A child of the Enlightenment, Bonaparte held a set of assumptions and prejudices which he took to be universal. Having moved away from Rousseau’s belief in his inherent goodness, he had moved on to the view that man is a rational creature guided by self-interest yet susceptible to being inspired by ideals. He therefore took it as self-evident that when shown the benefits of French administration and technological progress, the inhabitants of Egypt would embrace them. He had liberated them from the cruel incompetence of the Mameluke beys, he had cleaned up and lit the streets of Cairo, he was bringing them civilisation. He had taken the trouble to acquaint himself with their religion and had made a rational assessment of it which was not entirely superficial. He thought the absence of the kind of hierarchy and ritual which characterised the Catholic Church would make Muslims more open to reason. What he failed to grasp was that Islam represented a mentality as much as a faith, and that was fundamentally at odds with Christian and secular Western values, along with their underlying assumption of superiority. He deluded himself that he was gaining acceptance because many styled him with Arab titles and kissed his hand. But however charming they may have shown themselves on occasion, they were at best not interested and regarded him as an alien intruder. Ironically, many of the measures he took would serve as a model for Mehmet Ali when he took over Egypt in 1805, but a Muslim could do what a Frenchman could not.
It took Bonaparte some time to appreciate that people obeyed only out of fear, and that showing mercy or consideration were seen as signs of weakness. He began beheading transgressors as an example, taking hostages or razing villages whose inhabitants had attacked his men. This did not achieve the desired results, as the locals saw it not as just punishment but as unwarranted aggression, and only waited for chances of retaliation. It was only then that he understood reason and logic had no purchase, and began showing he meant business by shooting and beheading suspects almost at random. The locals responded in kind, cutting off the arms, legs, noses, ears or genitalia of prisoners, usually after sodomising them, or beheading, flaying or burying them alive. Outside Cairo and the other towns, the French occupation remained frail.
This was the more alarming as the second assumption on which the viability of the Egyptian venture had been predicated now crumbled. The first had been that Egypt was within reach of France and therefore easier to protect and exploit than more distant colonies, but the destruction of the fleet in Aboukir Bay had made it as vulnerable as the Caribbean ones it had been meant to replace. The second assumption had been that the Ottoman Porte would remain neutral. Yet having packed Bonaparte off on his pet venture, Talleyrand had failed to carry out his part in the plan. Bonaparte had written to him from Cairo, telling him he could inform the Sultan that the Islamic faith and mosques were being protected, pilgrims to Mecca were being assisted, that he had personally attended the feast of the Prophet, and that Turkish shipping and interests were being respected. Yet not only did Talleyrand not go to Constantinople, he had entirely omitted to approach the Porte, which was astonished to discover that a French army had invaded its dominion.
News of Nelson’s victory emboldened the Sultan to declare war on France. British supremacy in the Mediterranean prompted the kingdom of Naples to do likewise. Russia, which had long been eyeing the Ionian islands as a potential naval base, buried its hatchet with the Porte and signed an anti-French alliance with it on 23 December and with Britain on 29 January. Two Ottoman forces gathered to expel the French from Egypt. One was to march from Syria under the command of Djezzar Pasha of Acre, the other was to go by sea and land at Aboukir.
Bonaparte had two options: either to wait for the attack in the hope that Djezzar’s force would be weakened by a march across the Sinai desert and the other could be prevented from landing, or to attack and defeat one force before the other could be deployed. If he were to defeat Djezzar and take Acre, he would at the same time deny the British squadron blockading Egypt one of its bases, thus opening up the possibility of communication with France. The fall of Acre might also frighten the Porte into making peace.
He therefore left Desaix in Upper Egypt to contain Murad Bey and Marmont at Alexandria to defend the coast, and marched out himself on 10 February 1799. It was just this kind of snap decision that had enabled him to triumph over successive Austrian armies in Italy, and a victorious outcome would open up all sorts of possibilities. He was, as he would later confess, carried away by the dreams they gave rise to.
16
Plague
‘All we could see in this new project was another chance of glory as well as incalculable hardships,’ recorded Captain Moiret, adding that the moment his men had been told they were to march out to Syria the grumbling ceased; they set off in high spirits on 6 February 1799.1
Bonaparte assumed that after a quick march his advance guard would capture the presumably well-stocked fortress of El Arish, and he did not take sufficient supplies with him. As the troops marched over the Sinai, hugging the Mediterranean coast, they ran out of victuals and were reduced to drinking brackish water and eating seaweed, which gave them dysentery. ‘We ate dogs, donkeys and camels,’ Bonaparte admitted to Desaix. It was not just the troops who were grumbling by the time he joined his vanguard at El Arish on the evening of 17 February. His generals too were fed up, and his theatrical rhetoric only irritated them. General Kléber, an experienced soldier who had served in the Austrian army before the Revolution, was difficult to ignore with his Homeric stature, booming imperious voice and tendency to use it to say what he thought. ‘Never a proper plan, everything goes by leaps and bounds, every day rules the action of that day,’ he declared of Bonaparte’s method. Yet even he had to admit that this ‘extraordinary man’ possessed something which set him apart and lent him an authority he could not dispute. ‘It is to dare, and to keep daring, and he carries that art to the limits of temerity.’ That capacity was to be tested severely over the next weeks.2
Desperate to move on but fearful of leaving possibly mutinous generals behind to continue the siege, Bonaparte offered the garrison of El Arish generous terms, and it capitulated on 20 February. The men were allowed to leave with their arms and baggage under oath that they would not bear arms against France for twelve months. The chief surgeon of the Army of the Orient, Dr Dominique-Jean Larrey, disinfected the fort against the plague, which had broken out in the area, and established a hospital before they set off for Gaza.3
They were now marching through fertile country, but under drenching rain that turned the tracks to seas of mud. Entering Gaza after a brief skirmish, Bonaparte made a pompous speech informing the inhabitants that he was bringing them liberty. He addressed the griefs of his own men with an order of the day full of references to the Philistines and the Crusaders. To some soldiers who complained of lack of food he said that the Roman legionaries had eaten their leather equipment but kept going.4
On 3 March they reached the pretty town of Jaffa. The officer sent under a white flag to summon its defenders to surrender was beheaded and his body thrown into the sea. This enraged the troops, who after three days of siege stormed the defences and entered the town. While the soldiers who had been defending it withdrew to a citadel, the French unleashed their rage on the mainly Christian population in an orgy of looting, rape and murder. ‘One would require very dark colours in order to paint the hideous scenes which took place,’ recorded one officer. Worse was to follow.5
Two of Bonaparte’s aides, his stepson Eugène and Captain Croisier, had persuaded the soldiers holed up in the citadel to surrender by assuring them their lives would be spared. When he saw them filing out, Bonaparte flew into a rage with his stepson, asking him what he was supposed to do with them, given that he could neither feed them nor spare men to escort them back to Egypt. As they were mostly the same men who had been released on parole at El Arish, after deliberating for some time with his senior officers he concluded that they all deserved to be shot. When Berthier pleaded for their lives, Bonaparte told him
to go and join a monastery. Over the next couple of days some 1,500 to 2,000 men (accounts vary) were led out onto the beach and shot, bayoneted or drowned. According to one officer, ‘the heart of the French soldier heaved with horror’, but it had not done so during the sack of the town, after which the camp had turned into a bazaar where loot, including women, was traded.6
Bonaparte’s decision to execute the prisoners was seized on by the British and has been made much of by his detractors ever since, but cities which resisted generally suffered the consequences, and British troops behaved no better during the concurrent war in India against the Mahrattas, or later in the Peninsular War; the Spanish and British treatment of those who surrendered at Bailén would be a good deal less humane. The morality of the time was far removed from present-day standards, and it was accepted that a general had to put his own men first.7
They may have expressed reservations, but the nerve required to act decisively earned Bonaparte the respect of his officers and men. Visiting the town, he inspected the hospital and impressed his entourage by walking among the plague victims, talking to and touching them. To set an example to reluctant orderlies, he allegedly approached one patient, ‘pressed the bubo and forced out the pus’. Whether he actually did this or not, the story circulated among the troops, enhancing his standing.8
Image was important, and Bonaparte could not be accused of underestimating its power. ‘You should know that all the efforts of humans are powerless against me, as everything that I undertake must come to pass,’ he announced in a proclamation to the inhabitants of the area. ‘Those who declare they are my friends prosper. Those who declare themselves my enemies perish.’ In another, to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, he warned that ‘I am as terrible as the fire of heaven to my enemies, clement and merciful to the people and to those who wish to be my friends.’ Some of his entourage were growing anxious over what appeared to be an increasingly delusional sense of his role, and expressed fears that he was being carried away by belief in his ‘fate’ and his ‘destiny’. He may by this stage have been bolstering himself psychologically in a situation which was growing increasingly perilous.9
The army marched on to Acre, which it reached on 19 March. The city was the seat of the Ottoman governor of Syria, Djezzar Pasha (Ahmad Pasha al-Jazzar), a Bosnian by origin, known colloquially as ‘the butcher’ (in 1790 he had drowned all the women of his harem and honoured his favourite by personally eviscerating her). Bonaparte sent him an offer of accommodation, stating that there was no reason for them to be enemies. The Pasha’s response was to massacre the Christian population of the city.10
Bonaparte’s siege artillery, which had been sent by sea, had been intercepted by the British, and many agreed with Kléber, who said bluntly that it would be impossible to take a place defended by European methods with Turkish ones. Bonaparte ignored them, and the first assault, on 28 March, nearly succeeded. Two days later the defenders made a sortie, which was successfully repulsed. On 1 April Bonaparte made a second attempt to storm the defences, in which he was nearly killed by an exploding shell, and this was followed by another sortie, which was also repulsed.11
Meanwhile Ottoman forces were gathering to relieve Acre, with some 7,000 warriors from Nablus and 40,000 under the Pasha of Damascus moving south. Bonaparte sent Murat with 500 infantry and 200 cavalry out to confront him, while Junot covered his flank at Nazareth with a smaller force. Junot was himself assailed by superior forces and Bonaparte sent Kléber to assist him, but they both found themselves facing more than ten times their own number at the foot of Mount Tabor. They sent urgent messages to Bonaparte and held off the Turks for a full day before being relieved on 16 April by Bonaparte, who had made a night march of forty kilometres.
The following day he visited Nazareth, where he attended mass and stood godfather to a soldier who wished to be baptised. Two days later he was back at Acre planning another assault. This, and the next one, failed just as the first two had done. Without siege artillery the only way to breach the walls was to dig tunnels and trenches in order to place mines underneath them, a painstaking and dangerous business at the best of times. It was made no easier as, being low on powder and shot, the French artillery could not supply adequate covering fire, while the British naval squadron under Commodore Sydney Smith was not only resupplying the defenders, but also bombarding the French trenchworks.12
Most of Bonaparte’s generals were by now clamouring for him to give up and return to Cairo. He was regularly hissed and booed by the troops, but he insisted on trying yet again to take the fortress. There was undoubtedly an element of personal pique involved: this was his first setback, and he could not accept it, the more so as the man directing Sydney Smith’s guns was Le Picard de Phélippaux, a hated classmate from Brienne who had emigrated and fought against the Republic. A weightier motive for Bonaparte’s determination to take Acre was that the Druze and the Shiite Muslims who made up the population of the region were keen to rise up against their Ottoman overlords; if Bonaparte could crush Djezzar, he would be able to raise the whole region, march on Damascus and Aleppo and force the Porte to switch sides, thus denying all facilities in the eastern Mediterranean to the British and confirming France’s possession of Egypt. But the prospect was dim: news had begun to trickle through that in Europe the coalition against France had gone over to the offensive.13
Following the failure of a final assault on 10 May, Bonaparte accepted the inevitable. He sent a report to the Directory announcing that he had destroyed Acre, which, he assured them, was not worth holding on to as it was a ruin full of plague victims. As usual, he diminished his losses. He despatched another declaration to the Divan in Cairo which made even more outrageous claims – that Djezzar was wounded, that he had sunk Turkish ships, and so on. Before striking camp, he praised his troops in an address which suggested that although they had been about to capture Acre they were needed more urgently elsewhere, and promised them more glory ahead.14
The march back to Cairo took twenty-five days, and they were among the worst many of the soldiers would remember. They trudged in temperatures in the forties, with no shoes to protect their feet from the scorching sand, and at night the rags to which their uniforms had been reduced could not protect them from the cold of the desert night. They only found food and water sporadically. Many of them were wounded and some sick; those who could not walk were carried on improvised stretchers.15
Before striking camp outside Acre, Bonaparte had suggested to Dr Desgenettes that those suffering from the plague and those so badly wounded that they could not be moved should be given fatal doses of laudanum, assuming that if they were left behind they would fall victim to the barbarous practices of the enemy. Desgenettes replied that his duty lay in preserving not ending lives. Bonaparte then approached the pharmacist Boyer and ordered him to prepare the potions. There is no certainty as to what followed, at Acre and at Jaffa and Tentura, where there were also several hundred sick and wounded. The available evidence is wildly discrepant, all of it written down after the events. The British press, conflating Acre and Jaffa, painted a black picture of the evil French general poisoning hundreds of his men. Defenders of Bonaparte’s reputation either dismissed the story entirely or brought the number down to a handful of the dying. A careful reading of the evidence suggests that a potion was administered by Boyer on Bonaparte’s orders to about twenty-five men, some of whom vomited and survived.16
Before leaving Jaffa, Bonaparte ordered all carriages and carts, and horses not pulling field guns, including his own, to be used for the evacuation of the sick and wounded. He gave detailed instructions as to the separation of the sick from the wounded and how they were to be transported. When his groom suggested he keep at least one horse for himself, Bonaparte struck him with his riding crop in fury. He showed his exasperation and dealt out harsh reprimands. He had vented his anger on the 69th Demi-Brigade when it fell back during one of the assaults on Acre, accusing the men of cowardice and having nothing betw
een their legs, and suggested he would put them in skirts instead of breeches when they got home. In the interim he made them march with their muskets butt-end up.17
The march from Jaffa to Cairo was the worst part of the retreat, and despite Bonaparte’s orders the sick and wounded were dumped by those whose horses had been requisitioned to transport them, and left to die or be decapitated by preying Bedouin. At the same time there were acts of self-sacrifice, and some did slow down to help the walking wounded keep up with the columns.18
The Syrian campaign had been an unmitigated disaster. Bonaparte had lost at least 3,000 men, and by some estimates as much as one-third of the force he had set out with had been put out of action. Even those who had never criticised a decision of his expressed the opinion that he should not have embarked on the campaign. At the same time, the episode had demonstrated one thing – that Bonaparte, a man of twenty-nine in charge of an undisciplined army in many cases little better than a rabble, led by unruly generals many of whom resented or even hated him, with no superior authority to support him, was able, in the face of defeat, plague, adverse conditions and lack of supplies, to pull that force together and maintain authority over it. The Syrian campaign had tested his mettle, and shown that he was up to the challenge.19
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