In fact, she saw him only for a moment, ere he ran to catch his train. She wept a little at the disappointment, but his visit had relieved her of a weight of sorrow. She had only to dispatch a telegram and he would come again. Moreover, she was now quite certain he was not in danger.
When told by Yûsuf that her drives must cease, because the horses had been taken for the army, she did not complain, but hired a donkey when she had to pay a call; nor could the prospect of a famine frighten her. Her mind had rest. Each evening brought the news of an Egyptian victory. The English would be driven out. Her son was safe. Once more she joked and dreamt with Umm ed-Dahak.
XXXII
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 seacoast 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 fellahin; 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 Islam 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 overmuch 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
