An army of reluctant conscripts still won spectacular victories

Evidence

The chapter then ends the story of the hypothetical soldier’s connection with the army, that is, with desertion. After that the chapter proceeds to answer a perplexing question of how an army whose soldiers were reluctant conscripts, dragged into it against their wishes, could still manage to produce the spectacular victories that the Pasha’s army accomplished. In an attempt to answer this question it compares the performance of the Pasha’s army with that of the Ottoman Sultan. It also offers a comparison with Napoleon’s army which was the first army to use conscripts on a national scale and along whose lines the Pasha’s army was partially modeled. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 126

Categorization

• XREF: Ties directly to the reader’s goal of understanding the Egyptian army’s actual combat performance versus Ottoman and European models.