GENERAL STEPHENSON IN EGYPT.
pro TRH EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR:1 Srn.,—Perhaps it may make the New Year a little happier to some of your readers if I, an Englishman, relate to Englishmen how faithfully and nobly one of our countrymen has been doing his duty and upholding his country's honour here in Egypt.
General Sir Frederick Stephenson came among us in May, 1883, to command the Army of Occupation. A month later we were facing the cholera. Amidst the absolute panic of the Greek and Levantine, and the stolid indifference of the Moslem, it seemed a bad look-out for our English lads. The Khedive and his Council were at Alexandria, and cut themselves off from all communication with the plague city. But our General was here. He did not abuse or despise any one, but very soon he had organised a sanitary inspection such as this city had never had before. He divided the city into districts. He induced volunteers thoroughly to examine each district daily. Every night at 10 o'clock they brought their reports to his house. Whatever sanitary measures were taken were due to his wise arrange- ments. The cholera left us, and a few months after the news of Hicks's defeat and slaughter fell like a thunderbolt among us. Then out came Gordon, and passed on to the South, —steadfast, earnest, yet cheery. Then we heard how he was encompassed, and we thought surely England was not going to let him die away there in Khartoum. We could not conceive that our leaders would have thought more of the details of the Redistribution of Seats than of the national honour and of our hero in the Soudan. General Stephenson thought, as every thinking man in Egypt did, that the road to Khartoum was by the Red Sea and Souakim. The War Office knows best how often he wrote to them, how strongly he urged and implored that an expedition should be fitted out. He advocated the Snakim route, but when the Nile Valley route was preferred, and Lord Wolseley—a man much his junior—was sent to take the com- mand over his head, who ever heard him grumble, or slack one hour in his efforts to smooth Lord Wolseley's way for him ? Then came hot fighting. Abou Klea and Kirbekan in the Nile Valley, Tamai and Teb on the Red Sea coast, and Cairo was full of anxious little wives, with their husbands at the front. They will not soon forget how kindly he went among them, how he cheered them, and saw that they always had the last informa- tion. And sweet. and sympathising as he was, General Stephenson knew how to be stern and severe. When was there ever an Army of Occupation so thoroughly under discipline P When were any ever molested or insulted that he did not see them righted ?
And so the years passed on, and we all knew and loved our General in his own hospitable house, at our sports and races, at every social gathering, by the grave-side, as one after another of us went to rest, with his white head bowed reverently in our church on Sundays. He came among us at an age when most men are thinking about their ease at home. When it got hot in summer, we went away to Europe ; but not so General Stephen- son. Not a day was he off duty for four years, and he went home last summer only because his health required it.
It was not only we Englishmen that loved him. All loved
him. The spiteful little Bosphore had nothing to say against him. He has always been un parfait gentilhornme. We gave him a dinner the other day. Two hundred sat down, and about half were foreigners. He has been a political factor of the very highest value, tending more than anything we have done in Cairo to cast honour on the English name. Is it not something to he prowl of, to gladden our New Year, that we should have been able to show to the nations such an Englishman as this P Somehow, one does not expect simplicity and purity and unselfish kindness of heart, and unaffected interest in his fellow-men, from an old bachelor used to the Guards' Club and the Albany, and to- London fashionable life. But all these good qualities are to be found in Sir Frederick Stephenson. He gave up his command and left us yesterday. Oh! be kind to him, my countrymen, when he gets home. He will perhaps never command an army again. Perhaps he is too old.
"0 just and faithful knight of God,
Ride on, the prize is near."
So would say many in Cairo, as well as yours truly,
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