130 Bill Gordon on the Situation [1894 



under Lloyd, who has local rank as Pasha, and that there is great dis- 

 like and jealousy between the black troops and the Egyptian troops. 

 The blacks, he says, would like nothing better than to have a go in at 

 the Egyptians, whom they hate and despise. He himself inspected the 

 troops on the frontier a few weeks ago as head of the Store department, 

 and found the Egyptian battalions, the 6th and 7th, in a very slovenly 

 condition. It was just these that the Khedive picked out to praise, and 

 not the others, of which he said they were a disgrace to the army. 

 Lloyd, he tells me, has been a great upholder of the Egyptian soldiers, 

 maintaining, contrary to all other opinion, that they are as good as the 

 Soudanese, ' but I fancy,' he added, ' he has changed his opinion now.' 

 Gordon is very severe on the Khedive, but his post, if I mistake not, 

 is one of those newly-made ones as to which there was an objection 

 raised (by the Legislative Council). 



" nth Feb. — Brewster Bey called on me this afternoon, having been 

 sent by the Khedive to thank me for my article in the ' Nineteenth 

 Century,' and to talk over the situation. He is a little man of about 

 thirty-five or perhaps more, an Englishman, he told me, born in Devon- 

 shire, but who has contracted a slightly foreign accent. He came to 

 Egypt the same year we did, in 1876, first as a clerk in the customs at 

 Alexandria, and then at the time of the Suakim campaign for three 

 years at Suakim, where he served under Kitchener, when Kitchener 

 was Military Governor there. He did not tell me how he happened to 

 get the post of private secretary to the Khedive, but he is clearly an 

 honest man, who, from his sympathy with native Egypt, has fallen 

 into disfavour with our people. ' I am on the black list,' he said, ' at 

 the Agency, and beyond leaving cards once a year, I see nothing of any 

 of them.' 



" He spoke in the warmest way of his young master, Abbas, and was 

 indignant at the treatment he had received in the affair of the frontier. 

 ' Will you believe it,' he said, ' but to the present moment the Khedive 

 does not know precisely what he has been accused of saying? He has 

 never been informed.' I urged him very strongly to get the Khedive 

 to put his own story on paper, and not by word of mouth, to Lord 

 Cromer, who would repeat it to our Government after his own fashion. 

 It ought to be done officially through Tigrane and at once. I asked 

 him exactly what the true story was, and he told me that what the 

 Khedive had told him was that after the review at Wady Haifa, the 

 second battalion, which is an Egyptian, not a black one, under English 

 command, had got out of order in the manoeuvres ; that when alone 

 with Kitchener he had expressed himself strongly about it, saying that 

 it was a disgrace to see good troops so badly handled ; that Kitchener 

 had resigned and then withdrawn his resignation, and had told the 

 Khedive the matter should remain a secret between them, and that 



