Roughly one in two conscripts deserted Mehmed Ali’s army

Evidence

During the early years of the Syrian campaign it was difficult to know exactly how many men went missing from their units at any one time; the roll-calls gave estimates as low as 10 percent and as high as 25 percent of the size of any one regiment. Six years into the campaign, however, Mehmed Ali received a report which was most alarming regarding deserters. It said that as many as 60,000 men had gone missing from the army in addition to 20,000 from the navy! Bearing in mind that the army could not have been larger than 130,000, this means that for every two conscripts, one soldier managed to desert. — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 1349

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s prior work on honor and military service in this book — the desertion rate starkly measures how little soldiers identified with the campaign.