The Weavers, Book 2 by Gilbert Parker

War! War! The chains of the conscripts clanked in the river villages; the wailing of the women affrighted the pigeons in a thousand dovecotes on the Nile; the dust of despair was heaped upon the heads of the old, who knew that their young would no more return, and that the fields of dourha would go ungathered, the water-channels go unattended, and the onion-fields be bare. War! War! War! The strong, the broad-shouldered -- Aka, Mahmoud, Raschid, Selim, they with the bodies of Seti and the faces of Rameses, in their blue yeleks and unsandalled feet -- would go into the desert as their forefathers did for the Shepherd Kings.

But there would be no spoil for them -- no slaves with swelling breasts and lips of honey; no straight-limbed servants of their pleasure to wait on them with caressing fingers; no rich spoils carried back from the fields of war to the mud hut, the earth oven, and the thatched roof; no rings of soft gold and necklaces of amber snatched from the fingers and bosoms of the captive and the dead. Those days were no more. No vision of loot or luxury allured these. They saw only the yellow sand, the ever-receding oasis, the brackish, undrinkable water, the withered and fruitless date- tree, handfuls of dourha for their food by day, and the keen, sharp night to chill their half-dead bodies in a half-waking sleep. And then the savage struggle for life -- with all the gain to the pashas and the beys, and those who ruled over them; while their own wounds grew foul, and, in the torturing noon-day heat of the white waste, Death reached out and dragged them from the drooping lines to die.