part of a small mounted force riding out into a desert morning. He drank in the scenery. They crossed a sandy plain strewn with iron-stone pebbles where the Egyptian infantry was parading to the accompaniment of a band. ‘On the right hand were hills, the near ones bright red with little yellow ochre foothills, the farther ones blue. They were savagely torn and great rents in them were filled with rich blue and plum coloured shadows.’ The squadron advanced to the top of one of these foothills, Signal Hill, and took their bearings. To the north lay Heliopolis, a garden suburb the British had constructed before the Great War. It was built in a quixotic style, a fantastic blend of European and Asian architecture that threw up such follies as a private residence modelled on a Hindu temple. In the morning light it looked like stage scenery. Beyond Heliopolis was the RAF aerodrome, which consisted of a few hangars beside an area of desert that had been levelled and cleared of stones. To the left of that stood the Abbassiyya barracks, and to the west Cairo, al-Qahira, ‘the City of Mars’, crowded onto the banks of the Nile. This plain, these foothills, served as the regiment’s training ground for the next three months.
After two weeks of little more than exercising the horses, the training began in earnest. Officers wore swords and their mounts were caparisoned with the brass-bound, plumed regimental saddlery. The squadron’s first task was to ride on a compass bearing for 6000 yards, to be calculated according to regulation paces. Next they walked, trotted and cantered on the ‘pace track’, a distance of 440 yards marked out with white cairns, timing each pass, then onto the ‘wheeling track’, turning in a figure of eight. It was during these manoeuvres that Shan noticed his plume had worked loose. While they continued to trot and wheel and reform their columns, he tried to loosen its straps so that he could stow it away, but almost unbridled his horse in the process. The result was the straps trailed on the ground and the plume dangled. Hackett bemoaned his ‘congenital unsmartness’ that was always inviting ‘extra and unseen disaster’.
It was not his first gaffe. There was the occasion where he had worn a Tyrolean hat he had been given for Christmas – he was banned from ever wearing it again – and another time he had appeared at a funeral wearing the wrong kind of uniform trousers – he was sent off to change. Twice he had been late for the morning parade, and once the squadron had moved off without him, taking his empty mount with them. Twice he had forgotten his duties when ward officer and had failed to set the watch, but the sergeant-majors expected as much from junior officers and nothing was said. The continuing field drill provided opportunity for plenty more mistakes – dismounted attacks, night manoeuvres, extending and closing in squadron column, artillery formation, line of troop column, patrolling by troops. It was even said that he had got lost on one occasion, a heinous crime, and he continued to have trouble with his plume.
While Hackett was critical of himself, he was not unquestioning of the army. He remembered a ‘most heretical’ conversation with his squadron commander, who asserted ‘there was no such thing as foreign service in the British Army, only home service abroad,’ and suggested Hackett might apply for a colonial job at the end of his commission. Hackett commented, displaying the analytical thinking he brought to bear on the world, and especially on military matters: ‘I suppose any corporate body when it travels preserves the immunity of its constituents from outside influence to some degree. A regiment seems to do so very largely.’ He also cited the corporate attitude as contributing to his own incompetence:
I do not know in my own mind whether this assumption of complete ignorance is a good thing or a bad. Two years in the Oxford University OTC taught me a good deal about section work and section leading, my two attachments with the Bays taught me something about stable management and … manoeuvres … But here and perhaps wisely absolute ignorance is assumed. The only trouble is I have always been as competent (or as anything else!) as people expect and here consequently I have been grossly incompetent. I started on the wrong leg. But there have been fewer raspberries the last day or two.…
The day’s training ended at lunchtime – ‘half a day’s wages, we always said, for half a day’s work,’ Hackett observed. Occasionally there was a lecture in the afternoon, but for the most part the officers were free to do what they wanted. Shan spent many of his afternoons with his polo ponies. By way of preparation for their tour of duty overseas the officers had clubbed together to purchase a string of 120 unmade ponies, bought from breeders in Australia and shipped to Egypt ahead of their arrival.
Polo was then in its international heyday and greatly encouraged in the cavalry regiments of the British Army, where it served, as it had since its origins in Persia, as a training game for mounted combat. It had been introduced by Muslim invaders into India, where the first British clubs were started by tea-planters in Assam in 1859 and by colonial administrators in Calcutta in 1860. Officers of the 10th Hussars saw a game there in 1866 and immediately formed a club of their own. They played a series of exhibition matches against the 9th Lancers in Richmond Park in 1870, and from England the game was exported to the United States and Argentina, where it became a national sport. By the 1930s big games in Buenos Aires attracted as many as sixty thousand spectators. For British cavalry regiments India was still the place to play, although the game was to be found in even the smallest colonial outpost, and the 8th King’s Royal Irish Hussars were due to spend five years in the subcontinent after their two-year tour in Egypt. Their aim was to arrive on the broad maidans of India after two years of warm-up matches with a team ready to take on the dragoons and lancers and hussars already there. Not only does the purchase show what the officers of the 8th Hussars thought they would be doing with their time, but also a great confidence in the continuation of the imperial peace; at the beginning of 1934, although the seeds of war had already been sown, there was no reason to suppose it would not last.
Shan’s ponies were both grey Arab stallions ‘with pretty heads and plenty of quality’. They had both played a good deal, unlike Hackett who had never played before. They were cared for by his syce, Dahab, who called both horses ‘him bony’; Shan called them Joey and Kishmul and many other things besides. He spent hours in the ‘polo pit’ – a wooden horse set up so that a player could practise hitting the ball, rather than his pony, with the long flexible mallet. He spent afternoons knocking about on his own, though his ponies had other ideas: ‘Joey had sudden fits of taking charge which lasted just long enough to make me miss a shot each time, and Kishmul, wanting to go on a bit, crabbed away from the ball.’ He practised so much his hands blistered, but all these exercises could not prepare him for the hurly-burly of the game. In his first match he was ‘carried away twice and quite failed to hit the ball except by accident. I didn’t know where to go except when it was too late to go there and got generally cursed.’ Next time out, ‘four incompetent chukkas’ at the Gezira Club, he started by ‘striking the ball the wrong way and then rarely, after that, striking it at all. Seem to be continually in the wrong place or fouling people.…’ He did improve with practice and, though he never won a place in the regiment’s first team, which toured internationally, he played the game with the same energy he brought to everything he did.
After two weeks of ‘withering sobriety’, Hackett was ready for a party, ‘a blind’ as he had come to say. It started innocently enough. On an earlier trip into Cairo, while shopping for a picture frame, he had found a copy of Vanity Fair, but only the first volume. He had sat reading in a cafe, feeling ‘“out of school” and more myself than I had in a long time’. Now he wanted to get the second volume and after buying it repaired to the Shepheard’s Hotel bar where he had arranged to meet a fellow officer. They proceeded to drink seven champagne cocktails. ‘After the fourth I began to feel very well and after the seventh refused to go home.’
Shepheard’s Hotel was usually where such evenings began. It was an institution amongst Cairo hotels, the first to be built there in the European style. Egypt’s opening to European trade and influences under Mohammed Ali attracted a growing number of visitors and in 1841 Shepheard’s opened its doors to them. If Mark Twain is to be believed the hotel was ‘the worst on earth except the one I stopped at once in a small town in the United States’ – if believed, because he then reproduces an extract from his journal about the place, the Benton House, that shows off all his
