At Kafr ed-Dowâr Muhammad was kept drilling conscripts, relieving older
officers who were required for actual fighting. Almost every day he
heard the boom of cannon, the stirring noises of attack and skirmish;
and often in his leisure moments he would perch in some high nook and
watch the flashes, the white puffs of smoke, dispersed upon the green
of level fields between the sea-coast sandhills and the lake--a pretty
sight. Beyond the plain of water skimmed by white-winged birds the town
of Alexandria basked in sunlit haze. Upon the land-plain doves were
wheeling round deserted villages, kites and vultures hovered high in
air. Franks from the seaport rode out in the rearward of the English
troops, and from the vantage-point of dykes and hillocks watched the
operations through their field-glasses. The assaults, as he had told
his mother, were not serious; mere “fantaziyeh” the old soldiers called
them. The aim of the assailants was to keep a portion of Arâbi’s troops
from joining the main army on the banks of the Canal, where war was
being waged in bitter earnest. Muhammad fretted at his dull employment.
The atmosphere of strife, the bugle-calls, the march of men, no
longer satisfied him as at first. He wished to fight, and begged the
general-in-chief, who favoured him, being a close friend of his uncle
Hamdi, to move him to some post of danger. The great one laughed and
patted him upon the back.
“We cannot spare thee yet from the recruits,” he said. “That work is
useful, and it must be done. Think, thou hast given us a thousand
soldiers, none like them for rigidity and speed of motion.”
Muhammad hated the recruits, who still were driven in by hundreds every
day--men past their prime, and boys dragged from the wretched villages,
and active rogues caught hiding in some ditch or patch of cane. The
land had been already drained; the dregs were called for. And they were
stupid, dazed, those fellâhîn; a flock of sheep has more intelligence!
Muhammad, for whom soldiering was a religion and every detail of the
drill had sanctity, was driven frantic by their apathy, their foolish
stare. Dancing with fury, he reviled their mothers and beat them with
his cane about the ears.
“By the Prophet, they are pigs!” he told the son of Ghandûr, who served
him in his tent and hung upon his every word. “Here is El Islâm in
danger; they are Muslims; yet they yawn and gape if asked to hold a
gun. Ah! if I had a hundred Turks instead of them!”
The son of Ghandûr, who to please Muhammad would himself have put
his head into a cannon’s mouth, was horrified at the behaviour of
the conscripts. That they could fail to see the light of inspiration
on Muhammad’s brow was proof sufficient of their utter baseness. For
the same reason he despised the generals. Muhammad was more gifted
for command than they, and yet they kept him ever at this menial
task. Had Muhammad--or his foster-brother even--owned the leadership,
Iskenderîyeh would long since have fallen, and all the English have
been pushed into the sea. He dared to proffer this opinion to his lord
one evening. But Muhammad in his wisdom answered:
“No, we cannot take the town, for this good reason, that a portion of
their fleet, unseen from here, commands it, and would pour in shells to
our destruction.”
Ali received this information with head bowed and thanks to God. He
prayed the Maker of the World to put some mind in the recruits in order
that they too might profit by such high instruction.
It was usual at that time for officers to handle soldiers roughly
on parade, caning them upon the head and shoulders, kicking them,
and heaping on them every species of abuse. Muhammad might be called
indulgent as commanders went; but he was over-much in earnest. His
outbreaks lacked the touch of humour which endears. Old soldiers might
have borne them with a laugh for the sake of his enthusiasm, which was
very evident.
But these were men who had been driven from their homes like cattle,
at the goad’s point. For days they had been herded up in pens in a
provincial town, and there harangued by holy men and maddened by
religious shouting till they lost what little wits remained to them
and hardly knew a true believer from an infidel. Arâbi had proclaimed
the golden age; yet here they were imprisoned, hounded, driven, and
now subjected to the cuffs and insults of a shameless boy. Huddling
together, they looked on with lowered brows, too scared to understand
what the young Turk was shouting. Arâbi had proclaimed the Turks
abolished. Where was reason? They gave forth inarticulate harsh cries
like frightened beasts.
Each squad Muhammad handled seemed more stupid than the last--so stupid
that one early morning an inspecting general advised him, laughing, to
give drill a rest, and take them to the trenches; they were used to
digging.
Muhammad felt the order as a whip-cut; he was furious. The general
despised his work as an instructor, whereas God knew what trouble he
had taken. It was all their fault. In the trenches he allowed them to
do nothing right, but shrieked out contradictory orders emphasized by
slashes of his cane. Slowly it dawned on them that he was quite alone;
the place was hidden by high banks from supervision.
The daily pageant of attack was then in progress. The crackle of a
volley came from no great distance. Muhammad implored Allah to direct
the bullets so as to kill them all, for they were worse than infidels.
He did not notice the changed manner of their breathing, nor the new
fire which smouldered in their eyes.
At a blow across the face, accompanied by frightful insults, a burly
fellow seized Muhammad’s wrists and deftly tripped him. The boy lay on
his back bereft of speech. His captor knelt upon his belly, while the
others crowded round like cattle interested. He could feel their breath.
“Hear, O my little son! Swear by the Sayyid Ahmad to be civil. It were
best for thee.”
Muhammad, with his pride undaunted, answered: “Sinful hog! I swear
to have thee thrashed with the nailed whip and then decapitated. O
Muslimîn! Do you not know that this is mutiny, an awful crime?”
“Then we must finish him,” remarked his captor, with a sigh. “With his
own sword! Here! Quickly, while I stop his screeching.”
The speaker pressed his hand down on Muhammad’s mouth, while another
drew the sword and plunged it several times into the prostrate form.
They watched until the last convulsions ceased; then piously observed:
“Our Lord have mercy on him! There is no power nor might save in Allah,
the High, the Tremendous!”
“By Allah, he could bite!” observed his first assailant, shaking
blood from his right hand. The palm was bitten through. He stopped
to bandage it; and then they made a litter with their spades and so
conveyed the body back to camp with wailing.
“The darling of our souls is dead,” they chanted. “Slain by the
infidels, whom we repulsed. Our brother, Abdul Câder, too, is wounded
in the hand.”
The lie was quite transparent, yet it passed unquestioned. The high
commanders shrugged and let it go. There were a hundred men concerned,
with Allah knew how many sympathizers. They dreaded a stampede of all
the conscripts in the camp.
When Ali, mad with grief, demanded justice, he was told to hold his
tongue. The general was profoundly grieved; he shed some tears, and
swore that every honour should be paid to the remains. A telegram was
sent to Yûsuf Pasha announcing that his son had died a martyr, and that
the blessed body was upon its way to Cairo. Within an hour of death it
had been dressed for burial. It was carried in a fine procession to the
railway, where a special train--a locomotive and an open truck--was
waiting. The corpse was laid down in the truck, and covered with some
tent-cloth; and Ali sat beside it, while the train sped hooting on past
empty villages, where only a few children played upon the dust-heaps, a
few women stood in doorways with hands shading eyes, past palm-groves
and the fields of cotton and of sugar-cane until the citadel rose up
before him in the evening sky.