CHAPTER TWELVE

Food and Drink

ALTHOUGH Lawrence’s most austere attitudes to food seem to have emerged during his time with the Bedouin, (e.g. ‘it was thought effeminate by the Arabs to carry a provision of food for a little journey of one hundred miles…’¹), his restraint in this matter shows as early as his cycle rides in France in 1906. In a letter to his mother of that year from Dinard, he dwells on:

‘…the great difficulty in getting a decent drink in France: milk is not obtainable anywhere and eau de Seltz only occasionally. The result is that one gets very thirsty and the only fruits are plums and pears, their apples are uneatable: I have not had a good one yet… I ate a glorious feast of blackberries.’

But he escaped the guide who was supposed to have accompanied him around the castle he was exploring by visiting at the dinner hour. His letters reveal that he was cycling long distances, subsisting mainly on fruit, bread, and milk – from wherever he could obtain it. The following year, while on a cycling tour to look at castles in Wales, he wrote to his mother from Caerphilly that:

‘I have come to the conclusion that two meals a day with a glass of milk at one o’clock, suit me better than three. At any rate I have always felt fresh on this trip in spite of very hard journeys, and the number of castles has not palled on me. I am fresh for any amount more, and could continue for months.’²

The next year (1908), again in France to study castles for his thesis, he wrote from Cussy-Les-Forges:

‘I am riding very strongly, & feel very fit, on my diet of bread, milk & fruit (peaches [best] 3 a 1d: apricots 5 or 6 a 1d. if very special: cherries don’t count). I begin on 2 pints of milk and bread & supplement with fruit to taste till evening, when more solid stuff is consumed.’³

It is almost as if Lawrence is trying to reassure his mother both that he is well, and that he is not falling into gluttony:

‘… one eats a lot when riding for a week on end at my pace. My day begins early (it’s fearfully hot at midday) there is usually a chateau to work at from 12.0 to 2.0 and then hotel at 7.0 or 8.0.’

His long letter of the same year from the Hotel du Nord at Cordes in Tarn to C.F.C. Beeson (a.k.a. ‘Scroggs’), full of details of places seen between Avignon and Cordes, includes the following passage which combines a characteristic mix of disgust and humour (he had already dismissed Carcassone-Toulouse as ‘… a dirty industrial dung-heap of factories and plate glass’):

‘One’s hotel dinners in Tarn (I’m degenerating into a commis-voyageur, and ca criticisera a ‘plat’ with the best) are weird: I don’t in the least know what I ate last night: I fancy a plough-ox or two (is it a nightmare?) some potatoes were they? Stewed infant or monkey: things like paving stones but not quite so hard, haven’t the faintest idea what; and to finish something indescribable, described apparently in patois as clargh-bult: they were quite possible, but anything from snail to ortolan. The bread – can you ‘degust’ in fancy (blessing your stars ‘tis only so), leather, steeped in brine and bitter aloes, boiled till soft, with a crust like iron, and an aroma like brandy snap? Milk they say is to be imported from Europe next year: butter was brought in the year before last, and is now turned into cream cheese. I should be dead by now only for the Roquefort: ‘tis as common as possible, and with enough of it anything is disguised, even the bread tastes not unlike charcoal. If you’re bored or overworn, come to Tarnais hotel for a week.’4

From Beyrout (Beirut) in 1909, after a month’s walking in northern Palestine, Lawrence wrote a very long letter – nearly 12 pages – to his family, which again included details of his bread and fruit diet, and the social interactions which accompanied obtaining it. He describes how he left Beyrout in early July ‘… and walked straight to Sidon [approximately 30 miles], finally arriving at Heldua [now Khan el Khalde]’ where he first tasted native bread and leben (sour milk, yoghurt). He emphasised that the diet he followed was:

‘… only my lunacy, and the native habit: no other European would think of it: if I have slept the night in a native house then [breakfast] will be ‘Haleeb’ ordered overnight. The people do not usually take this, since it is fresh milk, (boiled, or heated rather, they fight shy of it cold), with quantities of sugar in it… With this will be eaten a sheet of bread no. ii. [previously described, as ‘light grey… very large… circular… very thin… as ordinary brown paper, tough, and pliable, almost leathery when fresh.’]. If still thirsty this is followed by prickly pears. At midday … I eat another sheet of bread… next a spring, if there is one: if not it is consumed on the march, moistened with an occasional drop of water from my water bottle.’⁵

Lawrence goes on to detail the various fruits which could be obtained: ‘Still one can get along in Palestine for fruit’ but, in essence, he is eating the food of ‘the peasant class at this time of year’. So far as drinking is concerned, ‘Nobody drinks anything but water, except coffee for visitors.’ The diet that Lawrence followed on these travels almost closely resembled the ideal Cynic of Classical times – apart from their ubiquitous Lupins. Lucian remarks that the true Cynic would carry beans, barley, bread, and a book: the false one would carry mirrors, razors, dice, gold and perfume.⁶ Lawrence does seem closer to the former: when he did carry gold later, it was for strategic purposes. Indeed, on his return from walking 1,100 miles through Syria and Palestine examining castles in 1909, a lecturer at Oxford who was also a family friend described Lawrence on his return as ‘thinned to the bone by privation’.⁷ By the time Lawrence was at Carchemish excavating a Hittite site, the references to the local food, essentially bread and leben, pass without elaboration, although during this period of the exploring, later written up as The Wilderness of Zin, he did produce a parody menu based on an apparent surfeit of Turkish delight:

Soup, Bread soup.
Then, Turkish delight on toast
Then until yesterday, Eggs
Then, sweet, Turkish delight, Dessert, Turkish delight

The most telling phrase from the same letter to his friend, E.T. Leeds, dated 24 January 1914, contains the above parody menu and the ‘flesh-potter’ remark below and tells us more about Lawrence’s self-definition:

‘… over the consequences of much riding on camels I draw thick veils: but take it as a summing up that we are very unhappy. Woolley is the more uncomfortable, since he is a flesh-potter: I can travel on a thistle, and sleep in a cloak on the ground.’8

On the way to Feisal’s camp for the first time, Lawrence tastes the basic bread cooked from flour and water ‘warmed’ in the ashes of a brushwood fire, and clapped to shake off the dust before sharing.⁹ The more sophisticated version of this bread is discovered on the way to Feisal’s camp, and is described in Seven Pillars on the same journey, symptomatically sweetened and offered by a man in the employ of the Turks as an informant:

‘It was made of the unleavened dough cake of yesterday, crumpled while still warm between the fingers, and moistened with liquid butter… sweetened with ground sugar and scooped up to be eaten like damp sawdust in pressed pellets with the fingers.’

Lawrence and his companions’ next meal was bread and dates. Later, when travelling from Wejh to El Kurr, Lawrence describes the minimal supply of flour they carried:

‘Sherif Yusuf, now back in charge of supply, gave us each a half-bag of flour, whose forty-five pounds were reckoned a man’s pinched ration for six weeks. This went slung on the riding saddle, and Nasir as well took enough on baggage camels to distribute a further fourteen pounds per man when we had marched the first fortnight out from Wejh, and had eaten enough room for it in our bags.’

Lawrence dwells for a moment on the relative luxury of rice:

‘Nasir, a great Emir in his own place, also carried a good tent in which to receive visitors and a camel load of rice for their entertainment: but the last we ate between us, with huge comfort, for the unrelieved diet of water-bread and water, week after week, grew uninspiring. We were beginners in this style of travelling, not understanding that dry flour, as the lightest food which could be carried, was the best for a long journey. Six months later, neither Nasir nor myself wasted transport on rice-luxury.’¹⁰

Lawrence’s own view of the real meaning of hunger emerges clearly in Chapter 59 of the Oxford Seven Pillars, also entitled ‘Across Sinai’ when, having arrived in Akaba (Aqaba), and not having eaten a meal for two days, the Arabs are confronted by palms heavy with dates which were yet small and green:

‘Cooking made them better in the taste but still deplorable afterwards, and we and our prisoners went about sadly, faced with the dilemma of constant hunger or of violent diurnal pains.’

Characteristically, Lawrence turns the situation to account by using it as an opportunity to practise his own austerity, and in a sense to continue perfecting the ‘spiritual equipment’ referred to earlier in this text and which I take to mean ‘moral’ qualities like endurance, self-discipline, willpower etc.¹¹ Lawrence goes on to remark that:

‘… it was good to be sparing, a great aid to continence, and the grosser forms of gluttony fell away from us… [Close readers may notice that the implication here is that the subtle forms of gluttony remain.] The assiduous food-habit of a lifetime had trained the English body to the pitch that it could produce a punctual nervous excitation in the upper belly a few minutes before the fixed hour of each meal: and we sometimes gave the honoured name of hunger to this sign that our gut had cubic space for more stuff. Arab hunger was not a pain but the cry of a long-empty labouring body fainting with weakness. They lived on a fraction of our bulk food, and their systems made exhaustive use of what they got. A nomad army did not dung the earth richly with by-products.’12

For many reasons, including the need to obtain more food, it was necessary to travel the 150 miles to Suez. In the event, this would mean a 50-hour march at walking pace to spare the camels, with only one point of water on the way:

‘to excuse us cooking-halts upon the road we carried lumps of boiled camel, and some broiled dates tied up in a rag behind our saddles: also two skins (about eight gallons) of water. This for a group of eight men.’

One piece of good fortune was the accidental discovery of a field of melons near the end of the journey: ‘… we cracked the unripe melons and cooled our chapped lips on their pith.’¹³

Finally arriving at the Suez Canal, Lawrence found himself, essentially, obstructed by bureaucracy, and signals his impatience and frustration, having spent most of the previous four months in Arabia, and on the move:

‘In the last four weeks I had ridden some fourteen hundred miles by camel, not sparing myself anything necessary to advance the war: but I was not going to spend one unnecessary night with my familiar vermin. I wanted a bath, and something cold with ice in it to drink: and to change these clothes, all sticking to my saddle sores in filthiness: and to eat something more tractable than green date and camel sinew. I got through again to the Inland Water Transport, and talked to them like Chrysostom.’¹⁴

Mentioning ‘Chrysostom’ without specifying whether he meant Saint John Chrysostom, or Dio Chrysostom, is pure Lawrence mischief. Either is plausible and leads to interesting connections. In the first place, chrysostomos is Greek for ‘golden-mouthed’ (i.e. very eloquent) and St. John Chrysostom [A.D. 347-407] was known for his eloquence in preaching, and his impact on the public at Antioch and Constantinople, as well as for his ascetic practices. Editions of his works are available in Greek, Latin, English, and French. Alternatively, Lawrence could have meant Dio Chrysostom, also known as Dio of Prusa [c. A.D. 40-120], a Greek orator, writer, and philosopher, who actually put on the cloak of a travelling Cynic and journeyed widely. A leading figure in the Second Sophistic, (i.e. the resurgence of Greek culture and politics under the Roman Empire, which amounted to a renaissance of Greek cultural interests), Dio Chrysostom is also a source for our knowledge of classical Stoicism and Cynicism. There is even a textual cross-link with another interest of Lawrence – Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana (Apollonius of Tyana and Chrysostom/Dio of Prusa were friends). Given that Lawrence was to dwell on the superiority of Greek literature, one might elect Dio as the intended reference if there was not the suspicion that Lawrence may have been playing on the ambiguity and fertility of evoking both figures; with their connections to the Classical and Christian past.

Lawrence’s philosophy of minimalism in material things, a ‘Gospel’ perfectly instantiated in the diets described above, tied readily into the strategic doctrines he developed to turn the apparent weaknesses of the Bedouin into strengths. A droll feature of Lawrence’s thinking about desert war was his recognition and exploitation of its resemblance to naval war:

‘In character our operations… should be like naval war, in their mobility, their ubiquity, their independence of bases and lack of communication, their ignoring of ground features, of strategic areas, of fixed directions, of fixed points.’15

Of course, Lawrence’s Classical background provided him with the perfectly apposite quote from Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War:

‘He who commands the sea is at great liberty, and may take as much or as little of the war as he will… and we who commanded the desert might be equally fortunate. Camel raiding parties, self-contained like ships, might cruise without danger along the enemy’s cultivation-frontier, and tap or raid into his lines where it seemed easiest or fittest or most profitable, with always a sure retreat behind them into the desert element which the Turks could not explore.’

Lawrence’s personal and fortuitous advantage was that he ‘had traversed most of the country many times on foot before the war, working out the movements of Saladin or Ibrahim Pasha…’ – an oblique, backwards glance to the time spent on his Crusader Castles thesis. In a sense, the key concept ruling these strategic desert war ideas is Mobility:

‘We should use the smallest force in the quickest time, at the furthest place. If the action continued till the enemy had changed his dispositions to resist it, we would be breaking the spirit of our fundamental rule of denying him targets.’

Lawrence achieves the implementation of these goals by using,

‘… the extreme frugality of the desert men, and their high efficiency when mounted on their female riding camels… We had found that on camels we were independent of supply for six weeks if each man left the sea base with a half-bag of flour, forty-five pounds in weight, slung in his riding saddle: and for shorter marches luxurious feeders might also have rice.’

A similar logic applied to water:

‘… we would not want to carry more than a pint each… Some of us never drank between wells, but those were hardy men: most drank fully at each well, and carried a drink for the intermediate dry day.’

The extraordinary mobility which these minimal resources made possible are drawn out by Lawrence: ‘Our six weeks’ food would give us capacity for a thousand miles out and home, which would be, like the water-figure, more than ever we required.’ A year later, Lawrence was to refer back to the motto of the Akaba base – ‘No Margins’; an exact statement of the ruling idea over all material things and particularly in the conduct of desert warfare.¹⁶ With weapons, Lawrence applied a similar line of thought: ‘The equipment of the raiding parties should aim at simplicity, with nevertheless a technical superiority over the Turks in the most critical department.’¹⁷

Sometimes there was respite from the monotony of bread, water, dates, and camel meat, and Lawrence describes some of the episodes when gazelle were shot and sometimes hare, jerboa, and lizards. Nevertheless they are seen as almost weakness by Lawrence: ‘These indulgences amid the exertion and slow fatigue of long unbroken marches gave grateful moments to the delicate townsfolk among us.’¹⁸

One of the rarest delicacies of the food Lawrence notes is the ostrich egg cooked on shredded blasting gelatine. It turns up at a time of particular difficulty. Lawrence has had to share his bread with his tired and hungry camel, they have had burning head winds, and dust blizzards, and have run out of water. Also the hot, flinty ground is laming to the delicate foot pads of camels brought up on the sandy coast or in south-central Arabia. One of their men finds two ostrich eggs, but the desert is so barren that they can only find a wisp of dry grass with which to cook them.

‘The baggage train passed, and my eye fell on the blasting gelatine. We broached a packet, shredding it carefully into a fire beneath eggs propped on stones, till the experts pronounced the cookery complete. They eat it with a silver-hilted dagger from flint flakes which serve as platters.’19

Where circumstances changed, there also the diet varied, and a sharp contrast to the foregoing austerities occurs when Lawrence is sent ‘… two forceful sergeant-instructors from the army school at Zeitun’ to teach the Arabs how to use trench-mortars and Lewis guns. Their names are Yells and Brooke, but they get called Lewis and Stokes after the names of their respective weapons. Although they are warned that they would have to give up their British Army comforts and privileges; they would share with the Arabs an equal treatment. There were no rules, and could be no mitigations of the marching, feeding and fighting inland.²⁰

In fact, Lawrence writes that ‘… they were fitted with clothes, and were lent two of my best camels, and stuffed their saddle bags with bully-beef.’²¹ These kindly concessions to the inexperienced sergeants amount to relative luxury for Lawrence and the Arabs: ‘… we were comfortable with cans of hot tea, and rice and meat.’²² It should be recorded that ‘meat’ here is bully beef, and Lawrence was aware of its strategic implications – at least, presumably, for Europeans: ‘Our cards were speed and time, not hitting power. The invention of bully-beef had profited us more than the invention of gunpowder, but gave us strategical rather than tactical strength.’²³ Nevertheless, Lawrence’s attitude to food shows through in the small details of journeying; for example in Chapter 78 of the Oxford Edition and Chapter LXXI, page 403 of the Penguin Seven Pillars, where, travelling through Wadi Rum with a mixed party of Arabs, Indians, and some English Officers (Wood, Lloyd and Thorne), he ascribes the failure of the group to reach a ‘stiff’ pass leading on to the heights of Batra to ‘laziness and a craving for comfort’. Similarly, eating rice while the English eat bully beef and biscuits, is ‘feasting’ and ‘abundance’. He twice paints a vivid picture of the grandeur of Wadi Rum ‘whose giant hill-shapes are full of design and as far above Nature as great architecture, but beautiful too, as though God had built them ready for some great pageant to which the sons of men were insufficient.’ The next day, having reached the crest, the group looks back to the:

‘… fantastic grey domes and glowing pyramids of the mountains of Rum, prolonged today into even wider fantasies by the cloud-masses brooding over them… Very pleased, we plumped ourselves down in the first green valley over the crest.’

They sheltered from the wind and were warmed by the faint sunshine. Lawrence has set the mood up very carefully for the bathos of his final sentence: ‘Someone began to talk again about food.’²⁴

Although Lawrence and the Bedouin were perfectly aware that their mobility and power depended on the health and number of camels in their possession, they were also very clear that each of the men ‘sat on two hundred pounds of potential meat. If food lacked, we halted and ate our worst camel.’25 Or, in some instances, this was an injured camel:

‘The Howeitat killed them where they lay broken, stabbing a keen dagger into the throat artery near the chest, while the neck was strained tight by pulling the head round to the saddle. The wound soon made them collapse from loss of blood, they were at once cut up and shared as meat.’²⁶

But apart from the bully beef and camel meat feasts produced by accidents, Lawrence describes episodes of great privation, as in Chapter 53, where the lowness of food supply had reduced them to chewing raw parched corn. Lawrence’s teeth were not up to this: ‘… a trial too steep for me, and mostly I had ridden fasting.’²⁷ That is, until friendly peasants provide the ‘luxury’ of a bag of corn – a day’s bread. Where exotic foods erupted into the desert world bringing real luxury, it was usually a side-effect of blowing up trains, a situation described in Chapter 92: ‘Nuri Said and the officers had artificial tastes, and rescued tinned meats and liquors from the wilder men.’ The Bedouin did not even want ‘olives and other Syrian food’ [page 532]. Again, as with Lawrence’s 1913 College Magazine article, The Kasr of Ibn Wardani, and his letter to Vyvyan Richards in July 1918, there is a view, in this instance behind the phrase ‘artificial tastes’, about the legitimacy or value of certain tastes, even culture itself, which is almost Cynic in its purity and severity. Curiously, Said and the officers rely on the Islamic distinction between ‘allowed’ (Halal) and ‘forbidden’ to ensure that the luxury foods are rejected (‘thrown in disgust at their heads’) so that they themselves can enjoy them. On the other hand, having obtained a whole truck of tobacco destined for the Turks in the Medina garrison, Feisal, himself a smoker, sends some pack-camels loaded with cheap cigarettes to them, out of compassion.²⁸

Where Lawrence meets troops who eat regularly and well, he registers amazement, as with the Egyptian Army near the railway line between Deraa and Damascus. There the expectation is that the troops will demolish large amounts of line. Then Lawrence finds out that nothing is happening because:

‘Peake’s Egyptians [were] having breakfast… like Drake’s game of bowls… The Egyptian Army, proud of its regularity, indeed one of the most formally beautiful alive, fed gigantically several times a day. To the men, food was a solemn duty, enjoined, an exigency of service. No doubt it did them good, but today they vexed me. We others in these scrambling days of action ate nothing, or ate something unseen as we went, whenever the raiding halted for a moment, and gave leisure for fatigue or hunger.’²⁹

In other words, the Bedouin exemplify the Stoic views expressed by Epictetus: ‘In things relating to the body take just as much as bare need requires’, and ‘It is the mark of an ungifted man to spend a great deal of time in what concerns the body.’ Both Lawrence and Epictetus’ attitude (and the Cynics for that matter), is that these bodily things should be dealt with en passant and are not, and should not be, ends in themselves. Militarily, Lawrence has turned the Bedouin minimalism, essentially based on poverty, to account to achieve an extraordinary strategic mobility. Philosophically and morally, Lawrence seems to turn away from the body – at least the pleasure-seeking, domesticated body, with its slavery to habits and routines, towards an existence oriented towards a personal mobility valuing mind and aesthetic experience, and duty, in time of war.

None of the foregoing strictures seem to apply to coffee and tea, although Lowell Thomas records that Lawrence did not drink these at home and was a devotee of water. Perhaps this is because coffee and tea are relatively blameless and, furthermore, much important hospitality and sociality is built round their consumption. Even so, when describing camp routine in the early days with Feisal, Lawrence makes a point of remarking that: ‘Sugar for the first cup in the chill of dawn was considered fit.’30 That is, not taken for granted: permitted.

The only group who out-distance the Bedouin and are described by Lawrence as ‘a race’, not a tribe, are the Sherat: ‘To look upon, they were Arab, only perhaps better made, and stronger of body.’ Their various excellencies seem to confirm Lawrence’s usual opinions about the merits of the desert over the town:

‘They were harder-living and more ascetic than any Bedouin. Often they spent years in the open without visiting a market, existing on samh [a kind of flour, as described earlier], and dates, and camel milk.’

Earlier Lawrence had remarked that ‘… they made it their pride to find the desert sufficient for their every need.’³¹ Characteristically, Lawrence establishes their low social standing by writing that they were ‘an enigma’ and ‘brave fighters’, but with no blood enemies or tribal organisation, but also that they ‘… were split up all over the northern desert as helots among the Arabs. They were outcasts… Other men had hopes or illusions. The Sherat knew that nothing better than physical existence was permitted them by mankind in this world or another.’ Climbing a hill with a Sherari youth gives Lawrence enough respite to reflect that:

‘The austerity of these great heights had shamed back the vulgar baggage of our daily cares. In the place of Consequence, it set Freedom, power to be alone, to slip the escort of our manufactured selves; a rest and complete forgetfulness of being.’

As if to balance the ways of the desert-dwelling Sherat, within two pages Lawrence describes the character and hospitality of one Mohammed el Dheilan who is camped with Auda. Auda is in the midst of a violent money dispute with Toweiha Bedouin. Lawrence sketches Mohammed el Dheilan’s merits: ‘a better diplomat because less open than most Arabs… we were made very welcome by him, and given a luscious platter of rice and meat and dried tomatoes.’ However, the sting at the end of the paragraph, signals Lawrence’s judgement, somehow not unconnected with the idea of freedom (from the ‘manufactured self’): ‘Mohammed was a villager at heart, and fed too well.’³²

As a counter-balance to the near cult of desert minimalism, with which Lawrence clearly had great affinity, a whole chapter of Seven Pillars is devoted to feasting with the Howeitat tribe, a level of hospitality, virtually unlimited, being provided in the form of twice a day feasts for an indefinite period. Lawrence describes the cooked mutton and rice, and the rituals attendant upon its consumption in great detail: enough to evoke nausea in the fastidious, or relish in the hearty:

‘… they ladled out over the main dish all the inside and outside of the sheep, little bits of yellow intestine, the white tail cushion of fat, brown muscles and meat and skin, all swimming in the liquid butter and grease of the seething… they poured the gravy… till it was running over and a little pool congealing in the dust. That was the final touch of splendour, and the host called us to come and eat.’³³

It is almost as if Lawrence wants to draw the contrast between the Sherat and the Howeitat as starkly as possible. In his first person reflections a few pages later, Lawrence writes:

‘Of course it was monotonous, but in return the crystal happiness of our hosts was a visual satisfaction, and to have shattered it a crime. Our education had been to cure us of prejudice and superstition, our culture to make us understand the simple. These people were achieving for our sake the height of nomadic ambition, a continued orgy of seethed mutton, and it was our duty to live up to it. My heaven might have been a lonely soft armchair, a book rest, and the works of poets, hand-set in Caslon, hand-printed on the best paper: but I had been for twenty-eight years well-fed, and if Arab imagination ran on food-bowls, so much the better for them. They had been provident expressly on our account.’

In fifteen meals a week, they had eaten fifty sheep.34

Lawrence’s private views about food pre-date his time in Arabia, and were quite firm as early as 1913 when he was digging at Carchemish. For example, in a letter to his family on 15 June he wrote,

‘As for poor appetite, which in Arnie Father deplores, it is a thing to be above all thankful for. If it were himself who felt no desire to eat, would he not rejoice aloud. To escape the humiliation of loading in food, would bring one very near the angels. Why not let him copy that very sensible Arab habit, of putting off the chewing of bread till the moment that instinct makes it desirable. If we had no fixed meal-hours, and unprepared food, we would not fall into middle age.’³⁵

Here we have an interesting anticipation of the views expressed in Seven Pillars over having no rules about food, and not living by bells and timetables (and death being hastened by regularity and habit). Also, an attitude completely harmonious with the standards set by the Stoic Epictetus: the things concerning the body to be done in passing. Later, writing to his mother from Cairo in January 1917, and evidentially replying to her enquiries, he writes:

‘I live with him [Feisal], in his tent, so our food and things (if you will continue to be keen on such rubbish!) is as good as the Hejaz can afford. Personally I am more and more convinced that it doesn’t matter a straw what you eat or drink, so long as you do not do either oftener than you feel inclined.’³⁶

Consistent also with Epictetus’ teaching were the views of the early Christian saint and mystic, St. Anthony of the Desert [251-356 A.D.] who, taking an even stronger line, which Lawrence may have known, would eat alone on account of a certain shame at concessions to the body:

‘For when going to food and sleep and the other needs of the body, shame came upon him, thinking of the spirituality of the soul… He used to say that we should give all our time to the soul, rather than to the body.’

The same biography of St. Anthony³⁷ then quotes from the Gospel of St. Luke, 12:29-31, the words of Jesus Christ:

‘Be not solicitous for your life what you shall eat, nor for your body what you shall put on, [Luke 12:22]. And seek not what you may eat or what you may drink, and be not lifted up; for all these things do the nations of the world seek. But your Father knoweth that you have need of all these things. But seek ye first his kingdom, and all these things will be added to you.’

By the time Lawrence has entered into the post-war world, his views on bodily activities in general, and food in particular, harden, and become almost doctrinaire. This is especially so after his ejection from the RAF and his entry into the Tank Corps. Lawrence was incredibly idealistic about the RAF and loathed the Army even though he stayed in it for two years. He described the army as having:

‘… a pervading animality of spirit, whose unmixed bestiality frightens me and hurts me… I react against their example into an abstention even more rigorous than of old. Everything bodily is now hateful to me (and in my case hateful is the same as impossible)… I sleep less than ever, for the quietness of night imposes thinking on me: I eat breakfast only, and refuse every possible distraction and employment and exercise.’38, 39

Here it is as if Lawrence is retreating within, away from the body, to a kind of inner citadel. His practice of fasting, and near fasting, seems to empower him, and it is an equation seen by the M.P. Ernest Thurtle – wherever there is a choice between comfort and freedom, comfort is always sacrificed. Of course, socially, joining in activities, including meals, would have drawn him nearer to these men whose bestiality so distressed him.

The space outside the Tank Corps at Bovington where Lawrence found some respite was, of course, his famous cottage at Clouds Hill. E. M. Forster, who was a visitor, has left an account of the place, including Lawrence’s arrangements for feeding his guests. As might be expected, Lawrence compromised, not offering his selected guests the bread and cheese he would have eaten himself, nor falling into taking the ‘loading in of food’ too seriously:

‘We drank water only or tea – no alcohol ever entered Clouds Hill… and we ate… out of tins. T.E. always laid in a stock of tinned dainties for his guests. There were no fixed hours for meals and no one sat down. If you felt hungry you opened a tin and drifted about with it.’

Forster also remarks that:

‘To think of Clouds Hill as T.E.’s home is to get the wrong idea of it. It wasn’t his home, it was rather his pied-à-terre, the place where his feet touched the earth for a moment, and found rest.’⁴⁰

Lawrence confirms this in a letter to Mrs Charlotte Shaw: ‘I do not wish to feel at home… Homes are ties…’⁴¹ In a letter to A.E. Chambers, Lawrence also emphasised the style of the place, being consistently with Forster: ‘No food, except what a grocer & the camp shop & canteens provide.’⁴² As always, Lawrence is resisting the ‘household gods’ of domesticity: routine, comfortable ‘excessive’ feeding – in short, anything which would hold him down and compromise his freedom and mobility. Lawrence’s detachment from food emerges in a minor reminiscence of the couple who ran the fish and chip shop at Bovington Camp. Apparently, Lawrence was fond of fish and chips, and Mrs. Knowles, the mother of Pat Knowles, his neighbour at Clouds Hill, would buy them for him. However, if Lawrence came into the shop to buy them himself, he would leave rather than queue if there was anyone else in the shop. Mrs. White told the local historian, Harry Broughton, that she solved the problem by ignoring the other customers, and instantly making up a parcel of fish and chips as if he had ordered them in advance.⁴³

By the time Lawrence was out of the Army, and finally back in the RAF, he registered his happiness in a letter from Cranwell to Tank Corps friend, E. Palmer. After itemising the various duties he would be undertaking, he writes, ‘Feel odd and strange: exhilarated: crazy sometimes. Is it going to meals does that?’44 Evidentally, proper meals had become such a rarity for Lawrence, that he ascribed his reaction to getting what he had wanted for years – entry into the RAF – to meals.

Lawrence’s views on food, and the danger of over-eating, emerge even when translated into a semi-humorous key, and are addressed to a 14-year old. To S.L. Newcombe in 1934, he wrote:

‘May you have a quiet Christmas with nothing abnormal to eat. Avoid gluttony, above all. Remember your figure, and the figures your parents ought to have. If you observe them over-eating, clear your throat gently to attract attention, and say “A bit high this bird?” That will put them off it. If they bring in plum puddings and things, remark in a blasé accent… the normal speech, I mean, of Eton… “Isn’t it jolly, papa, to keep up these old customs? It’s like Dickens, isn’t it, I mean, what?’ That will throw a chill over the whole meal-time – I mean orgy. You owe a duty to your family at Christmas.’⁴⁵

Endnotes

¹    Seven Pillars, Oxford Edn., p. 70.

²    Letters, Ed. Garnett, p. 47.

³    Ibid., p. 53.

⁴    Ibid., p. 59.

⁵    Letters, Ed. Garnett, pp. 65-66.

⁶    See Cynics, William Desmond, p. 79. Compare also, ‘My Arabs were turning their backs on perfumes and luxuries, and looking out towards the wilderness, choosing the things in which mankind had had no share or part.’ Seven Pillars, Oxford Edn., p. 20. Penguin Edn., p. 38.

⁷    Letters, Malcolm Brown, p. 23.

⁸    See Cynic Epistles quoted earlier: ‘make it a habit to sleep in a cloak on the ground.’

⁹    Seven Pillars, Oxford Edn., p. 68.

¹⁰  Ibid., p. 242.

¹¹  See Safety Last, Col. W. F. Stirling, p. 83. ‘His powers of endurance, too, were phenomenal. Few of even the most hard-bitten Arabs would ride with him from choice. He never tired. Hunger, thirst and lack of sleep appeared to have little effect on him. He had broken all the records of the dispatch riders of the Caliph Haroun al Raschid which had been sung for centuries in the tribal sagas.’

¹²  Seven Pillars, Oxford Edn., Ch.59, p. 339. Penguin Edn., p. 323.

¹³  Seven Pillars, Penguin Edn., p. 325.

¹⁴  Seven Pillars, Oxford Edn., p. 344. Penguin Edn., p. 326.

¹⁵  Seven Pillars, Oxford Edn., Ch.65, ‘Irregular War’, pp. 367-373.

¹⁶  Seven Pillars, Oxford Edn., pp. 645- 646. Penguin Edn., p. 557. ‘I crossed out forage for the camels after Bair, cut down ammunition, and the petrol, and the number of cars, and everything else, to the exact point which would meet the precise operations we planned.’ p. 645.

¹⁷  Seven Pillars, Oxford Edn., p. 369. Penguin Edn., p. 346.

¹⁸  Seven Pillars, Oxford Edn., p. 266.

¹⁹  Ibid., Oxford Edn., p. 269.

²⁰  Ibid., Oxford Edn., Ch.67, p. 380.

21  i.e. canned or pickled beef; corned beef.

²²  Seven Pillars, Oxford Edn., p. 381.

²³  Ibid., p. 201.

²⁴  Seven Pillars, pp. 440-441.

²⁵  Ibid., p. 369.

²⁶  Ibid., pp. 248-249.

²⁷  Ibid., pp. 309-310.

²⁸  Seven Pillars, Oxford Edn., Ch.92, p. 532.

²⁹  Ibid., Ch.125, p. 723.

³⁰  Seven Pillars, Oxford Edn., Ch. 21, p. 112.

³¹  Ibid., pp. 271 and 442-447.

³²  Ibid., p. 447.

³³  Seven Pillars, Oxford Edn., pp. 283-288.

³⁴  Ibid., p. 291.

³⁵  Home Letters, 15.6.1913. Also quoted in Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia. The Authorised Biography, p. 124.

³⁶  Letters, Ed. Malcolm Brown, p. 103.

³⁷  St. Anthony of the Desert by St. Athanasius, pp. 56, 65.

³⁸  The idea of ‘abstemption’ looms in the Seven Pillars, but occurs as early as 1916. ‘It’s a bad life this, banging about strange seas with a khaki crowd very intent on banker and parades and lunch. I am a total abstainer from each, and so a snob.’ Selected Letters, Ed. Garnett, p. 91. See also ‘We abstinents… in the friendly silence of the desert.’ Seven Pillars, p. 564, Penguin Edn.

³⁹  Letters, Ed. Garnett, pp. 415- 416, [1923].

⁴⁰  E.M. Forster, quoted in Letters, Ed. Garnett, pp. 435-6. From an article in The Listener, 1 September 1938.

⁴¹  Letters, Ed. Malcolm Brown, 1929, p. 424.

⁴²  Letters, Ed. Garnett, p. 436.

⁴³  Rodney Legg, Lawrence of Arabia in Dorset, p. 38.

⁴⁴  Letters, Ed. Garnett, pp. 481-2.

⁴⁵  Letters, Ed. Garnett, pp. 837-838.