1.]

MEHEMET ALI

3

was as brilliant and as complete as the most celebrated of his triumphs; but a month after it was won, the French fleet was destroyed by Nelson at the battle of the Nile. And two years later, after his return from the Syrian expedition, in which Sir Sydney Smith, as he complained, made him miss his destiny, and after that escape, as one may almost call it, in which he only narrowly succeeded in evading the watchful British cruisers, he was doomed to see his trusted locum tenens assassinated by a fanatic, his army defeated and driven by a British force to capitulation and evacuation. Great Britain, however, had far too serious preoccupations in Europe to be able to follow up her advantage. Her own withdrawal from Egypt was delayed but a year or two, and the episode, except in so far as it established, and as it were consecrated by reciprocal sacrifices in blood and treasure the rivalry between the two western Powers, had no other effect than to rehabilitate the sovereignty of the Sultan, to whom on our departure we formally restored his Pashalik.

Yet once again, however, were we to intervene within the next few years. In 1807 the Government saw fit to throw itself into the conflict which had been raging in Egypt ever since the rise of the able but cruel Albanian, Mehemet Ali, and his attempt to crush the Beys and make himself master of the country. He had already so far succeeded as to have been confirmed by the Porte in the Viceroyalty; but his authority everywhere outside of the walls of Cairo was still disputed by the Beys, and on the 17th March of the year above mentioned, a British fleet appearing off Alexandria, with a force of 5000 men, under the command of General Fraser, was received in a friendly spirit by a garrison disaffected to Mehemet Ali, and was admitted into possession of the port and town. This enterprise, however, was destined to end in disaster; and so characteristic was the first reverse that it met with, so closely and curiously, even down to the name of one of the chief victims, does it recall recent events at the other end of Africa, that we cannot

refrain from giving the following extract from General Fraser's despatch to the Secretary of State. After stating that, in view of the risk of starvation incurred by the inhabitants of Alexandria unless Rosetta and Rahmanieh were taken by His Majesty's troops, a force under Major-General Wauchope and General Meade had been detached for that purpose, General Fraser continues :—

I am now under the disagreeable necessity of acquainting you that, contrary to all expectation, this measure did not succeed. Our troops took possession of the heights of Almamandower (which command the town) without any loss; but from circumstances as yet unexplained, the General, instead of keeping his post there, unfortunately was tempted to go into the town with the whole force, without any previous examination of it, when the troops were so severely handled from the windows and tops of the houses, without ever seeing their enemy, that it was thought expedient to retire, more especially as Major-General Wauchope was unfortunately killed, and the second in command, Brigadier-General Meade, severely wounded.

The years roll back indeed as we read these lines and see how fixed and enduring are the qualities of the British General, and what a striking "continuity" our strategic policy displays.

The possession of Rosetta being deemed, as has been said, to be indispensable, a larger force of 2500 men were despatched thither under General Steuart and Colonel Oswald, and bombarded the town ineffectually for thirteen days. On the 25th of April, news being received of large reinforcements having reached the besieged, General Steuart was compelled to retreat, and a dragoon was sent to the officer in command of the advance guard ordering him to fall back. The messenger, however, was unable to reach him, and the advanced guard, numbering 733 men, was surrounded, and its survivors, after a gallant resistance and the exhaustion of their ammunition, made prisoners of war. General Steuart regained Alexandria with the remainder of his force, having lost, in killed, wounded, and missing, nearly 900 men. Some hundreds of

I.]

MASSACRE OF THE MAMELUKES

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British heads were now exposed on stakes at Cairo, and the prisoners were marched between these mutilated remains of their countrymen.

It was not an encouraging experience, and if the adventure had been engaged in as a step in our general anti-Napoleonic policy, it had no effect in eliciting any counter move from France; and no doubt the English statesmanship of the period perceived in process of time that it would be as well to leave Egypt to its own devices and dissensions. Mehemet Ali was left to consolidate his power by the cold-blooded massacre of the Mamelukes in 1811, and to pursue his long career of rule for another thirty years without any interference of ours. French and English jealousy, however, again became acute in 1841, though on this occasion the cause which provoked it was one of a kind unprecedented in Egyptian history since the distant days of the Nineteenth Dynasty. For it arose from the sudden and strange re-apparition of Egypt in the form of a military and conquering Power. During a period of something like a quarter of a century the personality of a singular adventurer, whose struggles for mastery over his rivals had led to the ill-fated military operations of Great Britain above described, overshadowed the whole of the near East, and its whole destiny seemed likely to be permanently modified by the military abilities of his adopted son. Mehemet Ali after stamping out the Mamelukes in the bloody mire of the Citadel courtyard at Cairo, and creating a clear and foeless field for his ambitious projects, made it his first business-concurrently, it is true, with many enlightened undertakings for the civilisation and enrichment of the Egyptian people-to equip himself with an efficient and well-organized army. This done, he looked round for conquests, and for a capable commander to effect them. Nor was he long in finding the instrument he needed, in Ibrahim, his adopted—according to some, his begotten-son, a man in certain respects more remarkable than himself, and endowed assuredly with as fine a natural gift, not only for war

fare, but for military administration, as the East has ever produced. Before his twenty-fifth year he had already shown something of his capacity as a soldier by his successful operations against the rebel tribes of Upper Egypt and the fugitive Mamelukes in Nubia. In 1816, when he was twenty-seven, he led an expedition into Arabia, which resulted, after a three years' campaign, in the conquest of a considerable portion of invaded territory, and in 1820 he annexed the whole of Nubia and a large part of the Sudan to the Pashalik of Egypt. Conscious of the impediments to his complete success which the want of organized discipline in his troops had interposed, he sought on his return to Cairo the assistance of French officers to train them into something like the order and steadiness of a Western force; and after giving them in 1824 some more experience in actual warfare in Greece, when he went to support the Sultan against his insurgent subjects, Ibrahim, by the end of the Greco-Turkish war and the final establishment of Greek independence, was the master of a very formidable military weapon indeed.

In 1831, by the direction of his father, he turned it against their common suzerain, and led an expedition to Syria for the conquest of that province of the Porte. Here for the next two years his career was one of brilliant and almost unbroken success. Unchecked by the loss of 5000 men from cholera before leaving Egypt, he appeared suddenly on the Syrian coast, took Gaza and Jaffa by surprise, and invested Acre. Here for the first time he met with check; but after two unsuccessful attempts to carry the place by storm he was called away to meet an army of relief, commanded by Osman Pasha, governor of Aleppo. Osman, however, dared not face him. He beat a hasty retreat, and Ibrahim, returning to Acre, made a renewed and more desperate effort to carry it, which he succeeded in doing with a loss of 1400 men. Without a pause he marched on Damascus, which offered no resistance. At Hems he encountered and defeated a Turkish army of 30,000 men with a

1.]

IBRAHIM AND THE TURKS

7

force of 16,000, and rapidly following up his beaten foe he overtook them and converted their defeat into an absolute rout. Another victory followed, and finally he had his "crowning mercy" at a spot near Konieh, where he met and routed a force of 60,000 men under the Vizier Reschid. Meantime his fleet had chased that of the Sultan back to the Bosporus, and Ibrahim, without an army to oppose him, was within six marches of Constantinople. Here, however, whether from political hesitations or not, a halt was called by Mehemet, whom Ibrahim always dutifully obeyed; and this alone saved the Ottoman Empire from destruction. As it was, the catastrophe was only averted by Russia and certain other European Powers, the former bringing up her army and fleet to the protection of Constantinople; and even then the Sultan had to pay dearly for his rescue. Syria was ceded to the Pasha of Egypt in 1833, subject only to the condition of paying a tribute to the Porte, and Ibrahim was made governor of the conquered province.

Again, however, was a call to be made on his military prowess. War broke out afresh in 1839, and at Nezib Ibrahim dealt a second deadly blow at the Turkish power. Again Constantinople was actually within his grasp; but again the commands of Mehemet Ali forbade him to follow up his success, and it was in the interval of diplomacy which followed that the conflicting policies of France and England brought the two nations to the verge of war.

France had from the first given veiled, and sometimes hardly veiled, encouragement to the ambitious designs of Mehemet Ali and his warlike son. What she desired in the first place, was to interpose a strong and independent kingdom, worked upon by French influence, between Great Britain and her Asiatic possessions; and, secondly, since her recent establishment of a footing in Africa by the conquest of Algiers, it was distinctly to her interest, in view of a future eastward extension of her African domain, that the territory which she