I've spent a
considerable amount of time recently researching the so called
'Battle of the Wazza'. It's a fairly marginal and neglected segment
of 'Anzac history', which involved a series of riots in Cairo during
the war. The perpetrators of the riots were mostly Australian and New
Zealand soldiers who were undergoing training in camps very close to
the city of Cairo. The people on the receiving end of the violence
were the prostitutes and pimps in the Wass'ah district of Cairo. The
phrase 'Battle of the Wazza' is misleading in three ways:
- 'Wazza' and 'Wozza' are Anzac manglings of the proper Wass'ah
- It was a riot, not a 'battle'
- There was more than one riot
The first riot
occurred on April the 2nd 1915 (Good Friday) and was the
largest and most significant riot. It involved somewhere between 2000
and 2500 men, mostly Australian and New Zealanders. It lasted for
several hours, and involved a large amount of damage to buildings and
property. Although it is very clear that many Egyptian citizens who
worked in the brothels targeted were assaulted, it is not clear from
the sources I have read if there were any actual deaths. There are
many different accounts of exactly what happened and why, almost all
of these accounts come from the letters or diaries of Anzac soldiers
who either participated in or observed the riots.
Percy Williams'
diary account is a good example:
We saw a riot in the evening, in which the soldiers took
part. We saw a crowd hurrying towards the disreputable part of the
town and followed, to find that Australian and some New Zealanders
had invaded a house of ill-fame, and having cast the furniture into
the street, set fire to it. A fire brigade arrived, but the hoses
were cut and the brigade pelted off the scene. I saw a cart wheel
heaved at the engine. The red caps (permanent infantry police) proved
insufficient to stop the riot at first, but they arrived with
reinforcements and began firing. Many were shot – two fatally. At
this the riot ran wild, and large pieces of furniture were cast into
the road, to the injury of one or two rioters. The building was set
afire. Just now the Hertshire Yeomanry arrived and cleared the
streets. The fire was got under, and we returned to camp. The cause
of the riot, disgraceful to New Zealanders and Australians alike, is
in doubt. But it seems as if an Australian was stabbed here whilst
haggling over the question of change. Another report is that the
house was disease-stricken, and had been responsible for spreading
syphilis. And the day was Good Friday.
 |
| From the Australian War Memorial collection. Caption: "Cairo, burnt buildings and carts possibly the aftermath of the riot later known as the Battle of the "Wozzer", which took place in the street known as the Haret El Wasser near Shepheard's Hotel, Cairo 2 April Good Friday 1915." |
Many of the men involved had been stationed in Egypt
since early December 1914. They spent a lot of time training in the
desert, and were encouraged by the military authorities to avoid the
temptations Cairo had to offer. They were allowed and even encouraged
to stay in camp and drink beer, and there were numerous alternatives
to Cairo provided such as nightly lectures and YMCA activities. One
of the biggest fears was the spread of venereal disease. By the time
of the riot in April, 445 New Zealanders had been treated for some
form of venereal disease. Clearly, for many of the men the wholesome
alternatives were no match for the allure of the prostitutes of
Cairo.
Shortly after the Good Friday riot the troops left Cairo
and travelled to the small mediteranean island Lemnos. This would set
them up for the Gallipoli landings beginning on April 25th.
Reinforcements from Australia and New Zealand kept arriving in Cairo
however, and despite what must have been obvious venereal dangers,
they continued to frequent the brothels of Cairo. Another riot,
smaller in scale but similar in character took place on July 31st
1915. I'm going to quote a passage from Robin Hyde's Passport to
Hell which describes this
episode. Hyde interviewed the veteran Douglas Stark ('Starkie'), and
this is his experience told in the words of a skilled novelist:
Aimlessly,
yet with the seeming purpose of a mad dog or a Malay running amok,
the charge swept on down the streets. Starkie ran with them, yelling
as they yelled, without the faintest idea why he ran and yelled. The
Wazza began to glare with the pattern of flames against the windows
of seven-storeyed houses. There were shrieks and crashes as women and
souteneurs
[pimps] were thrown down from the upper windows of those tall
balconied ratholes. Furniture was tossed out and battered into
splinters. A soldier reeled into a doorway with a Gippo knife sunk to
the haft in his belly, and sat there retching and coughing, a bright
red foam on his lips. One hand was pressed against his stomach.
Nobody stopped to ease the death that had its fangs in his middle,
but there was another roar, 'Murder! Come on!'
[….]
The flames shot up in a dense and maddening forest, and within that
circle the scorpion of the Wazza brandished its sting against its own
death. Naked women ran from their balcony rooms to the damp ooze of
their cellars. A soldier among the looters died, crushed under the
weight of the grand piano that the prostitutes pushed out of their
high window on the heads of the men below. Wherever a house offered
resistance, soldiers posted themselves at the doorway and smashed
down women and souteneurs
as the flames drove them outi.
Why
did the riots take place? Reading over the various accounts given by
the soldiers who either observed or participated in the riots, we can
easily find numerous triggers: the men were ripped off by the pimps,
the drinks were overpriced or spiked with drugs, somebody's sister
was found in one of the brothels (forced into prostitution), a Maori
soldier was turned away from a brothel because his skin was too dark.
There's a distinct undercurrent of fear, anger and hostility in these
accounts. It seems clear that whatever the truth status of these
various rumours, there were deeper and more fundamental causes.
 |
| A destroyed hotel - after the first Wass'ah riot |
Terry
Kinlochii
argues that the troops were frustrated and impatient to get into
battle. Apart from a very minor battle for the Suez canal in January,
the first batch of Anzacs had to wait over four months before they
finally got to the trenches of Gallipoli. Desert training was boring
and arduous, and the soldiers were simply sick and tired of being
stuck next to Cairo. In the words of New Zealander William Heineman,
"we had attained to that top-notch pitch of condition in which
we felt we must fight some one – or burstiii".
The
biggest problem with this narrative of frustrated energy is the fact
that the riot was repeated after the Gallipoli landings, and that
there was also a third riot much later in 1919 after armistice. This
third riot was similarly aimed at the brothels, but involved British
soldiers rather than Australians and New Zealanders. These soldiers
had had four years of battle to quench their thirst for violence, so
there must have been another motive for them. Given the similarities
between the three incidents – that they all targeted brothels –
it's reasonable to assume they had something basic in common.
Impatience to get into battle seems to be a poor excuse for a more
sinister motive.
Searching
the dark corners of the blogosphere, I found a couple of Australian
sites which display a vehement pride in the Wass'ah riots. From what
I have read so far, most Anzac commentators are keen to avoid placing
too much importance on this incident. They emphasise that many Anzacs
did not participate in the riots, and they tend to offer us
apologetic narratives similar to Kinloch's. So these sites represent
the extreme fringe of Anzacery:
this is the boys will be boys proud to be a beer drinking Aussie who
occasionally beats up prostitutes it's the Anzac spirit
interpretation of Wozza. More disturbing is this site, which openly celebrates the riots as an example of righteous
Christian "cleansing" of the sinful hellhole of the Wass'ah
brothels. There are other, less nutty commentators who emphasise the
fact that April 2nd
1915 was Good Friday, so the men were motivated by some kind of
Christian zeal. This article for
example argues that 'an excess of puritanism due to its being easter'
was the reason, and also connects up the first riot with an obscure
song and the famous poet T S Elliot.
Again,
the fact that there were three similar riots, only one of which took
place during Easter, convincingly disproves this religious zeal
motive as the main reason for the riots. There is an element of truth
here though: many of the Anzacs were certainly devout Christians, and
the exposure to the licensed brothels of places such as the Wass'ah
district provoked a moral panic. Women would openly display
themselves and solicit from balconies above the streets, and targeted
the well paid Australian and New Zealand men. One of the chaplains of
the NZEF, Guy Thornton, wrote a whole book devoted to the worrying
evils of Cairo. The following quote from his book shows how big a
shock Cairo must have been for many of the men:
It
was a nightmare – inconceivably vile and horribly grotesque. The
narrow, evil-smelling, tortuous lanes literally lined by these poor
degraded women of almost very nationality, the foul cries of
solicitation sounded in a veritable Babel of tongues, the barbaric
dress and ornaments which many of them wore, the flaring lights, the
flaunting evils, all combined to produce on the mind of a European an
impression of unreality. "Things never could be as bad as this,"
one argued, "and therefore it must be a dream." But it was
no dream. It was an infinitely awful reality. Each nationality seemed
to rival the other in bestiality. Arabs, Egyptians (all Mohammedans;
no Coptic girl is to be found earning her livelihood by
prostitution), Circassians, Greeks, Syrians, Nubians, French and
Italians were all represented. Thank God, however, there was not one
British woman in that motley throngiv.
What
comes through quite strongly in this passage from Thornton's book is
the attention to the race of the sex workers. There are numerous
examples of this sort of 'Orientalist' racism to be found in the
writings of the Anzacs. It wasn't just the fact that they were openly
soliciting that was so disturbing, it was the colour of their skin
and their 'barbaric dress' which combined to make such a strong and
fearsome impression.
There's
a lot more that could be said about this widespread and deeply
entrenched racism. Although I think it's important to acknowledge and
recognise the fact that many of the Anzac soldiers had these sorts of
attitudes, I don't think it is a particularly surprising fact. These
attitudes were widespread cultural norms, actively promoted by many
people in powerful positions. More tolerant and cosmopolitan views
were possible, but unlikely to develop in provincial New Zealand
where many of the Anzacs came from.
What
is more notable in the Thornton quote is that he recognises women 'of
almost every nationality'. There were in fact many European sex
workers in Cairo, and their existence had a lot to do with British
colonialism. The British army had occupied Egypt in 1882 and had
maintained a presence ever since. Fear of venereal disease led the
British authorities to legislate a 'general decree' which involved a
system of regulations for state controlled prostitution. Women were
given licenses and were forced to undergo regular medical check ups.
The system didn't actually work very well – many women continued to
practice unlicensed sex work, the medical checks were not performed
to a high standard and venereal disease continued to run rampant. But
the huge demand for the services of the prostitutes by the army,
colonial bureaucracy and tourist sector continued. By the time the Anzacs arrived in late 1914,
the brothels were already doing a roaring trade.
There
was a definite class system in operation, with French women at the
top of the heirarchy servicing the needs of well heeled officers.
Various other European nationalities came next, with the least valued
services of the Egyptian, Sudanese and Nubian women at the bottom of
the social and economic scale.
The
Wass'ah district where the riots took place was a poor area dominated
by brothels housing Egyptian, Sudanese and Nubian sex workers.
This very useful blog describes the geography of the riots. Interestingly, the
Wass'ah district is actually very close to the famous Shepheard's
Hotel where the elite colonials mixed and mingled.
With
this undeniably racist colonial background in mind, we can imagine
the tensions, fears and hostilities which must have helped to create
these riots. Another factor noted by Suzanne Brugger is that
internal
order in the brothel quarter had been maintained fairly successfully
before the War by the local association of “bullies” but their
resources had been severely overtaxed by the influx of troops into
Cairo at the start of hostilities … They were not always able to
ensure that customers were protected from petty thieves within the
brothels and they could not exclude elements with too little regard
for the ethics of the oldest professionv.
The
Anzacs tended to be rowdy and aggressive customers who didn't always
pay for the services rendered. The brothels on the other hand would
definitely have included a fairly robust and ruthless criminal
element, especially the pimps who worked in the Wass'ah area. With
these very real tensions and the added mix of alcohol, drugs and
sexual desire, all garnished with an underlying fear-based form of
racism, it isn't too hard to imagine how a riot might have started.
There's
one more aspect to these riots which needs to be mentioned. These
Anzac rioters were young men mostly from provincial backgrounds.
Prostitution did exist in the New Zealand of 1914, but it was a
mostly hidden and discreet sort of trade, completely unlike Cairo.
Robin Hyde imagines the psychological impact of paid sex upon a
typical Anzac:
Only one explanation was
given concerning the Wazza battle, though there was a vague rumour
that a soldier had been locked in one of the brothels and had called
for a rescue. To this no great authority attaches. The explanation
shrieked at a fulminating officer by a man in the ranks of the New
Zealanders consisted of only one sentence, but from the psychological
point of view it was one of the most remarkable sentences spoken in
the history of the War.
'They was better off
dead.'
Every civilized race of
mankind, and many savages also, regard with horror the loss of
personal identity. Nations with no written history, such as the
Maoris, have an elaborate and priestly system of memorizing every
twig on the ancestral tree of the individual. In white society, to
lose identity is a personal disgrace. One of the penal code's forms
of punishment – admitted a barbarous one by most criminals – is
to deprive a man of his name and indicate him by a number. Often
among the poorest is witnessed dread of the pauper's grave, the
resting place of which no man knoweth the name anymore.
In the Wazza the men who
went to appease curiosity or appetite found themselves confronted
with the same loss of identity. Women with whom they could exchange
no common word of language received them behind doors where, in many
cases, they waited in procesions for that curious relief. There was
no pretence that one soldier's face differed from the rest. The men
were used, especially the colonial soldiers whose countries supported
no licensed houses, to more regard for their vanity. Even those women
who had played the prostitute's part for them in their own lands had,
for the most part, woven the little fables of individual romance and
liking.
In
the Wazza, they were nobody; male embracing heterogeneous female. The
first shock of this faded from their consciousness, but it waited in
hiding – a resentment that they hardly realized, but that could not
be placated except by vengeance. The convict becomes accustomed to
the loss of his name and citizenship, but the surface resentment
wears down into his deeper hatred of Society. So it was with the
soldiers in the Wazza. The place stole their sexual identity from
them. They had to revenge themselves. The women who had deprived
them, the souteneursvi
who had shared the spoils, the
houses where they had waited, were – in the phrase of that inspired
and hysterical soldier – better off deadvii.
* * * *
NOTE:
Aside from the links I have already mentioned above, I would also
highly recommend + this thesis
“Let
Down the Curtains Around Us” : Sex
Work in Colonial Cairo, 1882-1952 by Francesca Biancani
iFrom
Robin Hyde, 'Passport to Hell', AUP 1986, p.75 - 76
iiKinloch,
Terry 'Echoes of Gallipoli: In the words of New Zealand's Mounted
Riflemen', 2005, Exisle Publishing Limited, Auckland
iiiFrom
'On the Anzac Trail: being Extracts from the Diary of a New Zealand
Sapper', William Heineman, London 1916, p.74
ivFrom
'With the Anzacs in Cairo: The tale of a great fight', Turnbull and
Spears, Edinburgh 1916, p. 55-56
v
Suzanne Brugger, Australians and the Egyptians (Melbourne:
Melbourne University Press), p. 146.
viPimp
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