The following day proved another of feverish activity at Bonaparte’s headquarters. Having sent for Sheik Koraim and other principal officials of the city, he spoke at great length of the benefits the French Republic was bringing to the world through its systematic destruction of all tyrants, and particularly the religious tyranny long wielded by Rome and her Christian priests. He even went so far as to say that he personally thought more highly of the Mohammedan faith, and quoted at them extracts from the Koran that he had learned by heart during the voyage.
Roger, who was present at this performance, thought it unlikely that the Sheiks and Imams would believe in the sincerity of these statements; but they were at least favourably impressed and willingly agreed to form a new Council to maintain order in the city and to co-operate with the French military authorities.
To have gained their goodwill was an important asset, as Bonaparte intended to push on as soon as possible to Cairo and he could afford to leave only a limited garrison in Alexandria. He would, however, have probably secured it without great difficulty in any case, owing to the very exceptional conditions maintaining in Egypt.
The country had for long been a part of the Turkish Empire and, in theory, was ruled by a Pasha appointed by the Sultan. But as Egypt was so far from Constantinople the Sultans had feared that one day an ambitious Viceroy might repudiate their authority and make himself Sultan of Egypt. To guard against such an eventuality they had appointed twenty-four Mameluke Beys, each with a following of several hundred men, to act as Governors of the provinces, independently of the Viceroy. In this they had been too clever, as it was the Beys who had repudiated the authority of Constantinople and had for centuries treated Egypt as a flight of vultures would have treated the carcass of a dead horse.
These Marmelukes formed a caste apart, dating from the time of Saladin. They were fair-skinned, often blue-eyed, Circassians, hand-picked as the handsomest and fittest small boys in the Caucasus, bought as slaves and shipped to Egypt. There they were brought up under the strictest discipline, and in ignorance of their origin, to the profession of arms. Each Bey owned five or six hundred of them, and each Mameluke had two native Copts to groom his horses and care for his weapons. They lived in camps and had no relations with the population, other than to plunder it at the order of their masters. They were magnificently equipped, the finest horsemen in the world and lived only for fighting. The Beys were far stronger than the Turkish garrison; so they treated the Sultan’s officials with contempt, while terrorising the Arabs and the wretched Copts who formed the greater part of the population. Often they fought among themselves for the control of greater areas of territory, and at this time two of them wielded authority over all the others. The elder, Ibrahim Bey, was crafty and powerful; his rival, Murad Bey, was valiant and ambitious.
So eager was Bonaparte to continue his conquest of the country that the remainder of his men, with the guns and horses he had brought, having been landed at Marabout on 2nd July, on the night of the 3rd he despatched Desaix’s Division to Rahmaniyeh, about thirty miles up the Rosetta mouth of the Nile to act as advance guard of the Army. Any other General would have sent them up the coast to Rosetta, then along the inhabited banks of the river, but that would have meant their marching nearly double the distance. So impatient was he that he ordered Desaix to head straight across the desert and Reynier’s Division to follow the next day. On that day, too, he ordered Menou to march up the coast, capture Rosetta, form a flotilla there and proceed up the Nile to rendezvous with Desaix at Rahmaniyeh. On the 6th, having completed his arrangements in Alexandria, he left the wounded Kléber in command of three thousand men to garrison the city and himself led the rest of the Army along the desert trail that the gallant Desaix had blazed.
During the next few days Roger’s worst forebodings were nearly realised. The reports already sent back by Desaix were harrowing. Scorched and blistered, his weary men were staggering across miles of shifting sands. They had met with no serious opposition, so it was evident that the Mameluke strategy was to draw them as far as possible into the desert before attacking; but during the march they were constantly pestered by Bedouin, who skirted the flanks and rear of the column, occasionally firing at it and falling upon and butchering all stragglers.
Fear of these Arabs was the main factor that kept the column together, for the suffering of the men from thirst was terrible and, as discipline had gone to pieces, small parties of them would have blundered off in all directions in a desperate search for water. Every well they came to had been filled in with sand by the Arabs, and even when they had frantically cleared away the sand there was not enough water in the holes to quench the thirst of more than a few dozen of them. Reynier’s Division, following a day’s march behind, suffered even worse, for on arriving at well after well they found them completely dry.
On the 7th both Divisions reached Damanhûr. They had been told that it was one of the largest towns in Lower Egypt, but found it to be only a huddle of tumble-down houses and mud huts, enclosed with walls that were falling to pieces. There was not sufficient food in the place to be worth commandeering, and they had nearly exhausted the hard biscuit they had brought with them from Alexandria. Almost at the end of their tether, they took such consolation as they could from the small ration of water that was available and the palm and pomegranate groves outside the town, which provided the first blissful shade they had encountered since starting on their terrible march.
The General-in-Chief caught up with them there on the following day, and the march of the other Divisions which accompanied him had been no less gruelling. Their route had lain along a canal dating from the Roman occupation. Having been abandoned for fifteen hundred years it was now no more than a series of elongated depressions, which filled with water each year only when the Nile flooded. As that took place in August or September, and this was July, the very little water left in it lay in small, stagnant pools, overgrown with moss and alive with horrible insects. In spite of that, every time the men sighted one of these greenish patches they rushed down to it and fought among themselves for the temporary relief afforded to those who succeeded in getting their mouths into the brackish filth and sucking it up.
There were water and cooks’ carts with the Headquarters Staff, but after the first day there was nothing to cook; so the Staff also had to make do on hard biscuit. Bonaparte, ever a father to his men, kept his officers on an absolute minimum of water, so that all that could be spared should be given to wounded or ailing soldiers.
Roger survived this nightmare trek in better shape than the others. Knowing what he might be in for, he had abandoned all his belongings except his weapons, so that he could take a, dozen water-bottles with him. Yet even so he suffered grievously, as from dawn to dusk there was no protection from the blazing sun, and he drank only sparingly so that he might share his wealth in water with the worst stricken among his companions.
At Damanhûr they learned that Desaix had met with another form of misfortune. In the desert at night there had been nothing to which to tether the horses. A sentry had panicked and had fired at what he believed to be Arabs, with the result that most of the horses had bolted and in the pitch darkness it had proved impossible to recapture them.
By this time the troops, who had been told that Egypt was ‘more fertile than the plain of Lombardy’, and had been promised six acres per man, were verging on mutiny. The officers, too, who had become accustomed to rich living, openly showed sympathy with them. Bonaparte was accused, even within his hearing, of having wilfully deceived them and led them to their destruction. Lannes and Murat, of all people, actually threw their Generals’ hats on the ground and stamped upon them in their fury of disillusion and despair.
Yet the little Corsican rode out the storm. He was the only man in his Army who appeared unaffected by the terrible heat. Wearing the green uniform of his Guides, buttoned up to the chin, he walked as often as he rode. To every complaint, whether from officers or men, he made a swi
ft, tart rejoinder, abusing them roundly for lack of faith, lack of stamina, lack of courage. His thin, bony frame rigid with indignation at their grumbling, his enormously broad jaw thrust out in unshakable determination, he forced them, by sheer willpower, to continue onward across the burning sands.
There followed two more appalling days, during which the main Army, now about thirty thousand strong, continued to stagger across the desert. Their only food now a few handfuls of corn per man, acquired in Damanhûr, and water was absolutely unobtainable, except for the few who carried a small hoarded supply. It had become literally worth its weight in gold, and the richer of the sufferers were offering those who had it a louis d’or for a small tin cupful.
The Bedouin continued to harass the column from its flanks and frustration added to the torments of the troops, for there was no ammunition apart from what each man carried, and that had to be husbanded against a pitched battle with the Mamelukes, so they were under strict orders not to return the Arabs’ fire. Now and again men screamed with agony as they were stung by scorpions and a number of the weaker actually died of thirst or sunstroke.
At last, parched, blistered, their skin drawn taut over their cheek-bones and their eyes starting from their heads, they reached Rahmaniyeh and the Nile. Croaking and delirious, they swarmed down the bank to lap up the blessed water; some flung themselves fully clothed into the river and were drowned.
For a few days Bonaparte allowed the Army to rest at Rahmaniyeh. While there, its lot was somewhat ameliorated by limitless water and great quantities of both luscious water-melons and wheat, although there were no mills to grind the corn into flour. On the 13th, learning that the Mamelukes were massing further up the river, Bonaparte ordered a resumption of the march. On the following day they reached the village of Chebreïss.
There the Army had its first serious encounter with the enemy. Murad Bey had assembled some three thousand of his cavalry on the left bank of the river up which Bonaparte was advancing. The Bey had also posted forces of his auxiliaries on both banks and had brought seven Turkish gunboats down from Cairo. The French flotilla, that had come up from Rosetta under a naval officer named Perrée, had on board, in addition to the unmounted cavalry, all the non-military personnel, and had been ordered to keep pace with the march of the troops on land. However it got too far ahead, so was first in contacting the enemy, and was so roughly handled by the Turkish gunboats that it was forced to retreat.
Bonaparte then arrived on the scene with his five Divisions. Each was marching in a square, with infantry six deep on all sides, the artillery at the corners and such mounted men as there were in the centre. As the Mamelukes drew near, the squares halted in positions enabling them to support one another by flanking fire. In great clouds of dust, yelling like fiends, Murad’s splendid cavalry charged the squares, first discharging their pistols, then waving aloft their flashing scimitars. But the disciplined fire of the French was a thing they had never before met. Many of them went down in the first charge, the remainder rode round the squares in confusion, small bodies of them attacking again and again with great bravery; but they were driven off and, after this one bloody encounter, they retired into the desert, having lost over three hundred men.
The French were greatly heartened, for they had withstood the terrible onslaught yet sustained very few casualties. But when the march was again resumed a renewal of their hardships caused fresh outbreaks of discontent. It began to be generally said that Bonaparte had allowed himself to be made a fool of by the Directors; that they had fired his imagination with lying tales about the riches of Egypt, in order to get rid of him; that the fabled Cairo did not exist, except perhaps as a collection of mud huts.
Now that they were marching up the bank of the Nile at least there was no shortage of water, and they could cool their weary bodies each evening by bathing in the river when the column halted. But the more water they drank the more they sweated, so that the dye from their uniforms began to stain their skins. Food for such numbers also continued to be a terrible problem, for meat was almost unobtainable and melons gave no sustenance. The only thing procurable in quantity was wheat, but there were neither mills to grind it nor ovens to bake it into bread; so they were reduced to pounding the grain on stones with their musket butts, making a mash by adding a little water and chewing the resulting uncooked mess.
The sands they trod seemed red hot. Out of a brassy sky the sun blazed down on their backs, myriads of flies appeared from nowhere and crawled over their sweating faces, the dust raised by thousands of marching feet choked and blinded them. Roger cursed the name of Talleyrand for having caused him to come on this ghastly expedition; the rest of the Army cursed that of Bonaparte.
On July 21st, after seven consecutive days of tramping through this living hell, they came in sight of the minarets of Cairo and the Pyramids. The city lay on the opposite bank of the river, the Pyramids some miles ahead of them and a little to the right. Between them and the triangular man-made mountains of stone lay Embabeh, a village that had been converted by the Mamelukes into a great, entrenched camp that ran down to the river bank. There, Murad Bey had mustered his whole force to give battle.
His rival, the crafty Ibrahim, had assembled his legions on the city side of the river. Later he said that he had expected the French to attack up both banks, but it was thought possible that he had hoped that Murad’s men and Bonaparte’s would each destroy so many of the others that he would become master of the situation without having fired a shot.
Nevertheless, even without his jealous compatriot, Murad’s force was truly formidable. It consisted of not fewer than ten thousand Mameluke cavalry, their twenty thousand Coptic helots and several thousand Arab auxiliaries. In addition the Turkish Viceroy, refusing to believe Bonaparte’s declaration that he had come to Egypt as the Sultan’s friend only to oust the Mamelukes, had sent his Janissaries to Murad’s aid.
The seething mass of helots had been armed and, twenty deep, formed a living barrier behind the shallow earthworks that had been thrown up in front of the village. At frequent intervals along the line were cannon, brought out from the city and manned by the Turks. The Arabs, on their racing camels, were stationed on the inland flank with their backs towards the Pyramids, ready to come in and massacre the wounded. In the centre, a mile-long host of Mamelukes—the lineal descendants of Saladin’s chivalry who had driven the Crusaders from the Holy Land—cavorted on their splendid Arab steeds, their bronze casques, scimitars and rich equipment glittering in the sun. Each man was armed with a pair of pistols and a dagger in his girdle, a second pair of pistols in his saddle holsters, a battle-axe hanging from the saddle and a scimitar ground to such sharpness that it would cut a thread of silk.
The five Divisions of the French Army again advanced in squares. That of Desaix on the extreme right faced the Pyramids. Then came Reynier’s; Dugua’s was in the centre and those of Vial and Bon were opposite Embabeh. The General-in-Chief and his Staff occupied the middle of the centre square. Galloping up and down, his eyes flashing with the light of battle, Bonaparte strengthened the morale of his troops by crying to them, ‘Soldiers! Remember that from the summit of the Pyramids forty centuries look down upon you.’
While still out of cannon shot he then surveyed the enemy’s positions through his telescope. Noting that the Turkish guns were fortress pieces without wheels, so could not be manoeuvred during the battle, he temporarily held back his left and ordered his right to advance, with the object of outflanking Murad and driving his cavalry back so that it should mask the Turkish cannon. Desaix’s Division, supported by Reynier’s, went forward at the quick step towards a cluster of palm trees with some mud huts among them. But Murad proved no mean opponent. Realising Bonaparte’s intention, he launched eight thousand of his cavalry upon the right flank of the French Army. Next moment the ground shook to the thunder of thirty-two thousand hoofbeats.
Officers who were there that day and lived to fight through all Napoleon’s campaigns
afterwards declared that no cavalry charge before or since ever equalled the onslaught of the Mamelukes. The belief that those who die in battle go straight to the delights of Allah’s Paradise made them completely fearless. Although the foremost fell by the hundred, mown down by the musket balls and grape-shot from the guns of the French, the following ranks leapt their horses over the great swathe of dead and dying and flung their mounts and themselves upon the squares. They gave no quarter and expected none. Yet their valour was in vain. The French stood firm and neither square broke.
As the survivors wheeled away Desaix and Reynier advanced to carry out the turning movement. Bonaparte then ordered Vial and Bon to attack the entrenchments. Elated by their comrades’ heroic stand, the two Divisions formed column and streamed forward cheering wildly. The Turkish cannon were old and ill-aimed; several of them blew up. The enormous rabble of helots, the majority of whom were armed only with spears, flails and billhooks, read death in the fierce faces of the veterans of Italy. Flinging down their weapons, they fled. There ensued a massacre. Many of the remaining Mamelukes were driven in upon the terrified helots and, rather than surrender, at least a thousand of them rode their horses straight into the river where, weighed down by their heavy equipment, they were drowned.
The Battle of the Pyramids lasted barely half an hour. During it Bonaparte had sat his horse impassively in the centre of the square formed by Dugua’s Division. He had not found it necessary to employ it. Not a man in it had done more than fire a few shots.
The Sultan's Daughter Page 18