A Shaky Do

In the white stucco British army grocery store in Ismailia, 43 British wives and their children were shopping unusually early. "I thought if there was to be trouble, it would be at a respectable hour," said Mrs. Stella Townsend, the wife of a Royal Signal Corps officer. Others had made the same surmise. Mrs. Townsend queued up patiently as the clerk served a neighbor with sausages, biscuits and a packet of sticky gumdrops. A score of British moppets wrestled happily on the floor. Suddenly there were angry shouts in the square outside. A gang of young Egyptians bellowed "Get out, dirty British." Two bricks came crashing through the store window. Scooping up their children, the 'wives ducked behind the store counter, and the manager barricaded the doors.

"In the beginning no one was afraid," said Mrs. Townsend afterwards. "The kids were having fun making castles with the cans. But the crowd set fire to the awnings and the canteen next door. Fire was crackling all around us. The mob broke into a drink shop. We were awfully scared then. People began shouting, 'Where's the bloody army?' It was a real shaky do."

At 11 a.m., a battalion of Britain's 6th Lancashire Fusiliers (infantry) supported by heavy armored cars swung into Ismailia. The fusiliers opened fire: eight Egyptians fell dead, 74 were wounded. Stella Townsend and her friends were rushed home in trucks. Ismailia calmed down.

All last week, ugly anti-British riots flared up in Egypt. The Egyptian government had started it by abrogating the 1936 Anglo-Egyptian treaty under which Britain is permitted to garrison the Suez Canal Zone. Parliament, by unanimous vote, told the British to get out. And by the same vote, Egypt announced its intention to rule the Sudan alone, which Britain and Egypt have jointly administered since 1899. Fired by the brave deeds of Parliament, Cairo mobs howled: "Give us arms. Where are the arms?" Egypt's bloodthirsty Moslem Brotherhood vowed to "knock at the doors of heaven with the heads of the British." At Port Said, the northern entrance to the Suez Canal, student gangs looted stores, over turned a British ambulance, careened through a British army camp hurling "Salah-el-Din cocktails" (homemade fire bombs named for the Foreign Minister). Eleven British army vehicles were burned.

Battle of the Bridge. So it began, but so it did not continue. British tanks and infantrymen rolled into Ismailia and Port Said, and took over railroad stations, harbors and telephone exchanges. Mechanized infantry sealed off the city of Suez. The commander of Britain's powerful Suez garrison is a tough, combat-seasoned soldier, Lieut. General Sir George Erskine, 52, who won the D.S.O. for helping to repel Rommel at El Alamein (said his citation: "He changed the whole course of battle"). "We are not going to be turned out, forced out or kicked out," he announced. His first move: to isolate Egyptian troops in the Sinai peninsula to the east of the canal.

This was relatively easy. The only rail road running east from Cairo to the Egyptian outposts along the Israeli border crosses the Suez Canal by a small swing bridge at El Ferdan (see.map). One night last week, a British lieutenant quietly led his platoon along the moonlit sand dunes approaching the bridge, where Egyptian soldiers stood on guard. There was a short, fierce battle, but in 15 minutes five Egyptians were dead and the British, with no casualties, had the bridge.

British reinforcements poured in. In 36 hours, R.A.F. transport planes airlifted 3,500 red-bereted paratroopers, originally ticketed to Abadan, from Cyprus to Fayid, British GHQ in the Canal Zone. They arrived looking fit, ready and mean. An infantry battalion and the 33rd Airborne Regiment followed. In Britain, 3,000 miles away, four-engine R.A.F. Hastings transports were gassed up to fly the crack igth Infantry Brigade to Suez. The 8,000-ton cruiser Gambia hove into Port Said.

In the Sudan, whose 8,000,000 people have little love for British or Egyptians, it was the same. Sudan, rich in cotton and wide with desert, is 3 1/2times the size of Texas. Its people, Arab in the north, African tribesmen in the south, want their independence. The British think they won't be ready for it for ten years, but may be forced to concede it sooner. Egypt's peremptory claim of control of the Sudan is opposed by all but one political party in the Sudan. And the resident British Governor General, square-faced Sir Robert Howe, is in control. The ist Battalion of the South Lancashire Infantry Regiment, stationed at Trieste, embarked for Khartoum, the Sudan capital.

New Polo Sticks. Faced with British firmness, and unprepared for it, Egyptians reacted with disillusionment and consternation. Nahas Pasha's cabinet was in trouble. Having promised to get the British out of Egypt, if necessary by force, he could not perform his promise. Egypt's under-equipped 80,000-man army, which the Israelis whipped decisively, was no match for Erskine's veterans. The government faced the disappointed wrath of the very crowds it had incited.

Nahas Pasha temporized by proclaiming a campaign of "civil disobedience." Egyptian dockworkers were ordered not to handle British supplies, thousands of Egyptian laborers and clerks were told to leave their jobs in the Canal Zone. But to do the British serious injury, Nahas Pasha would have to cut off food and water supplies to the Canal Zone. This he hesitated to do, since 250,000 Egyptians living in the zone would be the first to suffer. General Sir Brian Robertson, commander of British Land Forces in the Middle East, was coolly confident as he left London for the Suez. "I am taking back with me two dozen new polo sticks," he said, "and have every intention of using them."

Dangerous Lottery. Why had Nahas Pasha acted so brazenly, if he could not match deeds with words? One possibility was that, watching Mossadeq's success, he too expected the British lion to roll over and play dead. A likelier explanation was that he badly needed a diversion at home, where there was much talk of corrupt government. King Farouk had returned from his honeymoon distressed by the reports. Recently when 400 acres of land near Alexandria were sold to the poor at bargain prices, the lists proved that among the "poor" new owners were relatives of Nahas Pasha's wife--her sister, her twelve-year-old niece, ten-year-old nephew, her brother & his wife. At Zitoon, near the Cairo airport, there were 10,000 applicants for another stretch of land. So a lottery was held by the government. The lucky winners included three of Nahas Pasha's cousins, the telephone operator at his residence, four of his secretaries, six of his guards, the Minister of the Interior's brother, and the Minister of Public Works' brother-in-law. Farouk disallowed the lottery.

An economic crisis was building in Egypt (in the past three weeks, the price of Egyptian cotton has plummeted). Amid such unrest, Nahas Pasha had unleashed the furies of nationalism and the always latent anti-British feeling. It was a desperate and dangerous move. If it failed, El Nahas Pasha's wobbly government might fall.

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