CHAPTER XVI THE CAMPAIGN OF TEL-EL-KEBIR

left away from the field of action. This was the third of the original "three colonels," Abd-el-Aal Helmi, a valiant fighting man as any in the army. For some time past he had been employed in what was at one moment the important duty of defending Damietta from a possible British landing, and he had with him some of the very best troops, notably the Soudanese regiment which had been Abd-el-Aal's own. Had these, with their commander, been brought at once to Tel-el-Kebir, they might have saved at least the honour of the army, for Abd-el-Aal was one who could be relied upon for forward action, and his troops were full of spirit and undiscouraged by defeat. It seems, however, still to have been thought that Damietta needed its garrison, for I cannot find that the Military Committee so much as suggested Abd-el-Aal as Ali Fehmi's successor. I have sometimes thought that Yakub Pasha Sami, the President of the Military Committee at Cairo, good service as he had done in organizing the war, had at this time been tampered with by the Khedive's agents. He was a Mussulman, of Greek origin, and so one of the ruling class, and there are documents in my possession which show him, though Arabi's right-hand man at the War Office, as always a Khedive's man rather than a Nationalist. The Khedive seems to have counted him as such, and as in other instances after the war, treated him for that reason with exceptional rigour, and he was one of the seven Pashas exiled to Ceylon, though the attitude he adopted before the Judges had been one of servile repentance and protestations of loyalty. Of his deep jealousy of Arabi the