by Tom Reiss
Some twenty-five miles north of Botzen, the Austrian forces were dug in “in a terrible position,” as Dumas reported to Joubert, at Clausen, a small Tyrolean city of quiet church squares and streets that end in sheer cliffs, set dramatically against snowcapped peaks nearly as high as the Swiss Alps. The Austrians had artillery emplacements above the town and thousands of troops protecting it. Hundreds of Tyrolean fighters hid in the woods and in rock formations, sniping at any French troops they saw. It was a shooting gallery in which the Austrians and their local allies had all the high ground.
On the morning of March 23, Dumas and Dermoncourt rode into town at the head of about thirty dragoons and “crossed Clausen under enemy fire,” as Joubert would report to Napoleon, even as the bulk of the French forces were pinned down nearby. On the far side of the town stood a strategic bridge, across the Eisack River, which at this point alternated between narrow streams and raging torrents, all pitched at preposterously steep inclines. The French could not advance farther north to pursue the Austrians toward the border without crossing this bridge. The Austrians were as determined to hold the bridge as Dumas was to take it. They scattered carts filled with heavy stones all over it, Dermoncourt recalled, against which Dumas “did more alone with his Herculean strength than the twenty-five of us put together. When I say twenty-five I exaggerate; the Austrian bullets had done their work, and five or six of our men were disabled.”
The troops received reinforcements, and as soon as they had pushed the last of the carts into the river, Dumas crossed the bridge into the town of Brixen. Dumas and Dermoncourt found themselves alone there. The enemy was firing at them from high positions in the boulders by the banks and from the far side of the bridge. Troops faced them in hand-to-hand combat. Dermoncourt recalled watching Dumas “lift his saber, as a thresher lifts his flail, and each time the sword was lowered a man fell.” Trapped himself by a trio of Austrian cavalrymen, Dermoncourt received a serious shoulder wound, severing the tendon. The Austrians “continued to hack at me with saber-swipes, and soon would have entirely skewered me, if I had not managed to draw a pistol out of my holster with my left hand.”
Early in the battle Dumas’s horse was shot out from under him and fell in such a way that the Austrians were sure it had killed him. “The Black Devil is dead!” the cry went up. But then Dumas rose from the dead, or, rather, from behind his horse, which he then used as cover to stage his own counter-fusillade. He had discovered a small cache of loaded Austrian guns, which he now used to return fire.
As Dermoncourt lay in a bleeding heap, he later recalled, “I managed to turn toward the general; he was standing at the head of the bridge of Clausen and holding it alone against the whole squadron; and as the bridge was narrow and the men could only get at him two or three abreast, he cut down as many as came at him.”
Bleeding from the arm, thigh, and head, Dumas slashed and stabbed with unrelenting fury, and with such power that most every Austrian touched by his blade fell mortally wounded or took a deadly dive over the bridge into the river below. When he was finally relieved on the bridge by a few dozen French cavalry and the Austrians retreated, Dumas did not rest but leapt on a horse to pursue the fleeing enemy nearly ten miles into the alpine woods.
“I must make a full report about the conduct of General Dumas,” Joubert wrote to Napoleon after the battle, “who charged three times at the head of the cavalry and killed several cavalrymen with his own hand; he contributed not a little by his courage to the success of this day.”
The final outcome of the day, according to Joubert: “we have taken fifteen hundred enemy prisoners, our loss has been about a thousand give or take.”
Meanwhile, of the man who had been at the very front of the action, surrounded by enemy soldiers shooting and hacking at him: “[Dumas] has received two light saber wounds during the time he was fighting off the Austrian cavalry, alone, on a bridge.” Another account says that musket fire pierced his greatcoat in seven places, though Dumas somehow emerged unscathed.
In the safe at Villers-Cotterêts lay a letter Dumas had written to friends from the headquarters of the Army of Italy. In it, he describes leading the cavalry into the Tyrol and how “these victories were necessary to dissipate a little the stinging grief of the irreparable loss which I had of my unfortunate Louise … cherished and adored child, who was always before my eyes and accompanied me day and night.” Then, as always, his thoughts quickly return to his beloved wife: “What worries me still more, is the state in which my wife finds herself, because this event will make itself felt.”
THIS time, Napoleon did not expunge Dumas’s heroism at Clausen in his report to Paris:
General Dumas at the head of the cavalry has killed with his own hand several enemy cavalrymen. He has been twice slightly wounded by enemy sabers, and his aide-de-camp Dermoncourt has been seriously wounded. This General held a bridge all alone for many minutes against the enemy cavalry who were trying to cross the river. By doing so, he was able to delay the enemy advance until reinforcements arrived.
At the end of March, Dumas received a letter from Napoleon announcing that “as the General-in-Chief wants to show his satisfaction to General Dumas for his valorous conduct in the recent actions in the Tyrol, he therefore grants him the command of all cavalry troops in the divisions stationed in the Tyrol.”
As a further sign that Napoleon was ready to forgive Dumas fully, he added this line to the following week’s report: “I request that General Dumas, who, along with his horse, has lost a pair of pistols, be sent a pair of pistols from the armament manufacturer at Versailles.”
Napoleon also gave Dumas a new nom de guerre, hailing him as “the Horatius Cocles of the Tyrol”—high praise indeed in that era. “Rome was in great hazard of being taken, the enemy forcing their way onto the wooden bridge,” Plutarch recounted, and “Horatius Cocles … kept the bridge, and held back the enemy.” Dumas was referred to as the “Horatius Cocles of the Tyrol” in all subsequent writings about him down to the early twentieth century, when classical allusions fell out of favor.
During the rest of 1797, Napoleon concluded the victory over the Austrians by forcing them to negotiate and sign a humiliating peace treaty, the Treaty of Campo Formio, which acknowledged all the new French-sponsored Italian republics, ceding various non-Italian Austrian territories to Paris, including the Austrian Netherlands as well as key islands in the Mediterranean. Napoleon also forced a laundry list of other concessions on the emperor. (One of these endeared him to liberal-minded people everywhere: General Lafayette, still held by the Austrians after deserting from the French army and attempting to flee the continent with his honorary American passport, was at last set free.)
While the treaty negotiations were going on, Napoleon appointed General Dumas military governor of Treviso, a wealthy province and city of the same name twenty-five miles outside Venice and filled with rich vineyards and residences built by Venetian merchants over the centuries. Dumas helped the residents rebuild their lives under the new order, taking part in local hunting expeditions and, if their letters to him are any guide, generally showing an evenhandedness that shocked civilians under his jurisdiction. A folder in the safe at Villers-Cotterêts contained these letters to General Dumas from the citizens of Treviso province, who mix flattery and thanks with fulsome attempts to prove that they, too, were true-blue republicans in the highest French style:
In this state of revolution, so new to us, and in a Democracy developing from Italy’s own regeneration, we had the greatest need to find in you, Citizen General, a Father, who would guide our steps, and support our efforts to consolidate ourselves in this state of cherished Liberty that we owe to the generosity of the French. Here we are, freed from a most hideous slavery, and here we are under the protection of your justice and selflessness.
BOOK
THREE
16
LEADER OF THE EXPEDITION
RELYING on the memories of old Dermoncourt, the novelist des
cribed the period after his father’s greatest triumph, when he was treated like the savior of Rome and celebrated even by Napoleon, as one of his most melancholic.
He had no sooner won his heart’s desires than he conceived a profound disgust for them. When the energy he had expended in obtaining his desires had died down … he sent in his resignation. Happily Dermoncourt was at hand. When he received these letters of resignation to dispatch, he slipped them in a drawer of his desk, put the key in his pocket, and quietly waited.
At the end of a week or two weeks, or even a month, the momentary cloud of disgust which had swept over my poor father’s spirits would disappear, and some brilliant charge or daringly successful maneuver would arouse enthusiasm in his heart, ever eager to aspire after the impossible, and, with a sigh, he would say: “Upon my word, I believe I did wrong to send in my resignation.”
And Dermoncourt, who was on the watch for this, would reply:
“Don’t worry yourself, General; your resignation—”
“Well, my resignation—?”
“It’s in that desk, ready to send off on the first chance; there is only the date to alter.”
After leaving his post as military governor in Italy, Dumas returned on furlough to Villers-Cotterêts for three months, to be with his wife and daughter, and also to perfect his hunting skills at the expense of the wild boars and stags in the Retz Forest. At the end of March 1798, he received orders from the minister of war to report to Toulon, in the south of France, to assume a new command. As happy as Dumas must have been during his time at home, the new assignment probably came as a relief to him, or so his son came to believe: his father, he thought, could not really thrive away from the action (hence his fit of melancholy after the Italian campaign). He now rewrote his will, kissed his family, and rode off for the south. He was thirty-six years old and in vigorous health, with dreams of greater glory.
On coming into Toulon, Dumas found the port in chaos with the provisioning of what appeared to be a great armada in formation. There were thousands of soldiers, sailors, animals, guns, and all the supplies needed not only for a military campaign but for maintaining a small city. (When fully assembled, the armada would consist of thirteen large warships and another forty-two smaller ones, along with 122 transport vessels. On board were 54,000 men, including 38,000 soldiers and 13,000 sailors, who brought 1,230 horses, 171 field guns, 63,261 artillery shells, 8,067,280 rifle rounds, and 11,150 hand grenades.) A military campaign of major proportions was clearly being planned, yet the destination was a closely held secret. Neither Dumas nor the other officers or men in Toulon had any idea what it was.
“The object of this grand voyage is not known,” wrote one of the other participants in an April 11 letter intercepted by British intelligence. “It is … certain that they have an immense amount of printing equipment, books, instruments, and chemical apparatus, which suggests a very long absence.” The identity of this letter writer was a clue to the expedition’s unusual character, for he was neither a soldier nor the sort of civilian who usually accompanied military adventures. Déodat de Dolomieu was one of Europe’s leading geologists. In 1791 he had discovered a mineral, which was named in his honor (dolomite), and later an entire mountain range in north Italy (the Dolomites) would also bear his name.
Yet Dolomieu was not the only eminent scientist and man of letters in Toulon waiting to board the ships. There were dozens of others, including, as he observed, “geographical engineers, military engineers, mathematicians, astronomers, chemists, doctors, artists, and naturalists of every sort; two professors of Arabic, Persian and Turkish.” Drawn from the cream of the French intelligentsia, the sheer number of “savants”—as they were designated on the expedition’s rosters—was as surprising as their renown. “And all have gone aboard without knowing where they are going.”
The mystery of the expedition’s destination had precisely the desired effect: the enemy was flummoxed. Having learned about the massing of the French armada, the British Admiralty had sent their best man to investigate. Rear Admiral Horatio Nelson, though at thirty-nine relatively young for the British navy, had an outsized reputation for tactical brilliance and bravery in harassing and sinking French vessels. He was also an arch-traditionalist who despised the French Revolution.
Nelson had been sent into the Mediterranean commanding a small squadron of just three large warships and three smaller frigates (scout ships) with orders to determine the French armada’s destination. Arriving south of Toulon on May 19—only one day before the armada’s departure—he positioned his squadron “exactly in a situation for intercepting the enemy’s ships.” By chance Nelson captured a small French corvette sailing from Toulon and interrogated the crew. But the French sailors could not tell Nelson anything about the armada’s destination because, like everyone else, they had no idea themselves. They managed instead to provide some bits of misinformation, including that Napoleon was not planning to sail with the expedition himself. Then Nelson’s luck failed him: gale-force winds, careening waves, and driving spray pummeled his warships for nine hours, damaging all three and demasting his flagship. The winds had blown his frigates out of sight. The British squadron was forced to retreat to neutral Sardinia for repairs—sans frigates, which effectively blinded it.
In the meantime, Napoleon’s vast armada had departed Toulon, missed the gale, and was safely cruising down the west coast of Italy. Back near Toulon on June 5, Nelson was overjoyed to see a fleet of eleven British warships arriving to join his command. This new firepower would give him fighting odds, if he could catch the French fleet in a vulnerable position. But where had Napoleon’s armada gone? And where the devil was it going?
The top British admirals surmised that the French expedition was planning to break out of the Mediterranean, sail up the Atlantic coast, and invade Ireland or England. The risk of invasion was seared into British consciousness, part of the heritage of an island nation whose very identity rested on a succession of transformative invasions, such as those of the Romans in AD 53 and the Normans in 1066. But beginning with the failed Spanish armada in 1588, at least a half dozen other attempted foreign invasions, most recently in 1759, had been thwarted by the British navy. In response to rumors the French government had planted of an imminent French assault across the Channel, panic seized the British public.* The Times of London called for emergency preparations—“barricades for each street”—against the Jacobin hordes who would soon swarm the city.
The French actually had been planning to attack England that spring. This was the mission the government had chosen and assigned to General Bonaparte after Italy. Command rolls for the invasion of England were drawn up at the end of 1797: Alex Dumas had been appointed commander of the dragoons and “Chief of Staff of the Cavalry.” His nemesis Berthier—the general Dumas had said would “shit in his pants” if he were exposed to danger—had been appointed chief of staff of the “Army of England.” In February 1798 Napoleon toured Calais and Dunkirk while General Kléber toured the beaches of Normandy. But Napoleon then held secret meetings with the government to dissuade them from the British armada plan. Napoleon was not ready to attack England; he would return to that idea in the following decade. In the spring of 1798, he had another idea. He had set his sights on invading Egypt.
EUROPEANS had always coveted Egypt. It symbolized all the power of the ancient world—an imperium almost three thousand years older than Rome’s. Egypt was thought to be as rich in grain as in mythology; imperial strategists imagined that control of its croplands would feed populations and armies. These are the reasons Alexander the Great conquered Egypt in the fourth century BC to establish his dynasty there. Napoleon dreamed of following in his footsteps and establishing his own.†
Today the Expédition d’Égypte, as the bloody venture is still called in France, is widely seen as among the most delusional of Napoleon’s globe-conquering fantasies. But the French had long viewed Egypt as a land of adventure, opportunity, and riches, and a
stepping-stone out of Europe into the wider world. The rise of literacy and the spread of printed books throughout the eighteenth century fed the public a slew of travelogues of the Near East. “The Nile is as familiar to many people as the Seine,” wrote one observer in 1735. The expedition, with the help of the savants, would discover the famed Rosetta Stone, excavate tombs in the Valley of the Kings, and catalog countless ancient artifacts—and, in the name of scholarship, haul many of them away.
In 1769, Louis XV’s foreign minister tried to get him to strike at Egypt—“to replace the [French] colonies in America, in case they should be lost, with colonies offering the same products and a more extensive trade.” Perhaps products like indigo, cotton, and, most important, sugarcane could be grown in Egypt as well as in Saint-Domingue. One of the best sources of information on Egypt was a polemical travelogue by the utopian philosopher “Volney,” who had chosen his name in homage to Voltaire. Volney traveled to the Middle East from 1783 to 1785, where he learned Arabic, adopted native dress, and lived among the Egyptians. His Travels in Egypt and Syria offered a thorough description of the Egyptian economy, society, government, and strategic forces. In Volney’s view Egypt, though ruined by oriental despotism, was full of potential and ripe for conquest—a tempting target for French colonization. France could gain control over a primary sea route to Asia and incredible prestige by resurrecting the ancient Egyptian past.