So far every chapter of this book has opened with a scene, an anecdote or a spectacle that set the tone for the chapter to follow. This chapter, however, opens with an absence of a scene, a scene that one would expect, but is found missing. Given the two cases of death mentioned above and given that the last chapter opened with a scene of battle, this chapter should have opened with a scene of a funeral. However, in all the thousands of documents about Mehmed Ali’s army and his various campaigns there is not a single description of a funeral either of an officer or of a soldier. As illustrated by the example of the two petitions mentioned above, highlighting the absence of the funeral, the hundreds and thousands of men who died in Mehmed Ali’s various campaigns received no dignified burial and the only concern of the authorities was that prompt notification be given about dates of death so as to cut salaries that were sometimes delivered to the men’s families back in Egypt. As far as the authorities were concerned a dead man, officer or soldier, was only a name to be crossed off the army registers and payrolls.

XREF: Connects to the chapter on how authorities treated soldiers as payroll entries (loc 628 on roll-call surveillance and loc 711 on numbered identity), showing death as the final bureaucratic erasure.

Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed…, loc. 1090