European armies were as improvised and under-supplied as Mehmed Ali’s

Evidence

If the intention of mentioning these inconsistencies in policies, these logistical problems and bureaucratic complications is not to refute the picture presented in the last chapter but to complement it, it is also important to stress that these were not unique features of Mehmed Ali’s army since, for example, compared to contemporary European armies, his was a hastily prepared and badly copied army. In other words, these problems were not characteristic of attempts at “importing the European army,” the assumption being that this latter did not suffer from these problems. For even if one assumes that Mehmed Ali was mainly borrowing from the French, Napoleon’s army was not as well supplied and properly organized as those studies that concentrate on the Emperor’s military genius would like us to believe. A recent study of Napoleon’s Grande Armée finds that a lot of its campaigns were highly improvised, with corruption, looting, arrears in pay and low morale hitting it and affecting its performance years before the disastrous Russian campaign of 1812.123 Furthermore, the French had themselves borrowed from the Prussians the famous Frederickian discipline and harsh order. But again, the Prussian army was never as well governed as its admirers in the eighteenth century assumed it to be, and Frederick’s iron-fist disciplinary methods could not effectively eliminate desertion that in some crucial moments threatened to make the army melt away. The process of borrowing goes even further: Frederick, in devising his military system, was influenced (ultimately) by Maurice of Nassau, Prince of Orange (1567–1625), who perfected army drill to create the modern Leviathan that fascinated him. Yet Maurice of Nassau looked to ancient Rome for his model, and Rome of course looked to Greece for inspiration. Here, however, the borrowing ends since the Greeks, as is well known, were inspired by the gods. … The point to be made regarding this seemingly endless process of borrowing of military models by “great men” is that there is nothing peculiar about an “oriental prince” borrowing from the “West.” The process of simplification and abstraction, of idealizing the situation of the army that is taken as a model goes on at all levels of the “borrowing” process regardless of who is doing it. At every stage there is the belief that the model had indeed been implemented in a pristine, neat fashion in an earlier time and that what is needed is to try to recreate this past as well as to adapt the model to suit the new reality. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 949

Categorization

• XREF: This echoes the reader’s question about Ottoman Pashas and British Lords comparing armies; connects to revisionist military historiography of the Grande Armée.