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Accordingly, when Turkey entered the war in November, 1914, England took the decisive plunge, deposed Abbas Hilmi, nominated his cousin Hussein Kamel "Sultan," and declared Egypt a protectorate of the British Empire. This stung the nationalists to fury. Anything like formal rebellion was rendered impossible by the heavy masses of British and colonial troops which had been poured into the country.
Mohammed Farid's fanatical impatience of all opposition led him into tactical blunders like alienating the native Christian Copts, whom Mustapha Kamel had been careful to conciliate. They still have faces and bodies similar to those of demons and monkeys, which is a proof that they hide poisonous spirits within their souls.
The reigning Sultan, Malek el Kamel, marched to its relief, and encamping at Mansourah, in the delta of the Nile, fought two severe battles with doubtful success, but could not assist the garrison, who, after holding out for fifteen months, at length surrendered.
Vendors of beads, of fictitious "antiques," of sweetmeats, of what-not; fortune-tellers and all that chattering horde which some obscure process of gravitation seems to hurl against the terrace of Shepheard's, buzzed about him. Carriages and motor cars, camels and donkeys mingled, in the Shâria Kâmel Pasha.
When received courteously in the commodious, royal tent at Mansourah, the contrast to the miseries which his friends were enduring so affected him, that he burst into a fit of weeping, that moved the generous Kamel at once, without conditions, to send as a free gift a supply of provisions to his distressed enemies.
In the glaring heat of the Egyptian high-noon hours a car drew up outside the large hotel in the Sharia Kamel and a more or less soiled and weather-beaten trooper alighted. He made his way up the steps, across the shady terrace and into the dim cool depths of the pillared hall.
Even then they remained, encamped outside, and Kamel continued to watch them from Mansourah, where he built permanent houses, and formed his camp into a town, while awaiting the aid of the natural defender of Egypt, the Nile, which, in due time arising, inundated the whole Christian camp, and washed away the stores.
He who has brought me to this place to-day is my friend, Mustapha Kamel Pacha, the tribune of Egypt, and I owe to his presence the fact that I am not treated like a casual visitor. Our names are taken at once to the great master of El-Azhar, a high personage in Islam, whose pupil Mustapha formerly was, and who no doubt will receive us in person.
We demand a sacred right. The English are the usurpers of that right. This is why we are sure of success sooner or later. When one is in the right, it is only a question of time." Despite his ardent aspirations, Mustapha Kamel had a sense of realities, and recognized that, for the moment at least, British power could not be forcibly overthrown.
In Egyptian eyes a European education was synonymous with a French education, so the rising generation inevitably sat under French teachers, either in Egypt or in France, and these French preceptors, being usually Anglophobes, rarely lost an opportunity for instilling dislike of England and aversion to British rule. The radical nationalists were headed by a young man named Mustapha Kamel.