Because conscript fellahin soldiers were illiterate, only officers’ accounts of battles survive

Evidence

Most significantly, “battle pieces” are always written from the viewpoint of the commanding officer. A sign of a good commander is his ability to think in abstract terms, to see units rather than individuals, to notice flags and banners rather than the men doing the actual fighting and killing, and to impose the map he so well rehearsed reading before the battle on the rugged terrain he now sees in front of him. Soldiers for him are not visible; instead what he sees are their battalions, regiments, and divisions; groups of men that he maneuvres around within the confined arena of the battle field and in the limited time he has. The soldier appears in these classical pieces of military history following orders with “no sudden burst of undisciplined valour.” He obeys orders, acts in unison with his fellow soldiers and together he marches forward with them to “engage with the enemy.” In other words, the “battle piece” portrays the soldier as the kind of man that the training manual we saw in the last chapter wanted the conscript to become: a man robbed of his instinctive reactions who shows no fear, feels no grief; is moved by no horror; instead he appears as a characterless, machine-like, alienated being. … Again, the language is one of order, discipline and uniformity. This is particularly so in the case of documents pertaining to the army which, by their own nature, attempt to describe things in a standardized, “recognizable and universally comprehensible vocabulary” which leaves very little space for human emotions and feelings. What complicates matters further is that the fellahin of Egypt, those thousands of soldiers who made up the bulk of the fighting force of Mehmed Ali’s army, were, for the most part, illiterate and did not leave us written material to tell how they felt and what they thought of this “new order” of the Pasha. What we are left with, for the most part, are documents that offer accounts of battles as experienced by officers: orderly, neat, exact. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 905