242 Egypt
tive expedition was pushing its way up the Nile. War
conditions were by now definitely established; aero-
planes bombed any suspected gathering, armoured cars
and trains fired at any suspicious parties near the roads
and railways. The British soldiery behaved with dis-
ciplined restraint; though, angered by great provocation
and by postponement of their demobilisation, they occa- *
sionally gave a taste of their temper. Sir William
Hayter, a legal official, reports a conversation with a
British corporal (Const. Dev. in Egypt, p. 27) : (f What
we all want/' he said, " is to go home. We are all due
to be demobilised now, and if we are kept other men
will get our jobs. If we were allowed to shoot hard for
ten minutes we should kill a few thousand gippos and
the whole thing would be over. We have had plenty of
provocation, and a lot of us have been caught alone un-
armed and killed. So that's what we would all like to
do. But General Allenby has been round to all the
barracks and he has asked us to go slow and kill as few
as possible/'
The army of occupation, swollen with troops held up
in Egypt on their way home, was now reinforced by
what was urgently required—a controlling civil authority.
General Allenby, as conqueror of Palestine, had a pres-
tige in Egypt comparable to that of Kitchener, and the
sort of personality that Egyptians could appreciate. He
had been summoned to Paris to unravel there the tangle
of the contradictory contracts concluded by our
diplomacy with conflicting interests in Syria. Following
our usual sensible procedure when we get ourselves into
a mess, he was now sent out to Egypt as the biggest
man that could be found, and to do the best that he
could. As <£ Special High Commissioner n he had to
Border and administrate in all matters as requirec( by