Napoleon in Egypt (12 page)

Brueys had no alternative but to concede, though he refused to allow the fleet under his command to anchor any closer than three miles offshore, owing to the constant danger from the uncharted shoals and the strengthening onshore wind. Disembarkation began at midday on July 1, but such were the conditions that the first men did not reach the shore until late afternoon, and did not begin arriving in larger numbers until dusk. Fortunately, their landing was unopposed.

It quickly became clear that the expedition was equipped with insufficient longboats to row the men ashore. Since the expedition’s destination had remained unknown at the time when equipment was being loaded at the ports, few had given thought to the actual circumstances of the invasion, and this oversight had not come to light during the dress-rehearsal invasion of Malta, when comparatively few troops had been put ashore.

As darkness fell and the swell increased, the overloaded longboats began capsizing. Most of those plunged into the water were not able to swim, but were quickly located by their screams through the sound of the waves as they clung to the upturned boats in the darkness. In Napoleon’s subsequent report to the Directory, he would state that twenty-nine men died in this operation; most firsthand sources suggest that this was a considerable underestimate, and that around three times this amount may have perished. Some of the crowded longboats took as long as eight hours to row through the storm until they managed to beach amidst the rollers, and a few were unable to make it back against the wind. Groggy with seasickness, the men assembled on the beach in the darkness in their sodden uniforms, clutching their muskets, attempting to dry out their kit and rations.

At the outset, Napoleon had watched the disembarkation from the quarterdeck of
L’Orient
. In the middle of the afternoon his dismay had turned to horror when an approaching warship had been spotted on the horizon. Fearful that this was the vanguard of Nelson’s squadron, he paced up and down the deck, crying out: “Am I now to be abandoned by Fortune? Can you not be merciful and grant me just a few more days?” In the event, the ship was soon identified as the French frigate
La Justice
, which had followed on from Malta. Napoleon then boarded a Maltese galley, which rowed him closer to the shore, so that he could see what was happening on the beach.
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At one
A.M.
on the morning of July 2, Napoleon finally jumped into a launch and was rowed ashore, accompanied by his chief of staff General Berthier, his close friend General Caffarelli, and General Dommartin, commander of the artillery. He had appointed Menou, Kléber and Bon as commanders of the three prongs of the initial in vasion force; while Desaix’s forces were to defend the beachhead, enabling the landing to continue. Napoleon waded ashore through the surf to find that Menou and Kléber had successfully landed with their advance forces (1,000 men each), whilst Bon had so far disembarked only a few of his men. Meanwhile Desaix and his contingent were still out in the water, trying to make it in against the waves. Napoleon supervised the defenses of the beachhead, and then lay down to sleep for an hour on the sand. Those safely landed soon followed suit, though the atmosphere that night on shore is best evoked by an entry in Captain Vertray’s journal: “I snatched some sleep until a false alarm, caused by several drunken soldiers, awoke the entire camp.”
⁵
Such was the chaotic situation for the men: having suffered misery for weeks at sea, they were now plunged into the darkness of an unknown land far from home, with the prospect of fighting for their lives. Not surprisingly, some resorted to the bottle, which only made things worse.

When Napoleon awoke at three
A.M.
, the beach was bathed in the light of a brilliant half-moon, with a warm wind now blowing in from the desert. The men paraded, while Berthier tallied their numbers: there were still fewer than 4,000 men ashore. These had limited rations, one canteen of water apiece, and sixty cartridges each. They were supported by neither artillery nor cavalry, as it was still impossible to land horses or field guns. Despite this, Napoleon was determined to press on and occupy Alexandria, so that he could secure the harbors there for the major unloading as quickly as possible.

As dawn rose across the desert ahead, the columns of men began tramping forward towards the silhouette of Alexandria and its minarets looming against the pink glow of the horizon. When the sun rose in the sky the heat quickly became insufferable; the men had soon emptied their canteens of water, and the few wells they came across could hardly quench the thirst of so many. At the head of the columns marched Napoleon, the wooden-legged Caffarelli gamely keeping pace at his side. Accompanying them were “Dumas, commander of the cavalry, without a horse; and Dommartin, commander of the artillery, without a gun.”
⁶

At five
A.M.
the first Bedouin appeared out of the desert on the army’s flanks. There were around 400 or 500 of them on horseback, “from the Henady tribe, the most ferocious of the desert Arabs, almost naked, black and scrawny.”
⁷
Their wild hair made them appear like warriors from another age. They were armed with lances, and seeing that the French had no cavalry they began charging between the columns, screaming their terrible cries, harassing any stragglers. As Napoleon was forced to concede: “If these 500 Arabs had been Mamelukes, they would have achieved a great success in this opening encounter.”
⁸
But they turned out to be more cowardly, and were seen off with little difficulty. Even so, they managed to take a dozen French prisoners, “who excited their vivid curiosity. The Arabs marveled at their white skin, and the prisoners who were returned some days later gave grotesque details of the horrible practices to which they were subjected by these men of the desert.”
⁹

At six
A.M.
Napoleon arrived at Pompey’s Pillar, which stood on a promontory southwest of Alexandria. By now even he and his staff were suffering from severe thirst, but there were no nearby wells. One of his officers produced some oranges which he had brought with him from Malta, and offered them to his commander. Napoleon accepted one, immediately tore it open and began sucking at it greedily. From his vantage point, he looked out over Alexandria. The city which had once been second only to Rome in the Roman Empire, famed for its library and its 400 temples, palaces and monuments, with a population of over a quarter of a million, was now reduced to 24,000 inhabitants.
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In the words of Captain Vertray: “Alexandria which from afar appeared a superb city, was now seen to be little more than a heap of ruins.”
¹⁰
Even so, it had its defenses. Napoleon described how he looked out over “the castellated walls of the Arab fortress . . . beyond which were the minarets of the city and the masts of the Turkish warship moored in the port.”
¹¹
It could be seen that the walls and towers of the city were lined with people, including women and children.

The arrival of the vast French fleet off Alexandria at dawn on July 1 had proved an awesome sight for the local population. According to Nicolas Turc, “When the inhabitants of Alexandria looked to the horizon they could no longer see the sea, only the sky and ships. They were seized by a terror beyond imagination.”
¹²
As soon as El-Koraïm had seen the fleet, he had immediately sent a message to Murad Bey, the Mameluke leader in Cairo: “My lord, the fleet which has arrived here is immense. One can see neither its beginning nor its end. For the love of God and His Prophet send us fighting men to protect us.”
¹³
Throughout that day and the following night he had dispatched a further dozen messengers to Cairo, begging for help. But Murad Bey remained undaunted. He demanded of one messenger: “Are they on horseback?” When he learned that the French army was on foot, he replied: “My men will destroy them and I will slice open their heads like watermelons in the fields.”
¹⁴
Such bravado was of little use to the people of Alexandria. The few guns which were dragged up onto the ramparts were evidently useless, and only one barrel of gunpowder could be found. As for the city’s defensive forces, these consisted of an Egyptian garrison of fewer than 500 men and a detachment of just twenty Mameluke cavalry.

Napoleon hoped to occupy the city without armed conflict, and to this end he had dispatched a message for El-Koraïm as soon as the fleet arrived off Alexandria: “The beys [Mamelukes] have been harassing our merchants, and I have come to demand reparation.” This was the official French government reason for the invasion, the one which Talleyrand had agreed with Napoleon should be conveyed to the Porte in Constantinople. “I will be in Alexandria tomorrow,” Napoleon went on in his message. “You need have nothing to fear. We French are great friends of the Sultan of Turkey, and you should conduct yourself as you would towards his ally. However, if you commit the least hostility against the French army I will treat you as an enemy, and you will regret it, though it is far from my heart’s desire to do such a thing.”
¹⁵

This letter received no reply, and according to Nicolas Turc, as the day progressed “the citizens fell into the greatest agitation, passing a night of such terror as to make the hairs of infants at their mothers’ breasts turn white in the blink of an eye.”
¹⁶
In the early hours news reached El-Koraïm that the French had established a beachhead and were marching towards the city, whereupon he rode out of the city at the head of his twenty Mamelukes. At daybreak he encountered a French scouting party, operating beyond the flanks of the advancing forces. “He charged them, cut off the head of the captain commanding them, and paraded it in triumph through the streets of Alexandria. This sight electrified the population.”
¹⁷

The contemporary Egyptian historian El-Djabarti, an educated man and a senior member of the Muslim community, who provided the most authoritative account of the French invasion, described how that morning the inhabitants of Alexandria saw “the French scattered around the outskirts of the city like a swarm of locusts.”
¹⁸

El-Koraïm’s attack on the French scouting party made Napoleon realize that he would have to take the city by force. Standing with his generals beneath Pompey’s Pillar, he reiterated his plan of action: Bon was to force his way in through the eastern Rosetta Gate to their right, Kléber was to scale the walls directly ahead, Menou was to attack the triangular fortress overlooking the old western harbor to the left. The three French divisions took up their positions out of cannon range under the silent gaze of the population lining the walls. According to a young French lieutenant: “All of a sudden the men, women and children burst into hideous screams, and at the same time there was a discharge of artillery fire from the walls.” Napoleon ordered the bugles to sound for the charge: “The screams doubled in intensity, our soldiers rushed forward with their generals at their head. Despite the gunfire from the defenders and the hail of stones that they threw down at us, we began fearlessly scaling the walls.”
¹⁹
The city walls were in such a state of disrepair that in some places they had crumbled, allowing the French to gain access with comparative ease. Menou was the first to break through and led his men into the city itself, receiving no fewer than seven wounds in the process, none of which proved capable of halting him in his intrepid charge. Not so lucky was Kléber, who led his grenadiers on the frontal assault to scale the walls and “was hit on the forehead by a musket-ball, which knocked him to the ground.”
²⁰
Though serious, this did not prove fatal. Meanwhile, Bon found his way through the Rosetta Gate barred, but a detachment led by General Marmont “hacked down the gate with axes, under fire from the walls” and burst into the city.
²¹

The bravery of the French soldiers under fire is indisputable, though their motive may not have been such as to inspire their commander. “In confidence I can assure you,” a young French officer wrote in a letter home, “it was thirst which drove our soldiers in the capture of Alexandria. Such was our state, it was either find water or die—we had no choice.”
²²
After the men had slaked their thirst with water from the wells and water jars they found in the nearby houses, the French army gradually moved through the streets, facing occasional sniper fire, which resulted in a few savage reprisals. Only El-Koraïm and his household guard offered any concerted resistance, eventually retreating up the causeway to Pharos Island, site of the ruined ancient lighthouse, where they barricaded themselves in the fort and refused to surrender. Napoleon finally entered the city around midnight, making his way through the narrow streets. “As he turned a corner, a shot from a window shaved the boot on his left leg. His guardsmen scrambled onto the rooftops and entered the house, where they found a single Turk barricaded in a room with six rifles, and killed him on the spot.”
²³