Napoleon in Egypt (10 page)

Once again he insisted upon being far more than just a conquering general; equally important to him was his civilian role as a legislator, administrator and reformer. He had first tried his hand at this—and discovered how much he enjoyed doing it—in Italy, but in Malta he went much further, changing the country beyond recognition. As we shall see, this was but a dress rehearsal for all the more sweeping reforms he had in mind for his empire in Egypt.
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Whilst Napoleon worked into the early hours, and Monge and Berthollet scoured the island’s treasuries, others disembarked to sample the pleasures of Malta, whose women were renowned throughout the Mediterranean for their beauty. The officers of the French expedition were welcomed ashore by the French contingent amongst the Knights of Malta, many of whom would volunteer to join Napoleon. Like all the Knights they had taken a vow of chastity; however, this did not prevent them from providing such hospitality as was expected of them by their com patriots. According to one young cavalry officer: “All of them have mistresses who are ravishingly beautiful and charming, concerning whom they are neither possessive nor jealous.”
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Meanwhile the lower ranks enjoyed themselves along the docks of Valletta, whose taverns and bordellos were said to contain more prostitutes than any other port in Europe.

All too soon the order came to re-embark, and on June 19 the last of the Egyptian expeditionary force returned to their ships, carrying in their pockets all they had managed to pick of the local oranges. Napoleon left behind General Vaubois and a garrison of some 4,000 French soldiers. But the expedition was far from being seriously depleted: he had taken with him 2,000 troops from the Malta garrison, along with 34 French Knights of Malta who had volunteered to join him, and many of the liberated “Turkish and Moorish” slaves, a large number of whom were in fact Egyptian. The latter were intended largely as a propaganda weapon: when Napoleon arrived in Egypt he wished to be seen as the liberator of Egyptians, as well as a friend of the Turks. However, crammed onto the transports, these men may have begun to have second thoughts about this “liberation.” As one young French military officer, Captain Vertray, recorded in his journal: “I suffered from seasickness the whole time. Combat on land was nothing compared to the tortures suffered by those not accustomed to sailing for any length of time, especially in such frail craft as those in which we put to sea.”
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Conditions belowdecks throughout the fleet were appallingly overcrowded, and as a result soon became almost unbearably fetid, vermin-ridden and squalid. None of the peasant soldiers had ever put to sea before and many were prostrated with seasickness. Their noncommissioned officers, many of whom lived in makeshift “cabins” erected on deck out of planks, fared little better, getting in the way of the sailors. Relations between army and navy personnel of all ranks deteriorated—each regarding themselves as the senior company, each blaming the other for the cramped and increasingly unhygienic conditions. Even aboard Brueys’ flagship
L’Orient
, where Napoleon had his own personal quarters, equipped with a library and his bed on rollers, conditions belowdecks must have been seriously overcrowded. The normal ship’s company was 1,000 men, living in cramped conditions at the best of times, but according to Bourrienne
L’Orient
was “like a village from which women have been excluded . . . a village of two thousand inhabitants.”
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If the flagship had double its quota, one can but imagine the situation on lesser ships and the transports.

After a week at sea, the provisions on board several vessels were found to have become spoiled. Wine casks had leaked, salt beef and water barrels had become tainted, and hard tack (ship’s biscuit) was becoming worm-eaten; even the fresh animals intended for the officers (chickens, pigs, sheep) were soon in short supply, with cockroaches and fleas getting every where. As one of the savants commented drily, “The animals which we were to eat were disappearing, while those which ate us began multiplying a hundred-fold.”
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The men groused as they were put through their morning inspection and drill on deck, rallying only when the bands played and the singing began in the afternoon. Napoleon would stand on the bridge of
L’Orient
waving his arms like a conductor as he encouraged the men in their intership choruses of the “Chant du Départ” and “La Marseillaise.”
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Napoleon was not entirely unaware of the state of morale amongst the men, but he considered this a mere setback which would soon be put right on arrival at their destination. Similarly difficult relations prevailed amongst the generals, senior naval officers and leading savants aboard
L’Orient
; even Vice-Admiral Brueys had to share his stateroom with Monge.

Napoleon was genuinely interested in higher learning, especially scientific and quasi-philosophical topics; he saw no conflict between this and his role as a military leader, and he appeared to take it for granted that his staff officers would feel the same. Indeed, he often seemed more at home amongst his leading savants, especially Monge and Berthollet, than he did amongst his generals. Most of the generals and naval commanders, with a few notable exceptions such as Caffarelli, were much more traditional in their tastes, maintaining a hearty contempt for the “donkeys”—their disparaging term for the savants, with their braying intellectual accents. Matters were hardly improved by the fact that the generals and commanders even had to dine alongside these intellectuals, with their unmilitary attitudes, lack of respect for rank, and ridiculous uniforms.
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Yet worse was to follow after dinner, when Napoleon insisted that his staff officers and commanders should accompany him and the savants in their nightly discussions on deck under the stars. This particularly irritated Napoleon’s favorite aide Junot, who made a point of appearing to fall asleep during the learned conversations, only rousing himself to make the occasional pointed remark—such as the suggestion that General Lannes was surely qualified to become a member of the savants on account of his name (
l’âne
being French for donkey). Junot was eventually exempted by Napoleon from having to attend these meetings, because of his inability to enter into the spirit of the proceedings.

As the vast French expeditionary fleet continued east across the Mediterranean, Napoleon’s nightly discussions with his senior officers and savants ranged across such topics as the nature of electricity, whether there was life after death, and what infinite mysteries might still remain for mankind to discover. Sometimes, when these grand debates were finished and the others had retired to their cabins, Napoleon would continue walking the deck with Monge and Berthollet, discussing his ideas. Although he grew close to both the mathematician and the chemist, as Bourrienne recorded, “it was easy to see that he preferred Monge, whose imagination may have been devoid of precise religious principles, but had a propensity towards religious ideas which was in harmony with Napoleon’s own view of this subject.”
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Berthollet’s cold chemist’s imagination was inclined to mock such things, tending towards the kind of materialism Napoleon always deplored. Yet regardless of Napoleon’s forcefully expressed opinions, Berthollet stuck to his guns. In exasperation, Napoleon at one point gestured towards the stars, demanding of the obstinate materialist, “If that is the case, then tell me who made all this?”

Napoleon’s attitude towards religion was ambivalent; his deepest belief appears to have been in the idea of destiny, most notably his own. This had grown out of a natural youthful self-conviction, allied with strong ambition, which evolved to metaphysical proportions with his meteoric rise. Nonetheless, this evolution had remained tinged with reality. Experience, particularly on the battlefield, had made him come to see that destiny also included the lesser, and less predictable, notion of luck. All this represented a deep internal conviction, with which he was so filled that it often spilled over into his pronouncements. On the other hand, his external view of religion itself was at the same time less spiritual and less favorable. According to Bourrienne, “As he frequently said to me, his principle was to look upon religion as the work of man, but to respect it everywhere as a powerful means of government.”
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Pacing the deck with Monge and Berthollet, Napoleon was in a sense merely attempting to immerse himself deeper in his self-inspired sense of destiny. As the fleet sailed up under the lee of Crete, with its high barren mountain peaks visible to the north, in his daytime conversations with Bourrienne

his imagination became exulted as he expounded with enthusiasm on ancient Crete. . . . He spoke of the decadence of the Ottoman Empire which so little resembled the fabulous land of history, a country so many times bathed in the blood of men. He began thinking of the ingenious fables of mythology, giving his words a poetic quality, which became further inspired . . . leading him to reason about the best laws to govern mankind . . . people’s need for religion . . .
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However, beyond the immediate darkness of night and Napoleon’s nebulous philosophical speculations, there did indeed lurk destiny—in the all too real form of the British fleet.

Even before Napoleon had reached Malta, he had received further information about the British ships that were searching for him. Writing to the Directory, he had described how a French sloop from the fleet had chased an English brig, forcing it to beach on Sardinia, where it had been burned: “The crew of this vessel repeatedly spoke of an English squadron, which I believe at the most boils down to five or six warships.”
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Even so, should such a squadron have surprised the huge and extended French fleet it could still have inflicted considerable damage, which was why Brueys and Napoleon had come to the conclusion that it was better to travel under the lee of Crete, deviating by well over 100 miles from the direct route to Egypt. Even if this meant losing valuable time, they would at least avoid the British squadron if it had guessed their destination and was searching along the direct route to Alexandria.

What Napoleon did not know was that Nelson’s small and depleted squadron had on June 7 been reinforced, so that it now had thirteen ships of the line, precisely the same number as Brueys had under his command. Nelson’s orders from St. Vincent had also changed. His appointed mission was no longer to spy on the enemy, in order to discover its strength and destination, but “to proceed in quest of the armament preparing by the enemy at Toulon . . . [and] use your utmost endeavours to take, sink, burn or destroy it.”
¹²

British naval intelligence was behind the times: by now Nelson had known for two weeks that Napoleon had sailed from Toulon. The fact that St. Vincent off Cadiz remained in ignorance of this event gives just an inkling of the problems of communication involved during this period. In fact, trans-Mediterranean communications and their difficulties were from now on to play a major role in both the successes and failures of the Egyptian expedition, as well as of those who sought to oppose it. Seaborne communications beyond flag-reading distance relied entirely upon messages carried aboard ships, which were dependent upon the wind, and at the mercy of currents and storms. Added intelligence could be extracted from passing ships, though this was not always reliable. Most important, any seaborne intelligence was always open to being intercepted by enemy naval vessels, who might put it to their own uses. As with St. Vincent’s communication to Nelson, messages usually took weeks rather than days, and were frequently out of date by the time they arrived, leaving much to the initiative of the individual commanders. And few of these had more initiative than Rear Admiral Sir Horatio Nelson.

Nelson was just thirty-nine years old, young indeed for an admiral in the ultra-conservative British navy, but he had already demonstrated exceptional talent. He was a battle-scarred veteran, having lost his right eye leading his men ashore at Corsica, and had his right arm shattered in an assault on Tenerife, the latter resulting in an amputation from which he had only just recuperated, leaving him physically frail. In fact, he had always suffered from a weak physique, and upon entering the navy at the age of twelve had been lucky to survive the tough conditions which then prevailed on board, where, according to a hoary British naval saying, “the ships were made of wood, and the men were made of iron.” Nelson’s will to survive had over the years deepened into a driving ambition; as a consequence, he took command of his first ship at the age of just twenty, making him the youngest captain in the entire fleet. Later, he saw action at the siege of Toulon, which the ambitious young Napoleon had played such an important part in ending. Yet there was a significant difference between the similarly powerful ambition of these two young men. Nelson was a man of deep religious conviction, in a traditional Christian sense; his dislike of the French Revolution, which he saw as an irruption of godlessness, led him to hate the French and all things French with an all-embracing fervor. The self-aggrandizement and lust for glory which so characterized Napoleon were thus sublimated into a certain selflessness in Nelson, who came to see himself as God’s instrument in this war against His enemy.

Just a year previously, in 1797, the low pay, brutal discipline and appalling conditions prevailing in the British navy had led to serious mutinies at the home ports of the Nore and Spithead. Nelson had always sought to temper these conditions, and the men who served under him loved him for it. The verb is not too strong: just as Nelson was driven by his sense of duty, so he instilled it in his men, who were willing to follow the example of their frail, savagely wounded, but fearless commander. However, on this particular occasion in the summer of 1798, he would begin by leading them on a wild goose chase. Having missed the French fleet as it slipped out of Toulon, Nelson and his reinforced squadron were now faced with the task of hunting down a prey that had nine days’ start on them and could have been anywhere in the Mediterranean—a stretch of water over 2,000 miles long and 500 miles wide, with several extensive arms and gulfs, together with many islands large and small which could provide cover for any size of fleet.