War Post has lagged a little since August - I’ve moved to Cairo for the year to study at AUC, mostly Middle Eastern history, improving my fu’usa and learning Egyptian colloquial. I’m taking three history classes: State & Society, the Ottoman Empire: 1699-1914; After Empire: Nationalism and Social Movements in the ME, 1914-present; and a seminar focused on Jordan and the Palestinians, which is so far a history of tribes in what became Transjordan. We’re reading conflicting accounts of the creation of Transjordan — Abdullah was a miracle from the Hijaz; Abdulla was just lucky; Abdullah was a dolt and a spendthrift — which opens the class to the field of Jordanian history-making. Much of the class ethos, perhaps, centers around Andrew Shryock’s Nationalism and the Genealogical Imagination, a book that seek to bring oral histories out from under their textual authoritities. Specifically, Shyrock wants to recognize the oral histories of the Adwan and the Bani Sakhr tribes alongside the written-down, national narrative of Hashemite Jordan to form a new understanding of the modern state and a new model of how we measure histories as accurate, "authentic" and influential.
I’m waiting on the Imperial War Museum to see if I can post some of their archived sources here. Andrew Carroll gratiously passed along information on a few Mesopotamian letters at the museum as he tours America for Operation Homecoming. In the meantime, I continue to record bits of life in Egypt on my other blog, while still keeping War Post updated.
The photo is an aerial shot of the Giza Plateau during World War I. I don’t know the date, but if it’s after 1920, maybe we can see Winston Churchill below, sketching the Pyramids between treaties. Here is an except of a British soldier’s stop-over in Cairo, before joining General Allenby’s army to take Palestine.
In my new unit, U.U. Cable Section, I found a couple of enquiringly minded fellows, and we spent many evenings exploring native Cairo. We met with far more courtesy than hostility.
One evening we found ourselves in a kind of courtyard where men were sitting smoking, and where children were playing. In a corner were three or four not-too-fat cats. Dusty - so called because his name was Miller - bought a piastre worth of meat at a little shop and we cut this up with jack-knives and fed the cats.
This caused quite a stir. The men made friendly noises, and a number of them offered us sweetmeats. Afterwards in that quarter we were always greeted as "The askaris who fed pussini".
Sapper H. P. Bonser, Royal Engineers (Signals), February 1916 to July 1919. Foreign service units: 74th Divisional Signal Company, Egypt, Southern Palestine; Detached Duty, Fayoum Area; U.U. Cable Section. Royal Engineers, Egypt, Palestine, Syria.
First published in Everyman at War (1930), edited by C. B. Purdom. Via First World War.com
