by Tom Reiss
Dumas also brooded over the fact that he still had no official command. In fact, unbeknownst to him, Napoleon had dictated to his chief of staff, Berthier, two weeks before: “General Dumas will command the cavalry of the entire army.” Napoleon had evidently decided to reward the Horatius Cocles of the Tyrol, though Berthier (who no doubt had not forgotten Dumas’s insults) made no effort to convey this to Dumas.
BY now Admiral Nelson had learned, in Naples, that Napoleon had taken Malta. After Malta, Nelson guessed, Napoleon might attack Sicily, but otherwise the French fleet would be heading for Egypt. Nelson would soon prepare a letter of warning for the British consul at Alexandria: “I think their object is to possess themselves of some Port in Egypt, and to fix themselves at the head of the Red Sea, in order to get a formidable Army into India; and, in concert with Tippoo Sahib, to drive us, if possible, from India.” But guessing at the armada’s destination was not the same as knowing either when it might arrive or where it was at the moment. As it happened, just at the very moment when he was about to stumble upon Napoleon’s fleet, Nelson picked up a false trail.
In his freshly repaired flagship, the Vanguard, Nelson was heading south toward Malta with his squadron in the early morning of June 22—it was 4:20 a.m., according to Nelson’s logbooks—when one of his ships, the Mutine, sailed within shouting distance of a merchant vessel. It was from the Republic of Ragusa (in present-day Croatia), a neutral country enjoying trade with both France and its enemies. Shouting back and forth, the Ragusans informed the British that the French had seized Malta on June 15 and had departed the next day, on the 16th. But the Ragusans were wrong: Napoleon had ordered the armada to depart on the 19th, leaving the messy details of reorganizing Maltese society to a handful of administrators. At the very moment this exchange was occurring, another of Nelson’s ships sighted four unidentified ships in the distance. Nelson sent the Leander to investigate. By 6:30 the Mutine had reported to Nelson the misinformation about when the armada left Malta. Nelson was certain its target could no longer be Sicily; he had just been there on June 20. At 6:46, Nelson got a signal that “the strange ships are frigates”—light warships. The fifty-gun Leander would have had difficulty catching a thirty-six-gun frigate. Should he investigate them further and risk separation from the Leander, or make haste to chase the French, who were apparently already three days ahead of him on the way to Alexandria? Lacking his own fast frigates to pursue the ships on the horizon, Nelson ordered the Leander back into formation.
Nelson had two reasons to choose to ignore the four unidentified frigates: he wanted to keep his vessels together precisely to keep from losing any more of his squadron, and he had also just received word leading him to believe that the armada itself was halfway to Egypt by then. He brought his officers to confer with him on the Vanguard, and by 9 a.m. they had received the mandate to steer for Egypt.
The four strange frigates were the outriders of the French armada, which lay just over the horizon.
On June 23, a day after almost bumping into Nelson’s squadron, Napoleon finally announced to the fifty-four thousand men under his command—sending orders ship to ship—the real object of the expedition. Dumas would now learn of his top command position: he would be supreme cavalry commander of the Army of the Orient.
Dumas’s satisfaction at the seniority of the assignment must have dispelled his gloom somewhat—along with the message Napoleon now imparted, that the French would be liberating Egypt from the tyrannical Mamelukes, a caste of hereditary foreign warriors who were originally slave-soldiers serving the local Egyptians. (Like other “slavs” of the high Middle Ages, the Mamelukes were white, and to this day some of the elite families of Egypt have the pale skin and blue eyes indicative of that ancestry.) The fearsome slave-soldiers had been imported by Egypt’s rulers in the thirteenth century from the lands around the Black Sea and the Caucasus Mountains to enhance their power. But the Mamelukes had then overcome their masters and seized control, until forced in turn by conquering Ottoman armies a few hundred years later to share power in a kind of uneasy partnership.
The Mamelukes had actually seized power in 1250 as a result of the previous French invasion of Egypt, that of the French king Louis IX, known as “Saint Louis.” They had built a new capital, Cairo, to replace the ancient capital of Alexandria, and by the late eighteenth century, they still held Egypt in an iron grip and lived a life governed by elaborate military rituals. Their primary interactions with the native Egyptians were extracting taxes and using them as servants.
The Egyptians would welcome the French as liberators, Napoleon assured his men, and they would find riches in Alexandria and Cairo to beggar the greatest cities of Italy.
APPROACHING Egypt on July 26, Nelson dispatched one ship to sail ahead of his squadron. It arrived in Alexandria harbor at sunset on June 28 to scout out the town; an officer went ashore for intelligence, but he returned with news that nobody had heard of any French fleet or spotted even a single French ship on the horizon. When the vessel reconvened with Nelson’s flagship the next morning, Nelson regretfully admitted that he’d been wrong—that Napoleon was not invading Egypt after all—and ordered his ships to proceed away from Egypt, toward Turkey. Just three hours after the British left Alexandria harbor, the first advance ship of the French armada arrived there. Somehow, to cap off the string of near misses, the last British ship and the first French ship had passed just within spyglass distance but did not see each other. Nelson would spend the next two months searching the Mediterranean, squinting at the horizon for the French tricolor flag, and cursing the loss of his frigates.
Toward midnight, the longboats from the Orient, the Guillaume Tell, and the other French vessels set out for the Egyptian shore, storm winds whipping them in the darkness. Some longboats capsized, and the screams and shouts of the sailors carried over the howl of the winds and the crash of the waves. Seamen and soldiers of that era generally could not swim. The official report to the Directory said twenty-nine men drowned; other reports put the number at over one hundred. By the predawn hours of July 2, after two days of ferrying, about four thousand Frenchmen stood on the beach outside of Alexandria, while perhaps eight times that number remained on the ships. The men on shore had no artillery, no siege equipment, no horses, little food, and less water. Napoleon gave the order to march.
Slinging his rifle over his shoulder, General Dumas marched to Alexandria by Napoleon’s side. The deputy commander-in-chief of the expedition’s infantry was with them—Jean-Baptiste Kléber, who had briefly been Dumas’s commanding officer in the Rhine campaign. Though Kléber’s native Alsace could hardly be farther removed from Dumas’s Saint-Domingue, the two men were cut from the same rugged republican cloth—fearsome to the enemy, often in trouble with the brass. Dumas would come to admire Kléber and confide in him.
The distance from the landing point to the city’s walls was approximately ten miles. Though he was commander of the cavalry, Dumas marched with no horses—just as the commander of the artillery marched with no cannon. The storm had made it too difficult to unload them. Also, the Army of the Orient had transported only about 1,200 horses to Egypt, and many were in poor shape after a six-week sea voyage; this total number included horses to pull artillery and supply wagons as well as officers’ personal mounts. Only a few hundred horses were left for the cavalry, and each cavalryman normally needed more than one horse. It was the equivalent of the D-day forces arriving without jeeps, trucks, or tanks. Based on travelers’ accounts, Napoleon had believed as many as twelve thousand horses could be easily procured in Egypt, which turned out to be false.
The sheer size of the French force provided some protection. Still, before sunup, a few hundred Bedouin tribesmen attacked the French columns as they marched toward the city. When the French returned fire, the Bedouin retreated quickly, but not before kidnapping a few unfortunate Frenchmen and disappearing with them into the desert.
Inside the city, Alexandria’s sherif—a kind of lo
cal nobleman, who controlled the city for the Mamelukes—was panicking. Alexandria was poorly garrisoned. He had only a few scores of Mameluke warriors to rely on for defense. The sherif sent a dispatch to Cairo, to one of his two supreme Mameluke overlords: “My lord, the fleet which has just appeared is immense. One can see neither its beginning nor its end. For the love of God and of His Prophet, send us fighting men.” But Cairo, the Mameluke capital, was more than a day’s ride away.
At dawn Napoleon ordered the bugles sounded and the French charged. Though the city walls seemed imposing at first, when the French began to scale them the old structures crumbled in many places, and soon the attackers poured into the city. Dumas led the Fourth Light Grenadiers over the walls with his rifle. The Alexandrians defended their city fiercely, house to house, but by the next day it was in French hands. General Kléber took a musket ball to the head but survived. Dumas escaped the fighting without a scratch.
DUMAS’S appearance made quite an impression on the Egyptians—a tall black man in a general’s uniform at the head of an army of whites. Napoleon had this in mind when, a few days later, he ordered Dumas to make contact with the Bedouins to try to ransom back the men they had kidnapped. He gave Dumas two dozen of his own elite guard to take along on this mission, telling him, “I want you to be the first general that they see, the first leader they deal with.”
Dumas’s mission was successful. But by the time he arranged the prisoners’ ransom—100 piasters a head—the Bedouins had killed a handful and left the rest in almost worse condition. Napoleon interrogated one soldier who cried and could not bring himself to outline the treatment he’d received, though it was eventually pried out of him—all the men had been raped, a fate the French soldiers would come to know and fear in Egypt, a land where European sex norms did not apply.
General Dumas apparently stood out from the beginning of the campaign—and not in a way Napoleon would have enjoyed. In the rare, unpublished third volume of his memoirs, the expedition’s chief medical officer, Dr. Nicolas-René Desgenettes, vividly recalled the impression the expedition’s top commanders made on the local population:
Among the Muslims, men from every class who were able to catch sight of General Bonaparte were struck by how short and how skinny he was.… The one, among our generals, whose appearance struck them even more … was the General-in-Chief of the cavalry, Dumas. Man of color, and by his figure looking like a centaur, when they saw him ride his horse over the trenches, going to ransom the prisoners, all of them believed that he was the leader of the Expedition.
* Terror over rumors of imminent French invasions would continue to haunt Britons for seventy years. Napoleon seriously planned to conquer the island in the years between 1801 and 1805, but the British naval triumph at Trafalgar finished that hope for good. Invasion panics later returned with a vengeance, especially during the reign of Bonaparte’s nephew, Napoleon III (1848–70). When a unified Germany occupied France in 1871, it also replaced that defeated country as the object of British invasion panics. The German invasion never arrived, but the fear of it proved inspirational for British novelists, whose visions of it eventually produced the modern spy thriller. And when H. G. Wells turned the invaders into Martians in The War of the Worlds, modern science fiction was born.
† Alexander of Macedon’s pharaonic dynasty, the Ptolemies, ruled for the next three centuries. The suicide of Cleopatra, the last of the Ptolemies, marked the end of Alexandrian Egypt in 30 BC.
‡ Tippoo’s plucky army was famous for its “rocket brigades,” which fired special long-range rockets out of steel and bamboo tubes. In one battle in April 1799, Tippoo’s rocket fire disoriented the normally unflappable Colonel Arthur Wellesley, future duke of Wellington, and forced a retreat. (“So pestered were we with the rocket boys that there was no moving without danger,” wrote one British officer.) But the British army gained the upper hand when a shot struck a magazine of Tippoo’s rockets, causing a massive explosion. The victorious British hauled away hundreds of rocket launchers and fire-ready rockets, and four years later they began their own rocket program at the Royal Woolwich Arsenal in England, under the direction of William Congreve. It was the so-called Congreve rockets, improvements on Citizen Tippoo Sultan’s rockets, that provided “the rockets’ red glare” when the British bombarded Washington, D.C., in 1812.
§ William Tell, the national folk hero of Switzerland, loomed large over the French Revolution. The national myth goes that Tell, an uncannily fine marksman, assassinated an Austrian tyrant in the fourteenth century and gave birth to Swiss democracy and independence. It heightened French fascination with him that the tyrant he assassinated was Austrian. During the Revolution, Paris was subdivided into administrative “sections”; one of the more radical was named for William Tell.
‖ When the crusader kingdom fell, the Knights lost their castles in Syria and Palestine, but rather than return to Europe, they relocated to the Greek island of Rhodes, where they built a powerful fleet to fight sea battles with the infidels. They held Rhodes for nearly one hundred years until the Turkish sultan Suleiman the Magnificent finally ousted them; it took a fleet of four hundred ships and 200,000 soldiers to do so.
But as the last line of defense between Christian Europe and the world of Islam, the Knights got a new home from the Holy Roman Emperor: a hilly, barren island of olive groves called Malta, which then belonged to the Kingdom of Sicily, itself a possession of the emperor. The only condition was that the Knights of St. John become official vassals of the king of Sicily and pay him annual feudal dues that included one “Maltese falcon.” This was the inspiration for the enigmatic statue that so upends the world of Detective Sam Spade—a treasure that men covet and kill for—just as a different kind of Maltese treasure would soon upend the world of Alex Dumas.
a The Napoleonic Code would impose and codify French revolutionary principles of law, politics, family, and society on the rest of Europe in ways that would never be undone, despite the eventual defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo and the reestablishment of the old monarchy. The Code established equality before the law, meritocracy in education and civil service, economic liberalism and modern property rights, and, perhaps most important, the secular control of most institutions of society, such as education and marriage.
b Though the Code would form the basis of modern life in almost every European country Napoleon subsequently invaded, the Maltese quickly threw off the new order. In 1800, the British took Malta from the French and made it the headquarters of the Royal Navy’s Mediterranean Fleet.
During World War II, Malta withstood another incredible siege—this one by the Nazis. Knights or no Knights, the Maltese showed they could hold out against the fiercest enemy. The king of England awarded the George Cross to “the island fortress of Malta … to honor her brave people,” a rare instance of the British Empire’s highest civilian award for gallantry going to a group rather than an individual. Franklin Roosevelt called Malta “one tiny bright flame in the darkness” of Nazi Europe.
17
“THE DELIRIUM OF HIS REPUBLICANISM”
“THE French people—may God thoroughly destroy their country and cover their flags in ignominy—are a nation of obstinate infidels, of unrestrained evildoers,” declared the Ottoman sultan and caliph of Islam when he learned of the French invasion. “Rivers of blood have watered the earth and the French have finally succeeded in their criminal designs over the nations that succumbed to them. They are sunk in a sea of vice and error; they gather under the flag of the Devil, and they can only be happy amidst chaos, taking their inspiration from Hell itself … may almighty God whom we worship turn their Satanic plots against them!”
“With the Prophet’s powerful protection,” he added hopefully, “these armies of atheists will be scattered before You and exterminated.”
Napoleon ordered an immediate march on Cairo. His plan was to capture the smaller cities of Damanhur, Rosetta, and El Ramaniya along the way. With the Nile Delta in t
heir hands, the French would drive the Mameluke warriors out of their capital city and seize control of the country. General Kléber, who needed to recover from his head wound, would stay behind as military governor of Alexandria. Admiral Brueys stayed with the fleet, which he had anchored in Aboukir Bay, just east of Alexandria at the mouth of the Nile.
The last of the groups to leave the ships were the savants. While the army marched on Alexandria, France’s most distinguished scientists, scholars, writers, and artists had been left on board, forced to beg moldy biscuits and brackish water from the remaining crew. At last a frigate was sent to bring them to shore. It dumped them, along with their belongings and the elaborate instruments of their trades, on a beach near some remnants of marble columns and they straggled into town.
Vivant Denon, the artist-archaeologist whose magnificent sketches would help create the discipline of Egyptology, recalled his brutal entry into Alexandria: “I was assailed by packs of wild dogs, which came at me from the doorways, the streets, the rooftops, their cries reverberating from house to house. I left the streets and tried to cling to the shoreline.… I jumped into the sea to get free of the dogs, and when the water became too deep I scaled the walls themselves. Finally, soaked to the skin, covered in sweat, overcome with fatigue and frightened out of my wits, I reached the soldiers on guard at midnight, convinced that the dogs were the sixth and most terrible of the biblical plagues of Egypt.”
Except for Napoleon’s favorites, who lodged with him, the rest of the savants went essentially homeless in Alexandria. The general who was supposed to be in charge of them was busy preparing the march on Cairo. He told the savants to make do as best they could. France’s most illustrious minds found themselves with fewer comforts than the lowest soldier.