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: