The British Occupation 125
sequent resistance to the British, Arabi had been acting
under the Khedive's authority. Tewfik had even refused
to take refuge in the fleet when warned (July 6) of the
impending bombardment. But when, from his roof at
Ramleh, he had seen weighty reasons for believing that
the British meant business, he bribed his guards to take
him by train to Alexandria instead of, as arranged by
Arabi, to Cairo. There, in the Ras-el-Tin Palace, where
Mehemet AH had been bullied by Napier, he waited, under
guard of British marines, the final defeat of his subjects.
Dervish returned to Constantinople, where he was put
under arrest, while Sherif, Sultan, and other pacific
Constitutionalists joined Tewfik under protection of the
British. A triple treason that greatly weakened the
Egyptian cause, for the army could no longer claim to
be fighting either a djehad for the Khalif and the Khedive
or a war for a national Constitution. No doubt, in strict
Islamic doctrine, the Khalif and the Khedive, by taking
sides with the infidel, had divested themselves of all
authority over the Faithful. But the fact remained that
both had proclaimed the Nationalists to be rebels and
mutineers, which exposed them to treatment as such not
only by foreign armies, but by fellow Moslems. We have
since seen the Turkish Nationalists defy a similar denun-
ciation by Sultan and Khalif with a sublime contempt and
complete success. But Egyptians are not Turks, and the
prestige both of British arms and of the Khalif's authority
was greater before than it was after the Great War. Nor
was the defection of the Constitutional leaders any less
injurious in that it reduced the Nationalists to a mere
military faction. Others, who did not openly desert to
the enemy, only remained at Cairo the better to betray
the Nationalist cause. For Tewfik and his associates
could command not only the backing of foreign steel * but