re than 10,000,000
Mohammedans in Egypt, but only a small minority of them, under the
most promising of circumstances, could have been counted upon to pay
the least heed to the call of Constantinople. The Egyptian fellah is
anything but a fighter. Lazy, unlearned, unambitious, he is content to
accept his daily lot, perhaps conscious that the British rule has
brought a certain amount of comparative prosperity even to him.

On the other hand, there were in Egypt something like 600,000 nomads,
a very large proportion of whom could be depended upon to follow the
lead of Constantinople. The males of these wild tribespeople were
remarkable fighters, subject to no control, hating the English sway,
and so independent of roads and transport that they could keep busy an
even larger force of less mobile troops. Their chief weakness was
their lack of cohesion and the impossibility of any concerted action
on their part.

This, then, was the native situation in Egypt. In other parts of the
world, where Great Britain maintained sway over large numbers of
Mohammedans, the situation was equally complicated. With the issue of
a call for a Holy War by the Sheik-ul-Islam, the religious ruler of
the Mohammedan world, many well-informed observers looked for a large
measure of trouble in India. So many were the elements of
dissatisfaction, and even open revolt, in India that it was believed
the Sheik-ul-Islam's call would be the match applied to the powder
magazine.

The attitude of the various Indian potentates was uncertain. Some of
them were known to be only outwardly loyal to the British authority.
The now famous incident at the visit of King George to India, some
years before the war, when one of the richest and most important of
the native princes refused to bend the knee, was indicative of very
widespread dissatisfaction. Innumerable cases of individual and even
concerted violence against British rule immediately preceded the war,
and several of these were openly encouraged by native princes.

So far as definite action was concerned, the opening of the war with
Turkey and the months that immediately followed falsified all these
predictions of disaster to British rule in India. Many of the native
princes were effusive in their professions of loyalty to the British
Empire, and several offered personal service at the front or financial
contributions to the huge cost of the struggle.

Notable, and perhaps decisive, was the open adher