as occupiers in Egypt were clearly numbered. In June 1906 at Denshawai, a village in the Nile Delta, a pigeon-shooting party of British officers was met by a delegation of fellahin (farmers) objecting to their sport. Apparently unbeknownst to the army of occupation, pigeons form a valued part of the Egyptian peasant's economy, supplying both fertilizer and an occasional meal. In the resulting confrontation a farmer's wife was shot and one of the officers died, probably as the consequence of a head injury and sunstroke. Reprisals by the British were extremely severe. After a show-trial, four of the Egyp- 132 tians were hanged from a gallows erected in the village while others were flogged at intervals during the executions; several more villagers were sentenced to prison terms. To this day every school-child in Egypt knows the horror of Denshawai.3 Forster would later write in a pamphlet of recommendations on the government of Egypt, produced for the Fabian Society in I920 during a period of renewed unrest in the Protectorate, that "hatred of the British has hardened the national character" of a people once praised for "such plebeian virtues as industry, good temper," and lack of "initiative."^ Although he had looked forward eagerly to his Egyptian venture, which he supposed would last only a few months, the first sight of this ancient land filled him with a sense of disappointment. It did not measure up to the "real East" emblemized by India. Nevertheless, Forster adjusted to his assignment and gradually found his interest in the country heightened, though he would never be captivated by it to the extent that he had been by India. His friendship with the Alexandrian poet Constantine Cavafy, however, was a decisive factor in channelling his intellectual energies towards several lectures, a series of...