The Second World War and After 201
anti-British feeling, with students marching down main streets
shouting, *We are Rommel's soldiers'. For some time the British
Embassy and military authorities had been coming to the con-
clusion that a stronger government in Egypt was necessary to
secure the military position, and that this could only be secured by
bringing back the Wafd, which had recently been growing restive
in opposition. King Faruq, however, who had dismissed Nahhas
from office in 1937 and was reported to be on the worst of personal
terms with the Wafd leader, refused to accept him as Prime
Minister and insisted on an all-party coalition under All Maliir,
whom the British authorities obviously could not accept as Prime
Minister. The young King was obstinate, and eventually on
the evening of 4 February the British Ambassador and the
G.O.C. British troops in Egypt found it necessary to present the
King with an ultimatum: accept Nahhas or leave the country.
The King yielded, the "Wafd returned to office and easily secured
its position in a general election. Though within a month the
party's secretary, the capable but difficult Copt Makram Ubaid,
and several of his supporters had seceded, apparently as the result of
a personal difference with Nahhas, the Wafd government loyally
co-operated with Britain in the anxious days of June-July 1942,
when the Eighth Army was forced back from beyond Tobruk to
the prepared position of al-'Alamein, only seventy miles west of
Alexandria. In this second great military crisis of the Middle East
campaign, faced clearly with choosing for Britain or the despised
Italians, the Egyptian government and people stood firmly behind
Britain. There was none of the prophesied sabotage and little anti-
British propaganda; the only incidents were that two or three
Egyptian Air Force pilots absconded to the enemy lines, and that
the veteran Aziz al-Misri,1 was detected in intrigue with two
ineffectual German spies who had been introduced into Cairo via
the Western Desert, and was interned for his pains. Arab Asia like-
wise, though apathetic towards the outcome of the war, did not
choose or dare to stab Britain in the back in the perilous days ofal-
' Alamein and Stalingrad; and in Persia the intriguing Franz Mayr
could only dream of the day when lie would raise Persia against
the British, and meanwhile scribble in his diary of 'those three
great strategists—Rommel, Von Bock, and myself.
1 He had attempted to join the Iraqis in the putsch of May, 1941, but his air-
craft was forced down ignorniniously when only ten miles from Cairo.