The publication of The Four Feathers in 1902 established A.E.W. Mason’s reputation as a writer of adventure stories. Over the next forty years, the book sold nearly a million copies. The plot turns on Harry Feversham’s receipt of four white feathers accusing him of cowardice for refusing to enlist in Britain’s military campaign in Egypt in 1882. Subsequently, he attempts...
Chain of Fire: Campaigning in Egypt and the Sudan, 1882-98 by Peter Hart. None of the British soldiers seems to have had much interest in the religious or tribal basis of the Mahdist uprising. One civilian who did, the poet and Egyptian nationalist Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, was characteristically scathing about the morals of the British officers, ‘whose ideal is the green room of the Gaiety [Theatre]’, and who, in pursuit of promotion at home, thought nothing of butchering men who were fighting to defend a ‘thousand years of freedom’.