TOPICS OF THE DAY
THE FALL OF ARABI.
SIR GARNET WOLSELEY has conquered Egypt at a blow. Something is due to the failure of the Egyptian troops, who, as we said last week, were just not brave enough, or trained enough, or numerous enough to benefit by their immense advantages, or by their discovery of the true method of defence against Europe ; and something to the disgraceful selfishness of the leader of the revolt, who refused even to die with his dupes ; but much more is due to the genius of the British Commander. Sir Garnet Wolseley has justified him- self and those who selected him once for all, and the military chiefs who, in their horror of " that damned intellect," have so long attributed his uniform success to luck, must now be at last convinced that it is not necessary, in order to be a General, to be an ignoramus. From first to last, Sir Garnet Wolseley has forecasted rightly, prepared carefully, and struck straight ; and now, within a month of his leaving England, Egypt is at his feet. He carried out the rush on the Canal, exactly as it had been arranged with the War Office weeks before, without losing a man, and then, establishing himself on his new base at Ismailia, prepared to deliver a crushing blow. Amid a hailstorm of criticism, some of which he heard, for he answered it officially, with his plans ' interrupted by the treachery of the Porte, who, in their desire to protect Arabi, laid an embargo on his transport, and with the constant pro- vocation of petty'attacks, which would have stung an inferior General into a premature advance, he continued his prepara- tions till he was completely ready, drew together his forces, from India, from Alexandria, and from England ; and on the day he had himself indicated to his chiefs, delivered his blow at the centre of the Egyptian strength. Then Arabi dis- appeared. The main body of the Egyptian Army had, Sir Garnet knew, been concentrated in Tel-el-Kebir, where, armed with all modern weapons, including sixty Krupp guns, and pro- tected by strong entrenchments, it awaited the British attack. The two problems were to reach the works without the awful loss of life which the Turks inflicted on the Russians at Plevna, and to gain the full advantage of the individual superiority of his men, and the General solved both. He marched at night, thereby paralysing the tremendous fire which over the last two long miles would have swept the British ranks, and have cost us not three hundred, but three thousand men ; and he ordered the soldiers to trust to their bayonets, instead of their rifles. Both orders involved great risks, for an army in motion at night is liable to endless confusion, and only superiority in the men could have saved them in their rush with bayonets into redoubts defended by five times their number of Regulars armed with Remingtons ; but Sir Garnet Wolseley knew the conditions accurately. The attack- ing force reached the entrenchments almost unobserved, and with scarcely any loss ; the rush was led by the Royal Irish and the Highland Brigade, and in less than twenty minutes all was over. The British General had succeeded in bringing his Europeans face to face, hand to hand, with Asiatics, and throughout history there has been but one unbroken result from that position. We do not see that the Egyptians deserve the name of " rabble," bestowed on them by the Times. They died in heaps, they almost flung back the Royal Irish, they sacrificed in twenty minutes five per cent. of their number ; but victory, for them, was hopeless. Terriers might as well rush on St. Bernards. They were shattered into mobs, cut down in hundreds, driven bodily out of the redoubts, to be charged and dispersed and massacred by cavalry, as invincible by them as Crusaders by the Saracens who had conquered the Eastern world. It was so when Charles Martel hurled himself on the " Moors," when Sobieski charged the Turks, when Napoleon reached the Mamelukes, when the Russians escaladed Kars, and it will be so to the end. When Europe and Asia touch, with nothing intervening, Asia goes down. The battle was over in twenty minutes, and Sir Garnet Wolseley, possessing the cavalry with- out which no enemy in Asia can be quite destroyed—for no enemy can be caught—followed up the flying foe relentlessly. The cautious preparation was exchanged for the rashest and wisest speed of movement. Zagazig was taken, Belbeis was occupied, the General himself took the train—how strangely it must sound to old soldiers I—to occupy Cairo, where his cavalry arrived, after a rapid forced march, at seven o'clock on Thursday, only forty-three hours after he had given the final order for the attack on Tel-el-Kebir. The Army which had revolutionised Egypt, troubled Europe,
and roused England into warlike action, had been swept away in one grand rush, organised with coldly scientific care, and carried out by soldiers who felt the struggle a delight. We shall hear no more of General Wolseley's " military mistakes," or " over-cautious delays," and we trust there is an end, too, to the chatter about the necessarily degenerate character of young and unflogged soldiers, and the impossibility of a Liberal War Minister organising victory. The capacity of organising and leading armies belongs to no party. Louvois believed in right divine, but Carnot was a consistent Red.
With the fall of Tel-el-Kebir, the strange spectaele which always follows a victory in the East once more presented itself to mankind. The keystone of the structure had been knocked out. A few thousand men had been driven out of an entrenchment, and a whole country submitted as to a decree of fate. The telegraph is hardly rapid enough for the sur- renders. While the defeated Army was still scattering, while the' Bedouins were actually astride of our communi- cations, while nothing was known save that the British had won Tel-el-Kebir, Zagazig and Belbeis submitted without a blow. The news was flashed to Alexandria, and the popu- lace of the bombarded city shouted for the Khedive and the Queen, and the deserted palace was filled in an hour with loyal courtiers. It was flashed to Kafr Dower, and the second-in- command of the revolt, with 5,000 regulars and defended by earthworks thirty feet high, cut the dams which debar Alex- andria from her water supply, and humbly begged permission to surrender his fortress at discretion. It was conveyed to Cairo, not by the telegraph, but by Arabi, who arrived a fugi- tive and alone ; and the populous capital, with its crowded university, El Azhar, centre of all Egyptian " fanaticism," and but a day before the centre of the Arab world, hailed the Infidel conqueror as a deliverer. God is great, and has decided,—he is the master. Arabi Pasha, but two days before master of Egypt, and known from Damascus to Acheen, the admired of every tongue, the possible Mehdi to be followed by millions, the flail of the Infidels, was arrested by the Pre- fect of Police like aily other malefactor, and delivered up un- conditionally to the British General. The higher officers of the Army surrendered in dozens at a time. The men dispersed to their barracks and their homes, all accepting the foreigner who had won as the destined ruler. There is not only no re- sistance left, but no wish to resist, no more hope that the war could still be protracted, than Englishmen would have hope of wearing out the lightning or an earthquake ; and there would not be, if Sir Garnet Wolseley proclaimed from the Mame- lukes' Leap that henceforward the Queen would rule in the Valley of the Nile. The conqueror must rule ; where is the humiliation in that ? If God willed otherwise, otherwise it would have gone. There may be trouble with Bedouins, trouble with Turks, trouble with sanitary enemies, but of resistance from the population of Egypt there will henceforth be none. Does the Englishman acknowledge the Khedive ? Then every Egyptian is, till a new defeat happens, the humble and loyal subject of Mehemet Ali's House. It is a strange scene, and may explain to perplexed minds why Plessey carried Bengal, and why two hundred millions of Indians, half of them brave, have so long accepted their laws from the leaders of sixty thousand barbarians, who always win in the field.
The entrenchment of Tel-el-Kebir may yet prove a land- mark in history. Had Sir Garnet Wolseley been foiled, had he even been detained for weeks, as the Russians were before Plevna, all Asia might have risen on the Whites, and a war have commenced to which this campaign against Arabi would have been child's-play. Thanks, however, to the genius of an Irishman—do not let us forget that when we next face the Seces- sionists—thanks to the spirit his stubbornness in refusing to retire at Mahuta maintained in his troops, and thanks to the toiling energy of the Minister at home, to whom no one as yet gives his meed, victory was not only secured, but secured with that completeness, that strong, irresistible dramatic rush, which tells to the Asiatic unmistakably the voice of Destiny. At Peshawur, in Patna, in Madras, in Hyderabad, at Teheran, in Damascus, in every centre of Mussulman feeling, it is known to-day that in Egypt Islam had risen, that the battle had been fought, and that in twenty hours El Misr—the one land, except Yemen, of which every Mussulman knows—had been struck down prostrate at the Englishman's feet. Within a week, every detail will be known in Mecca, and the Asiatic world will have decided by a plebiscite no reflection will reverse that, in the unaccount- able providence of God, the hour for slaughtering out the swine-eating Infidels is not yet. Be Arabi accursed l
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