The end came suddenly at dawn on the morning of the 13th of September. There has been much romance written by English military writers of the silent and hazardous night march from Mehsameh under guidance of the stars and of a young naval officer, and doubtless to those who took part in it it seemed that the English army was groping its way blindly to the unknown, but in reality the road had been made plain for them by the secret means I have alluded to. Two of Arabi's minor officers, both holding responsible positions, had accepted, a few days before, the bribes offered them by the Khedivial agents. The names of these two deserve, to their eternal shame, to be put on record. The first was Abd-el-Rahman Bey Hassan, commander of the advanced guard of cavalry, who was placed with his regiment outside the lines in a position commanding the desert road from the east, but who on the night in question shifted his men some considerable distance to the left, so as to leave the English advance unobstructed. The second was the already mentioned Ali Bey Yusuf, in command of a portion of the central lines where the trenches were so little formidable that they could be surmounted by any active artillery. By the account generally given, and Arabi's own, he not only left the point that night unguarded, but put out a lantern for the guidance of the assailants. Other names have been mentioned to me, but not with the authority of these two, and I therefore prefer not to put them down. As to the two I have given, their position as traitors was notorious for years at Cairo, as little secret was made of it by them, especially by Ali Bey Yusuf, who complained freely of the scurvy treatment he had received for his services. £1,000 indeed had been paid him down in gold before the battle, but a further promise of £10,000 had never been kept to him, nor did he succeed in obtaining more from the Government, when he had spent his first round sum, than a poor pension of £12 a month, which was paid him to his death.
Arabi and the rest of the army, deluded by Saoud into a false security as to that night at least, slept profoundly, the poor men in their trenches and Arabi at his headquarters, about a mile to the rear. Thus, without any warning, they suddenly found the enemy upon them, the lines crossed at their weak point by the English, and a little later artillery in their rear. The vast number of the recruits fled without firing a shot, half-naked as they were sleeping, worn out with their constant labour of entrenchment, and having thrown their arms away across the open plain, and were cut down in hundreds as they ran. It was a mere butchery of peasants, too ignorant of the ways of war even to know the common formulas of surrender. This was in the centre and to the right of the position. To the left a more gallant stand was made, especially where Mohammed Obeyd was in command, and here and there all along the lines by the Egyptian artillery. The whole thing lasted hardly more than forty minutes. Mohammed Obeyd fell gallantly fighting, and with him the flower of the regular army, and many gunners too who had stuck obstinately to their guns. But at the end of an hour the fighting was wholly over, and what remained of the National army was a mere broken rabble.
As to the part played personally by Arabi that fatal morning, I have the evidence, besides his own, of a very worthy man, Mohammed Sid Ahmed, his body-servant, who in 1888 entered my service as manager at Sheykh Obeyd and remained two years with me. From him I have over and over again heard the events narrated. According to Sid Ahmed, the whole camp that night was in profound slumber, having been assured by the scouts that the English were making no movement, his master's headquarters at about the centre of the whole camp, but more than a mile in rear of the front line of trenches, as undisturbed as the rest. The Pasha had undressed and gone to bed as usual and slept soundly through the night, nor was any one awake before the sound of the guns announced the attack. Arabi then threw hastily on his uniform and got on horseback and rode towards the firing, followed, among others, by his servant, also mounted. They had not, however, got far when they were met by a crowd of fugitives, who declared that all was lost, while Saoud's Bedouins also were galloping wildly about, adding to the general confusion. The Pasha, Sid Ahmed assured me, did his best to rally the men, and continued to advance towards that part of the lines where Mohammed Obeyd was still holding out, but was gradually borne away with the rest, and yielded to his (Sid Ahmed's) prayers that he would seek his safety in flight. The idea that his master had any duty of dying on the field of battle was always wholly absent from Sid Ahmed's mind, and he prided himself on having succeeded in persuading him. They were both well mounted on horses, which had been sent to Arabi by one of the Bedouins of the Western Fayoum, and reached the Tel-el-Kebir station just before it was occupied by the English, and though unable there to take train, got across the small canal bridge before it closed, and so by the causeway to the other side of Wady Tumeylat, whence they galloped their best for Belbeis. They were alone, Arabi having been separated from his staff in the confusion. Arabi's one idea now was to get to Cairo before the news of the disaster should arrive and prepare the city for defence. At Belbeis they took train and reached the capital not long after noon.[27]
Arabi, on his arrival in Cairo, seems to have had hopes still of continuing the patriotic struggle by defending the city. He went straight to the Kasr el Nil and assisted at a council being held there by the members of the War Committee, but a compromise of opinion was all that he could obtain, namely, that while it was decided in principle to make submission to the Khedive, the question of defending Cairo against the English army was reserved. Nor had the matter got any forwarder next day when Drury Lowe with his Indian cavalry arrived at Abbassiyeh. The truth is all heart had been taken out of the official resistance by the intrigues of the Khedive's agents, and by Arabi's proclamation by the Sultan as a rebel having become known. Only the rabble of the streets, as yet ignorant of all, were still in favour of a defence. The military circumstances of Cairo were that it possessed nominally a large garrison, but these were all the newest of new recruits, and although they would probably have been sufficient to hold the citadel and so dominate the town, they could not have made a long defence without great destruction of property in the lower city. For this no one was prepared, and the sudden arrival of Drury Lowe decided the question with the War Committee for capitulation, and it was resolved to send him, according to his demand, the keys of the citadel. Arabi then seeing that all was over, and on the advice of John Ninet, with whom he had spent the night in anxious debate at the house of Ali Fehmi, drove to Abbassiyeh, and there surrendered his sword as prisoner of war to the English general.[28]
FOOTNOTES:
[22] "It is no exaggeration," Lord Dufferin asserted, "to say that during the last few months absolute anarchy has reigned in Egypt. We have seen a military faction, without even alleging those pretences to legality with which such persons are wont to cloak their designs, proceed from violence to violence, until insubordination has given place to mutiny, mutiny to revolt, and revolt to a usurpation of the supreme power. As a consequence the Administration of the country has been thrown into confusion; the ordinary operations of the merchant have come to a standstill; the fellahin, no longer finding purchasers for their produce, are unable to pay the land-tax, and the revenues of Egypt are failing. This state of things has placed in extreme jeopardy those commercial interests in which the subjects of all the Powers are so deeply concerned. Not only so, but those special engagements into which the Governments of France and England had entered with Egypt have been repudiated; the officers appointed to carry them into effect have been excluded from the control they were authorized to exercise, and the system which had begun to work so greatly to the advantage of the industrious cultivators of Egypt has been broken up and overthrown.
"But these effects form only a portion of the deplorable situation which has excited the anxiety of Europe. It is not merely the public creditor who has suffered extensive damage. The life and property of every individual European in the country have become insecure. Of this insecurity we have had a most melancholy and convincing proof in the brutal massacre by an insolent mob of a number of unoffending persons at Alexandria, and in the sudden flight from Cairo and the interior (a flight which implies loss to all and ruin to many) of thousands of our respective citizens.
"It is evident that such a condition of affairs requires a prompt and energetic remedy."
[23] The following is from my journal of 1887: "January 31, Cairo.—Called on Princess Nazli. She is at least as clever as she is pretty. Her conversation would be brilliant in any society in the world. She told us a great deal that interested us about Arabi, for whom she had, and I am glad to see still has, a great culte, talking of his singleness of mind and lamenting his overthrow. 'He was not good enough a soldier,' she said, 'and has too good a heart. These were his faults. If he had been a violent man like my grandfather, Mehemet Ali, he would have taken Tewfik and all of us to the citadel and cut our heads off—and he would have been now happily reigning, or if he could have got the Khedive to go on honestly with him he would have made a great king of him. Arabi was the first Egyptian Minister who made the Europeans obey him. In his time at least the Mohammedans held up their heads, and the Greeks and Italians did not dare transgress the law. I have told Tewfik this more than once. Now there is nobody to keep order. The Egyptians alone are kept under by the police, and the Europeans do as they like.'"