Be that as it may, as far as both wars were experienced by the soldiers who did the fighting and not by the commanders who drove them to their deaths there are significant similarities between them that make comparison worthwhile. In both wars there was an underlying current of discontent with the war, of "pacifism," to use a modern term, a feeling that the war was futile, purposeless and unnecessary. In spite of the subsequent attempts to write such "pacifist" tendencies out of the official narratives of both wars, the record shows that in addition to their reactions to the horror, anguish, fear and panic of the actual combat situation the men often broke down and refused to continue with the slaughter. During the Great War such cases were referred to as "shell shock"; by 1916 such cases had accounted for 40 percent of the total casualties in the combat zones. W. H. R. Rivers, the noted anthropologist and clinical psychologist who treated numerous cases of "shell shock" during the war, concluded that the "quantity of neurotic symptoms correlated not with the intensity of battle, the length of an individual's service, or his emotional disposition, but with the degree of his immobility." In the Syrian war it was during the prolonged siege of Acre (early December 1831 to late May of the following year) that thousands of Egyptian troops were feeling vulnerable, sitting immobile as they did in the sappers' trenches that they were digging to approach the walls of the fortress and falling prey to the shells that were being fired from the defiant city. It was then that the men started showing signs that could only be read as "shell shock" and resembled the experiences of the British soldiers eighty years later.

XREF: W.H.R. Rivers' finding parallels modern shell shock research and Foucault-type analysis of immobile troops, echoed by the siege at Acre.

Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed…, loc. 1097