From The Eagle Rising: The Story of Prussia's Arrival On the World Stage, pub. 1989 by Professor Reinicke Herz
At the end of March, 1880, Prussia delivered a declaration of war to Ismail Pasha, the Egyptian ruler. Prussian armies were already embarked in the Mediterranean Sea, and soon began landing on the shores of Egypt.
While one infantry division remained to man the Prussian forts and entrenchments in the Sinai, protecting the Prussian left flank, two armies of cavalry, reinforced with infantry, landed on either side of the Nile River Delta – Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm at Alexandria, and Feldmarschall von Moltke at Dumyah.
In the south, General von Blumenthal headed north from Massaua, utterly destroying two under-strength cavalry regiments, and capturing the Upper Nile Basin as far as Aswan by the end of the war.
At the end of April, General Caprivi was landed with a small force at Ouad Aly, to the rear of what little Egyptian resistance remained, in order to outflank and destroy them. Friedrich Wilhelm and von Moltke pushed south against paltry resistance, and eventually converged on the capital of Cairo.
Ismail Pasha, who was trapped in his palace by the rapid Prussian advance, admitted defeat in the middle of June. He ceded vast swaths of territory to Prussia, including all of the Mediterranean seashore from Gaza to the Nile River Delta, and significant portions of southern Egypt and the Upper Nile Basin.
The entire war had taken only two and a half months. The Prussian people were ecstatic at the rapid, overwhelming victory. It was finally felt that Egypt’s misdeeds of the 1850s had been sufficiently avenged.
And, more substantially, the victory paved the way for decades of Prussian dominance in the Middle East and Red Sea regions, as well as opening a new front for expansion into the deepest heart of Africa.
But Prussia’s joy at such total victory was short lived, tempered by news that came just one month after the signing of peace with Egypt.
