• • •
Napoleon’s decision to embark on what was called his Syrian campaign – though he never set foot in present-day Syria and stayed entirely within the bounds of modern Gaza, Israel and the West Bank – was presaged by his threat to Jezzar on November 19: ‘If you continue to offer refuge to Ibrahim Bey on the borders of Egypt, I will look on that as a mark of hostility and go to Acre.’94 Jezzar responded in early December by occupying the Ottoman provinces of Gaza, Ramleh and Jaffa and taking up position at El-Arish, only 22 miles from Napoleon’s Egyptian fort at Katieh on the edge of the Sinai desert, declaring that he was going to liberate Egypt from the French.
Napoleon visited Suez in late December, both to inspect fortifications and to trace the route of Ramses II’s canal connecting the Nile to the Red Sea, following it for 40 miles until it disappeared into the desert sands. (Little could he have guessed that his own nephew would be involved in building its successor in 1869.) He also announced his wish to visit Mount Sinai ‘through respect for Moses and the Jewish nation, whose cosmology retraces the earliest ages’.95 Berthier, Caffarelli, Dommartin, Rear-Admiral Honoré Ganteaume (whose survival of the battle of the Nile was, according to Napoleon, its sole commiseration), the chief ordonnateur Jean-Pierre Daure, Monge and four other savants came with him, as well as his guides.96 ‘We travelled fast,’ recalled Doguereau, ‘the commander-in-chief left Cairo at the gallop, and we urged our horses on at full speed so that they arrived out of breath.’97
It was on this sightseeing trip from Suez into Sinai (he never reached Mount Sinai itself) on December 28 that Napoleon appears to have come as close to death as he ever did in any of his battles, after taking advantage of the low tide to cross a section of the Red Sea.* ‘We reached the far shore without difficulty,’ stated Doguereau, and the party visited the so-called Spring of Moses and other antiquarian sites, but having lunched and watered the horses at the Nabah wells, they got lost as night fell and wandered through the low-lying marshy sea-shore as the tide rose:
Soon we were bogged down up to the bellies of our mounts, who were struggling and having great difficulty in pulling themselves free . . . After a thousand problems and having left many horses trapped in the bog, we reached another arm of the sea . . . It was nine at night and the tide had already risen three feet. We were in a terrible situation, when it was announced that a ford had been found. General Bonaparte was among the first to cross; guides were situated at various places to direct the rest . . . We were only too happy not to have shared the fate of Pharaoh’s soldiers.98
8
Acre
‘The frontiers of states are either large rivers, or chains of mountains, or deserts. Of all these obstacles to the march of an army, the most difficult to overcome is the desert.’
Napoleon’s Military Maxim No. 1
‘The decision that Caesar took to have a hand cut off all the soldiers was completely atrocious. He was clement towards his own in civil war, but cruel and often ferocious towards the Gauls.’
Napoleon, Caesar’s Wars
Once Desaix had routed Murad Bey at the battle of Samhoud in January 1799, captured his flotilla on the Nile and ended the threat from Upper Egypt, Napoleon’s rule extended over almost the whole country. He could now unleash his attack on Jezzar. He told the Directory on the day he left Cairo that he hoped to deny the Royal Navy the use of Levantine ports such as Acre, Haifa and Jaffa, raise the Lebanese and Syrian Christians in revolt against the Turks, and decide later whether to march on Constantinople or India.1 ‘We have plenty of enemies to vanquish in this expedition,’ he wrote, ‘the desert, the local inhabitants, the Arabs, Mamluks, Russians, Turks, English.’2 The mention of Russians was no mere Napoleonic hyperbole; Tsar Paul I hated everything the French Revolution stood for and considered himself the protector of the Knights of Malta (indeed he had engineered his own election as Grand Master in succession to von Hompesch). On Christmas Eve 1798 he made common cause with Russia’s traditional enemy, Turkey, and also with Britain, and made plans to send a Russian army deep into western Europe. But for the moment Napoleon had no inkling of that.
Historians have long taken Napoleon at his word that he planned to go further than Acre, to Constantinople perhaps or even India, but since he took only 13,000 men with him, one-third of his entire force in Egypt, this seems very unlikely. Even if Acre had fallen, and the Druze, Christians and Jews had all joined him, the logistics and demographics would not have permitted an invasion of either Turkey or India, even by a general as ambitious and resourceful as Napoleon. He later claimed that with the help of the Indian Mahratta princes he would have expelled the British from India, marching to the Indus with a long halt on the Euphrates in daily 15-mile marches through deserts, with his sick, ammunition and food carried by dromedaries, his men fed by a pound each of rice, flour and coffee per day. Yet there are more than 2,500 miles between Acre and Delhi, and the march would have required crossing the whole width of modern-day Syria, Iraq, Iran and Pakistan as well as part of northern India, far further than his journey from Paris to Moscow. The logistics would have been impossible; these plans were only ever pipe-dreams prompted by the conquests of Alexander the Great.
In February 1799 Napoleon’s immediate objective was to pre-empt the Sultan’s proposed eastern land invasion of Egypt, supported by Jezzar, before returning to deal with the amphibious Ottoman invasion of northern Egypt he had long expected that summer – the two fortunately not co-ordinated. It was his old strategy of the central position writ very large. On January 25, 1799 he did write to Britain’s foremost enemy in India, Tipu Sahib, announcing his imminent ‘arrival on the shores of the Red Sea with a numerous and invincible army, animated with the desire of delivering you from the iron yoke of England’.3 A British cruiser intercepted the letter, and Tipu was killed in the capture of his capital, Seringapatam, by the young and highly impressive British Lieutenant-General Sir Arthur Wellesley that May. Napoleon’s intention was probably simply to spread disinformation, as he knew his letters were falling into enemy hands.
Leaving Desaix in Upper Egypt, Marmont in Alexandria and General Charles Dugua in Cairo, Napoleon invaded the Holy Land with Regnier in the vanguard, three infantry divisions under Kléber, Bon and Lannes, and Murat leading the cavalry. As the troops marched out of Cairo they sang the stirring 1794 revolutionary anthem ‘Le Chant du Départ’, which thereafter became a Bonapartist anthem. At a council of war the only general openly to oppose the invasion was General Joseph Lagrange, who pointed out that Acre was 300 miles away through hostile desert and past several well-defended cities which, if captured, would require garrisoning by detachments from the relatively small force that Napoleon proposed to take. He suggested that it would be better to await an attack inside Egypt, forcing the enemy to cross the Sinai instead of taking the battle onto their terrain.4 Yet with the amphibious assault expected in June, Napoleon felt he didn’t have the luxury of time; he needed to cross the desert, defeat Jezzar and then re-cross it before it became impassable in the summer.
Napoleon left Cairo on Sunday, February 10, 1799 and reached Katieh at 3 p.m. on the 13th. Just before leaving, he wrote a long letter to the Directory. One sentence was in code, which once deciphered read: ‘If, in the course of March . . . France is at war with the kings, I will return to France.’5 On March 12 the War of the Second Coalition began, with France eventually pitted against the monarchs of Russia, Britain, Austria, Turkey, Portugal and Naples, and the Pope.
To cross the then unmapped Sinai Napoleon would have to overcome problems of food, water, heat and hostile Bedouin tribesmen. His use of a dromedary camel corps, fast-firing drill by alternating ranks, and pieux (hooked stakes for swiftly erected palisades) were to be retained by French colonial armies up to the Great War.6 ‘We have crossed seventy leagues [over 170 miles] of desert which is exceedingly fatiguing,’ he wrote to Desaix on the journey; ‘we had brackish water and often none at all.
We ate dogs, donkeys and camels.’7 Later they also ate monkeys.
In the past five millennia there have been an estimated five hundred military engagements fought in the area between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean. The western coastal route that Napoleon took – eschewing the mountain and Jordan valley routes – was the same that Alexander the Great had taken in the opposite direction. Of course Napoleon appreciated the historical aspects of his campaign, later reminiscing, ‘I constantly read Genesis when visiting the places it describes and was amazed beyond measure that they were still exactly as Moses had described them.’8
The fort of El-Arish, 170 miles from Cairo, was defended by about 2,000 men of the Turkish vanguard and their Arab allies. By February 17 Napoleon and the main body of his army had arrived there and constructed trenches and batteries. There were ‘violent murmurs among the soldiers’, who were exhausted and thirsty and who insulted the savants, unfairly blaming them for the entire expedition, but they quietened at the prospect of action.9 By the 19th a bombardment of the walls had created breaches large enough to send troops through. Napoleon demanded the surrender of the fort, which was accepted by Ibrahim Nizam, the co-commandant, as well as by El-Hadji Mohammed, commander of the Maghrebians, and El-Hadji Kadir, Aga of the Arnautes.* These men and their senior agas (officers) swore on the Koran ‘that neither they nor their troops will ever serve in Jezzar’s army and they will not return to Syria for a year, counting from this day’.10 Napoleon therefore agreed to allow them to keep their weapons and go back home, although he broke his agreement with the Mamluk contingent by disarming them. Before the second half of the twentieth century, and especially in the Middle East, the rules of war were simple, harsh and essentially unchanging; to give one’s word and then break it was generally recognized as a capital offence.
On February 25, Napoleon chased the Mamluks out of Gaza City, capturing large amounts of ammunition, six cannon and 200,000 rations of biscuit. ‘The lemon trees, the olive groves, the ruggedness of the terrain look exactly like the countryside of the Languedoc,’ he told Desaix, ‘it is like being near Béziers.’11 On March 1 he learned from the Capuchin monks at Ramleh that the El-Arish garrison had passed through on its way to Jaffa 10 miles away, ‘saying they did not intend to abide by the articles of capitulation, which we had been the first to break when we disarmed them’.12 The monks estimated the Jaffa force at 12,000 strong and ‘many cannons and much ammunition had arrived from Constantinople’. Napoleon therefore concentrated his force at Ramleh before moving on, laying siege to Jaffa from noon on March 3. ‘Bonaparte approached, with a few others, to within a hundred yards,’ recalled Doguereau of Jaffa’s city walls. ‘As we turned back, we were observed. One of the cannonballs fired at us by the enemy fell very close to the commanding general, who was showered with earth.’13 On March 6 the defenders made a sortie, which allowed Doguereau to notice how heterogeneous the Ottoman army was: ‘There were Maghrebians, Albanians, Kurds, Anatolians, Caramaneniens, Damascenes, Alepese and Negroes from Takrour [Senegal],’ he wrote. ‘They were hurled back.’14
At dawn on the next day, Napoleon wrote the governor of Jaffa a polite letter calling on him to surrender, saying that his ‘heart is moved by the evil that will fall upon the whole city if it subjects itself to this assault’. The governor stupidly replied by displaying the head of Napoleon’s messenger on the walls, so Napoleon ordered the walls to be breached and by 5 p.m. thousands of thirsty and angry Frenchmen were inside. ‘The sights were terrible,’ wrote one savant, ‘the sound of shots, shrieks of women and fathers, piles of bodies, a daughter being raped on the cadaver of her mother, the smell of blood, the groans of the wounded, the shouts of victors quarrelling about loot.’ The French finally rested, ‘sated by blood and gold, on top of a heap of dead’.15
Reporting to the Directory, Napoleon admitted that ‘twenty-four hours was handed over to pillage and all the horrors of war, which never appeared to me so hideous’.16 He added, wholly prematurely, that as a result of the victories of El-Arish, Gaza and Jaffa, ‘The Republican army is master of Palestine.’ Sixty Frenchmen had been killed and 150 wounded at Jaffa; the numbers of enemy soldiers and civilians killed are unknown.*
Napoleon’s treatment of the prisoners captured at Jaffa, of whom some, though not all, were men who had given their word at El-Arish and then broken it, was extremely harsh. On March 9 and 10, thousands of them were taken to the beach about a mile south of Jaffa by men of Bon’s division and massacred in cold blood.* ‘You . . . will order the adjutant to lead all the artillerymen who were taken in arms and other Turks to the water’s edge,’ Napoleon wrote unambiguously to Berthier, ‘and have them shot, taking precautions that none escape.’17 In his own account Berthier stated his belief that these men had forfeited their lives when Jaffa refused to surrender, regardless of what had happened at El-Arish, and he didn’t differentiate between the deaths taken in battle or in cold blood.18 Louis-André Peyrusse, a senior quartermaster, described to his mother what happened next:
About three thousand men deposited their arms and were led right away to the camp by order of the general-in-chief. They split up the Egyptians, Mahgrebians and the Turks. The Mahgrebians were all led the next day to the seaside and two battalions started to shoot them. They had no other recourse to save themselves but to throw themselves in the sea. They could shoot them there and in a moment the sea was dyed with blood and covered with corpses. A few had the chance to save themselves on rocks; they sent soldiers in boats to finish them off. We left a detachment on the seaside and our perfidy attracted a few of them who were mercilessly massacred . . . We were recommended not to use powder and we had the ferocity to kill them with bayonets . . . This example will teach our enemies not to trust the French, and sooner or later the blood of these three thousand victims will revisit us.19
He was right; when El-Aft on the banks of the Nile was abandoned by the French in May 1801, the Turks beheaded every Frenchman unable to flee, and when the British present remonstrated, they ‘answered by indignant exclamations of “Jaffa! Jaffa!”’20 Captain Krettley, another eyewitness to the Jaffa massacre, saw how although ‘the first batch of prisoners were shot, the rest were charged by the cavalry . . . they were forced into the sea, where they attempted to swim, trying to reach the rocks a few hundred yards offshore . . . but they were not saved in the end, since these poor unfortunates were overwhelmed by the waves’.21
Contemporary French sources – there are no Turkish ones for obvious reasons – differ very greatly over the numbers killed, but generally give a number between 2,200 and 3,500; higher figures exist but tend to come from politically motivated anti-Bonapartist sources.22 As only 2,000 or so gave their word at El-Arish, Napoleon certainly executed some in the polyglot Turkish army who had not been present there, but who had been promised clemency by Eugène when they held out in an inn after Jaffa’s walls had been breached and the rest of the city captured. (This may be what Peyrusse had in mind when he said the massacre would teach them not to trust the French.) There was, of course, a racial element to this; Napoleon would not have executed European prisoners-of-war.
Napoleon himself gave the number killed at fewer than 2,000, saying: ‘They were devils too dangerous to be released a second time so that I had no choice but to kill them.’23 On another occasion he admitted to 3,000 and told a British MP: ‘Well, I had a right . . . They killed my messenger, cut off his head, and put it on a pike . . . there were not provisions enough for French and Turks – one of them must go to the wall. I did not hesitate.’24 The food argument is unconvincing; some 400,000 rations of biscuit and 200,000 pounds of rice were captured in Jaffa. He might well have thought himself too short of men to detach a battalion to escort so many prisoners across the Sinai back to Egypt, however.25 As his remarks on the September Massacres in Paris and his actions in Binasco, Verona and Cairo demonstrated, Napoleon approved of uncompromising – indeed lethal – measures if he felt the situ
ation demanded them. He was particularly interested in ensuring that the eight hundred trained Turkish artillerymen weren’t able to fight against him again. (Had he taken up the Sultan’s job offer of 1795, many of these same men would have been his pupils.) Having accepted their word once, he couldn’t have been expected to do so again. And in a war against the seventy-nine-year-old Jezzar, fabled for his spectacular cruelty, who that year had had four hundred Christians sewn into sacks and thrown into the sea, he might have felt the need to be seen as equally ruthless.26
On March 9, during the massacres, Napoleon wrote to Jezzar, saying that he had been ‘harsh towards those who had violated the rules of war’, adding: ‘In a few days I shall march upon Acre. But why should I shorten the life of an old man I do not know?’27 Luckily for that messenger, Jezzar chose to ignore this threat. The same day, Napoleon also made a proclamation to the sheikhs, ulama and commandant of Jerusalem, telling them of the terrible punishments awaiting his enemies, but further declaring: ‘God is clement and merciful! . . . It is not my intention to wage war against the people; I am a friend of the Muslim.’28*
In an all-too-rare example of poetic justice in history, the French caught the plague off Jaffa’s inhabitants whom they had raped and pillaged.* With a mortality rate of 92 per cent for sufferers, the appearance of its buboes on the body was akin to a death sentence.29 Captain Charles François, a veteran of Kléber’s division, noted in his journal that after the sack of Jaffa ‘soldiers who had the plague were right away covered with buboes in the groin, in the armpits and on the neck. In less than twenty-four hours the body became black as well as the teeth and a burning fever killed anyone who was affected by this terrible disease.’30 Of all the various types of plague infecting the Middle East at the time, this, la peste, was one of the worst, and Napoleon ordered the Armenian Monastery hospital on the seafront of Old Jaffa – where it still is today – to be turned into a quarantine station. On March 11 Napoleon visited it along with Desgenettes, and there according to Jean-Pierre Daure, an officer in the pay commissariat, he ‘picked up and carried a plague victim who was lying across a doorway. This action scared us a lot because the sick man’s clothes were covered with foam and disgusting evacuations of abscessed buboes.’31
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