“Allenby used over a hundred thousand of these Egyptian labourers in the campaign. These chaps have been famous as burden bearers ever since the time when their ancestors built the Pyramids. But Allenby could only get them to work for about six months, because at the end of that time, at a shilling a day, they had more money than they had ever seen before in their lives so they would insist on resigning and would return to their little farms along the Nile to spend the rest of their lives smoking their hubbly-bubbly pipes and beating their wives.”

-Lowell Thomas
“With Allenby in Palestine” (1919)