Although the first battalion was not actively engaged in the Afghan war, the officers and men who served in the Khyber Pass received the medal, and the regiment was permitted to add the words “Afghanistan 1879-80” to its battle honours. At the end of the campaign in 1881 the Royal Irish returned to India, and for the next two years and a half oscillated between the great cantonment of Rawal Pindi and the hill station of Kuldurrah. On May 23, 1882, when Lieutenant-Colonel M. MacGregor’s term of command expired, he was succeeded by Lieutenant-Colonel H. Shaw, V.C., and in July of the same year the death of Lieutenant-General Edwards broke one of the few links still connecting the XVIIIth with its campaigns in the middle of the nineteenth century. He died full of years and honours, respected and admired not only by the regiment with which he had passed the best years of his life, but by every officer and man with whom he had served during his long career.[231] Lieutenant-General and Honorary General Sir Alexander Macdonnell, K.C.B., was appointed to replace him as Colonel.[232] A few weeks after the Royal Irish lost their Colonel, the second battalion sailed from England for Egypt to take part in the campaign described in the next chapter. The first battalion continued to serve in India until August, 1884, when in its turn it was summoned to Egypt as one of the corps selected for the attempt to rescue General Gordon from the dangers besetting him at Khartoum. The account of the doings of the first battalion in the Nile Expedition will be found in [chapter xii].
[CHAPTER XI.]
THE SECOND BATTALION.
1882-1883.
THE WAR IN EGYPT.
In [Chapter iv]. the campaign of 1801 is described, in which the Royal Irish regiment played a distinguished part in the expulsion of the French from Egypt. To explain why, more than eighty years later, it became necessary for British troops again to take the field in the valley of the Nile, a few words of historical retrospect are necessary. Our short occupation of Egypt in 1801 was purely military and in no way interfered with the status of the country, which for many years continued nominally to be a province of the Ottoman Empire. In the first half of the nineteenth century an adventurer named Mahomed Ali, who started in life as a small government official in Turkish employ, made himself master of Egypt and conquered the Soudan, a vast no-man’s land, which from Wadi-Halfa, the southern boundary of Egypt proper, stretched for 1300 miles up the valley of the Nile. For thirty years he waged an intermittent war with the Sublime Porte, occupying Syria and threatening the safety of the Sultan in Constantinople itself, until the great Powers of Europe, which in 1827 had combined to destroy the Turkish fleet at Navarino, united in 1840 to save the Ottoman Empire from disruption, and sent a joint naval expedition against Mahomed’s garrisons on the Syrian seaboard. Next year the Sultan made peace with his rebellious vassal, who restored Syria to his overlord as the price of the hereditary viceroyalty of Egypt, which was then conferred upon him. A few years later the opening of the “overland route,” by which mails and passengers for the East were carried between Alexandria and Suez, began to bring Egypt closely within the sphere of British politics; and the completion in 1869 of the Suez canal by a French company, whose moving spirit was M. de Lesseps, the engineer, made the safety of the new waterway, and the good government of the country through which it ran a matter of paramount importance to the British Empire.[233] Yet England by no means desired to add the possession of Egypt to her other burdens. Her attitude is well described by Lord Cromer:
“The general political interest of England was clear. England did not want to possess Egypt, but it was essential to British interests that the country should not fall into the hands of any other European Power. British policy, in respect to Egypt, had for years past been based on this principle. In 1857 the Emperor Napoleon III. made overtures to the British Government with a view to the partition of the northern portions of Africa. Morocco was to fall to France, Tunis to Sardinia, and Egypt to England. On this proposal being submitted to Lord Palmerston, he stated his views in a letter to Lord Clarendon. ‘It is very possible,’ he said, ‘that many parts of the world would be better governed by France, England, and Sardinia than they now are.... We do not want to have Egypt. What we wish about Egypt is that it should continue to be attached to the Turkish Empire, which is a security against its belonging to any European Power. We want to trade with Egypt and to travel through Egypt, but we do not want the burden of governing Egypt.... Let us try and improve all these countries by the general influence of our commerce, but let us abstain from a crusade of conquest which would call down upon us the condemnation of all other civilised nations.’ On another occasion Lord Palmerston used the following homely but apt illustration. ‘We do not want Egypt or wish for it ourselves any more than any rational man with an estate in the north of England and a residence in the south would have wished to possess the inns on the north road. All he could want would have been that the inns should be well kept, always accessible, and furnishing him when he came with mutton chops and post-horses.’”[234]
Unfortunately Egypt was anything but well governed. A thin veneer of European civilisation barely concealed the barbaric methods of the East, and the corruption and extravagance of her rulers were almost incredible. In 1863, her public debt was about three millions and a quarter sterling.[235] Thirteen years later, under the rule of Ismail, it had increased to sixty-eight millions, with a floating or unfunded debt of twenty-six millions more, or ninety-four millions in all. As the funded debt had been contracted in Europe, chiefly in the money markets of London and Paris, and as a large portion of the floating debt was due to European creditors, the English and French Cabinets wrung from the Khedive a reluctant consent that European men of business should be appointed to investigate the financial condition of his country. In 1878, the Anglo-French committee of enquiry discovered that the finances of Egypt were rotten to the core. For the debt of ninety-four millions there was practically nothing to show, except the Suez canal, towards the building of which the Government of Egypt had contributed sixteen millions.[236] There was no money to pay the interest on the bonds, and the old method of raising a fresh loan to pay the interest on those already in existence was obviously no longer possible.
In the hope that the influence of high-principled European men of business would improve the government, the Powers insisted that the Khedive should employ ministers of their selection. He did so, but by resolutely obstructing the officials thus imposed upon him, he reduced the administration to such a state of chaos that in June, 1879, the patience of England and France was exhausted, and with the concurrence of the other Powers and the reluctant consent of the Sultan, the Khedive was deposed in favour of his son, Prince Tewfik. The change of viceroy did not, however, produce the result anticipated. Affairs did not improve under Tewfik’s rule; by the end of 1881 the population was in a ferment; a strong anti-European feeling had arisen among the people, while the army was mutinous, and regarded not Tewfik but Arabi, a clever and intriguing Egyptian colonel, as its master. With the object of strengthening the Khedive’s position, England and France in January, 1882, addressed to Tewfik a “dual note,” stating that they considered his maintenance on the throne as the sole guarantee of good order and prosperity in Egypt. This note, however, in no way impressed the population; the condition of the country daily grew more unsatisfactory, and by May a series of military demonstrations had made Arabi the virtual dictator of Egypt, though Tewfik continued in name to be its ruler. Massacres of Christians in various parts of the country caused an enormous exodus of the European population,[237] trade was completely dislocated, and the safety of the Suez canal appeared imperilled.
The Egyptian army, exclusive of the garrison of the Soudan, consisted of about 9000 men actually serving with the Colours, but more than 50,000 men had passed through the ranks into the reserve, and in the Bedouins, the dwellers in the desert, Arabi had a further reserve, though of very doubtful value. His artillery was powerful; exclusive of heavy guns there were forty-eight batteries of field-artillery, not, however, fully horsed. When war broke out the reserve men were recalled, and 40,000 recruits enlisted, who after a few days’ drill were thrust, virtually untrained, into the ranks. Egypt was rich in horses and camels, and in addition to the horses required for the artillery, eleven thousand transport animals were obtained from the population. Nominally, these beasts were the free-will offerings of their owners, but there is reason to believe that the generosity of their donors was greatly stimulated by the use of the courbash.