LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter One

      ‘The East is a career,’ wrote Benjamin Disraeli in his novel Tancred, or The New Crusade published in 1847, but just what sort of career lay ahead for John Winthrop Hackett was far from certain. His regiment, the 8th King’s Royal Irish Hussars, the regiment in which his great-grandfather had served in the eighteenth century, arrived in Port Said on 29 December 1933 aboard the Nevasa. ‘I was glad’, he wrote, ‘to be in the East again.’ He was so glad, he embarked upon an all-night bender with a group of other young officers. They started at the casino and dined at the Eastern Exchange Hotel, before being led by ‘a persuasive person in a blue dressing gown’ to an unsavoury part of the town where a floor-show was staged for them in an equally unsavoury establishment. For some who served in the ‘sensuous and despotic’ Orient their career was a headlong one towards dissoluteness.

      The first time Shan Hackett passed through Egypt he had been a serious Australian teenager en route to a place at New College, Oxford. He returned with a taste for champagne, two degrees and a thirst to learn about the world; as an officer in the British (rather than the Australian) Army he would have the chance to see some of it. There may also have been a financial motive. His widowed mother had remarried and the bulk of his father’s fortune had gone to various public institutions as a result. In life his father had been a philanthropist, but in death he was more than beneficent; his endowment to the University of Western Australia remains, in real terms, the largest single bequest to an academic establishment in Australian history. They named a wallaby after him. Shan said later that he was glad he had not inherited a fortune as it would have made him bone idle, yet the modest means left to his mother were severely depleted by the Great Depression. He may have come from ‘the uppermost crust’ of Australian society, but he was frequently short of money while he was at Oxford, not least because he ran with a rich crowd, and in 1931 he pledged to join the army on graduating, thereby supplementing his irregular allowance with a subaltern’s pay.

      He was an unlikely-looking soldier, short of stature, only five foot six, and slight, but he had a competitive toughness, resulting perhaps from his antipodean upbringing, which earned him a half-blue at lacrosse, and a physical recklessness that directed him to the biggest jumps while out hunting. He had grown up with horses, and a part of the allure of joining the 8th King’s Royal Irish Hussars stemmed from the fact it was still a mounted regiment. As strong was the desire to make his name outside Australia, where, because of his father’s standing, he would never have been sure that his achievements were entirely his own. He was only too aware of the burden he had inherited with his father’s name. He was both proud of his family history and eager to escape its colonial confines. In joining his great-grandfather’s regiment he was at once honouring his ancestry by reconnecting with his Irish forbears and striking out for himself.

      All these circumstances led the second lieutenant unsteadily to Port Said’s waterfront at dawn on the morning of 30 December. His companion, a captain in the East Surrey’s, was even shakier than Hackett, on whom it fell to hail a passing dinghy and negotiate a passage back to the Nevasa. The fisherman and his wife rowed them across the still harbour. It was so calm and quiet that the sound of a dog barking reached them from miles away, quiet that is until the captain started singing at the top of his voice, the raucous song bouncing between the hulls of the dimly lit ships lying at anchor. They paid double the agreed fare. The fisherman presented them with a crab which they gave to the sentry, who signed them in as having returned at midnight.

      No amount of coffee could restore Shan for the arduous day ahead and his mood was as flat as the desert through which the train ran towards their barracks at Abbassiyya, just outside Cairo. The sand stung his eyes. The station was crowded with men from the 14th Hussars who were to leave that night and his sore head could have done without the band that led them into the troops’ quarters. There was no let-up that night either as he had friends in the departing regiment and so did not get to bed until midnight. He had slept for only eleven hours in the preceding four days; the following night being New Year’s Eve, his aggregate was not set to rise by much. There was a party at Shepheard’s Hotel. On New Year’s Day there were arrangements to be made for the start of training the following morning, after which Shan paid a visit to the stables to see his pair of polo ponies. So ended his first three days as an officer of the Cairo Cavalry Brigade.

      By the time the British took control of Egypt in 1882 the country had been ruled by foreigners for more than two thousand years, ever since Alexander the Great was confirmed as Pharaoh by the priests of Memphis in 332 BCE. Greek was supplanted by Roman rule in 30 BCE, whose centre shifted eastward to Constantinople during the fourth century CE. The Byzantines were defeated in their turn not only by a new Arabian power, but also by a new religion. The armies of Islam established a camp before the walls of the Byzantine fortress, Babylon-in-Egypt, in 641, from which the city of Cairo grew. As a province in the empires of Islam, Egypt was ruled in succession by the Umayyad dynasty of Damascus, the North African Fatimids, the Abbasid Caliphs of

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