CHAPTER VIII
REBELLION AND INDEPENDENCE
WINGATE—ALLENBY
tc And the Lord said unto Joshua, This day have I rolled away
the reproach of Egypt from off you."—JOSH. v. 9.
As the thunder of the guns and the flares of the battle
fronts died away in the West there came ominous growl-
ings and gleamings from the lowering Eastern horizon,
where storm clouds had long been banking up unnoticed.
The passive, but purely politic, acceptance by Egypt of
the complete subjection imposed by the war entirely
misled British opinion as to the growth of the nationalist
movement that had been going on during the war. Our
rulers either overlooked the movement altogether or
underestimated it. To them it was a petty faction best
treated with contempt, or, wrhen necessary, by short and
sharp coercion. While our writers, even to this day,
explain the rebellion as a sudden explosion of exaspera-
tion with war grievances such as those above enumerated.
Whereas in reality the explosion would have come sooner
or later, war or no war. For the rebellion of 1919 was a
natural development of the nationalist movement of the
whole previous century. It was merely that movement
making good in a month or two the ground it had lost
and the growth of which it had been robbed, not only by
war coercion, but also by pre-war Cromerism.
There were, no doubt, new features and factors in this
last phase of the nationalist movement. The population
had doubled during the British occupation from six and
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