The War 217
the Nationalists lay low and looked on all these new
dignities as mere camouflage for a reinforcement of
British rule.
The British protectorate, martial law, and military
administration marked the end of the second phase of
Egyptian nationalism. This phase, as we have seen, was
a feverish and ineffective anti-British agitation of press-
men and propagandists. Driven still deeper underground
and still further afield by the repression of war regula-
tions, Egyptian nationalism now entered its final
(t activist" phase. Press and platform agitation was
to be replaced by carefully plotted aggressions, and by
no less carefully promoted anarchy. For revolutions,
whether nationalist or socialist or both, are a new wine
that does not become milder and more mature by
bottling. The Egyptian movement, that had been safe
in the hands of elderly Constitutionalists and Colonels,
like Sherif and Arabi, and that had been insignificant
in the hands of young journalists and intriguers like
Mustapha Kamil and Abbas Hilmi, was to achieve a
sinister success through student assassins and schoolboy
anarchists.
We have now to see how the war, by its economic and
political exigencies, converted the Egyptians from allies
into antagonists. The argument here advanced is that
we could have fought the Turks and Germans equally
well, indeed, even better, in the Near East without any
pre-war occupation of Egypt, And that we should
not, in that case, have had afterwards to fight the
Egyptians.
The £' war '' between the English and the Egyptians,
that broke out in 1919, originated in our pre-war occupa-
tion and in our consequent obstruction of Egyptian
nationalist aspirations. But the actual rupture was the