He relied implicitly on Saoud el Tihawi to give him news of any further advance by Wolseley, and Saoud always lured him into security. The army at Tel-el-Kebir was the most incoherent one imaginable. Of regular, well-disciplined troops, infantry of the line, there cannot have been more than 6,000 to 7,000, with, perhaps, 2,000 cavalry and a corresponding number of guns served by good artillerymen. This was all the really reliable force. The rest were a half-clothed and wholly undisciplined rabble of recruits and volunteers, good, honest fellahin, hardworking as labourers in the trenches, but of no fighting value whatever. Their total number may have been 20,000, but I have no accurate statistics to go by. Day and night they worked valiantly to complete the unfinished lines, but this was all the military service they possibly could render. Stone Pasha, the American, after the war stated it freely as his opinion that not one of the whole number had even as yet fired a ball cartridge, and this was probably true.
The end came suddenly at dawn on the morning of the 13th of September. There has been much romance written by English military writers of the silent and hazardous night march from Mehsameh under guidance of the stars and of a young naval officer, and doubtless to those who took part in it it seemed that the English army was groping its way blindly to the unknown, but in reality the road had been made plain for them by the secret means I have alluded to. Two of Arabi's minor officers, both holding responsible positions, had accepted, a few days before, the bribes offered them by the Khedivial agents. The names of these two deserve, to their eternal shame, to be put on record.