There must be something about a Turk that hypnotises an Egyptian. His
country has suffered appallingly under Ottoman rule, and a pure-blooded
Turk can seldom be decently civil to him and considers him almost
beneath contempt. This is the conquering Tartar pose that has earned the
Turk such detestation and final ruin in Arabia, but it seems to have
fascinated the Egyptian like a rabbit in the presence of a python. Quite
early in the Turkish invasion of Sinai a detachment of Egyptian camelry,
operating in conjunction with the Bikanirs, deserted _en masse_ to the
enemy. It was at first supposed that they had been captured, but we
afterwards heard of their being fêted somewhere in Palestine. On the
other hand, an Egyptian battery did yeoman service on the Canal; I saw a
pontoon that looked like a carelessly opened sardine-tin as a result of
its attentions.
The most tragic aspect of this spurious and mischievous propaganda was
its victims from Indian regiments. The Indian Moslem as a rule has no
illusions about the Turks, and will fight them at sight, but there will
always be a few misguided bigots to whom a specious and dogmatic
argument will appeal. There is no occasion to dwell on these cases,
which were sporadic only and generally soon met with the fate incurred
by attempted desertion to the enemy.
We looked on the movement as an insidious and dangerous disease and did
our best to trace it to its source and stop the distributing channels.
After events on the Canal had simmered down, I was seconded to Cairo to
help tackle the movement there: to show how little hold it had over the
minds of thinking Moslems. I may mention that my colleague was a Pathan
major who was a very strict Moslem and a first-rate fellow to boot.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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