Napoleon in Egypt (16 page)

Reports differ, but it seems that despite such hardships the men, at least at the outset, retained a measure of resilience. In the words of the ever-observant Denon, “This was the first foray of our troops into another part of the world. Though separated from their homeland by seas infested with enemy ships, and passing through deserts a thousand times more dreadful still, such foreign circumstances dampened neither their courage nor their good spirits.”
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But this was only the beginning, and soon the French would begin finding themselves in even more “foreign circumstances.” Nicolas Philibert Desvernois, a twenty-seven-year-old lieutenant in a cavalry regiment of Desaix’s division, recounted how he supervised the 200 men of his platoon in setting up their camp, and then set off with a military patrol to reconnoiter the surrounding desert.

I hadn’t covered a kilometer before I came across an encampment of 150 Arab tents made of brown and black wool. They were deserted, but while cautiously searching amongst them I came across an old Arab with an old woman, both stark naked, lying on a mat. In order to allay their fears, I gestured my peaceful intentions and tossed them a Spanish gold piastre. The old man sat up and began gesticulating towards the desert. I understood that his fellow tribesmen who had departed during the night were going to return and attack us.
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Soon after Desvernois returned to his camp, he noticed “a great cloud of dust rising on the horizon.” Sure enough, this was the tribesmen coming to attack him, but he and his men were waiting for them, and soon drove them off.

Denon records an even more bizarre encounter. On their second day out from Alexandria, several soldiers came across an upsetting sight in the midst of the desert some way off from a village: a woman, her face covered in blood, carrying a newborn baby, was wandering blindly across the sand. The soldiers were curious, and summoned the column’s Arab guide, who also acted as an interpreter. They learned that the woman’s plight was the result of the jealous rage of her husband; she didn’t dare beg for mercy on her own account, but prayed that they might save the innocent child, who was the cause of her husband’s rage. The soldiers were deeply moved, and forgetting their own needs began pressing on her their rations and precious water. Then they saw an angry man approaching them from across the desert. He came up to the woman and dashed the food and water from her hand. “Stop!” he cried. “She has betrayed her honor and blackened my name. This child has brought about my disgrace, he is the son of a crime.” When the soldiers tried to oppose him, his jealous fury was rekindled, whereupon “he pulled out a dagger and stabbed the woman to death, then seized the child and smashed it to the ground. Stupefied with anger, he stood immobile, gazing fixedly at the soldiers surrounding him, daring them to avenge what he had done.”
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As a consequence of this incident, Denon gained from their interpreter a curious insight into the Egyptian way of life. Apparently, for a Muslim this man’s behavior would have been regarded as evil not because he had stabbed the woman to death, but because he had not allowed the will of God to run its course, “for if God had not wished her to die, at the end of forty days in the desert the unfortunate woman could have been taken in and looked after by charity.”
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The full extent of the French incomprehension of Egypt was gradually being revealed: first had been the men’s incredulity at Egyptian behavior (the woman buried alive with her child in Alexandria, the old man and his wife abandoned naked in the Bedouin camp); now it was their inability to understand the Egyptian way of thinking. They were in another continent: here it was not just the climate and the landscape, or the appearance and language of the people, which was different from Europe.
Everything
was different.

As the columns of Desaix’s division marched further across the desert, the soldiers found themselves undergoing another weird experience. When they marched forward each morning, “soon after the rising of the sun the objects ahead became distorted to the point where they were no longer recognizable . . . distant villages appeared as if surrounded by flood waters from the Nile, which seemed to spill over the entire landscape.” The men had never before experienced mirages, which at first perplexed them, and then began filling them with superstitious misgivings when “what at one moment appeared to be a sheet of water vanished as they advanced and became transformed into the utterly parched and arid ground of the desert.”
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The very world itself appeared to be falling apart, and many of the soldiers began regarding such mirages as a kind of fatal omen.

Desaix’s leading division finally made it to the town of Damanhur on July 7; their forty-mile march had taken four days. The sight of Damanhur at the edge of the wilderness, with its domes and minarets poking up through the green palm trees, had initally encouraged the men, but as they marched into the town itself, this prospect too appeared to have been something of a mirage. Damanhur hardly lived up to the fulsome praise of the guide. Apart from the mosques and a few houses belonging to rich cotton merchants, the town consisted mainly of alleyways lined with primitive baked-mud dwellings. But it was not all disappointment. In the market the soldiers found meat, fruit, bread and dried beans for sale. They had little money to bargain for extra rations, but soon found that the Arab vendors were willing to accept the shiny brass buttons from their uniforms as currency, and in no time a rapid trade was established.

Reynier’s division, which was following Desaix on the march to Damanhur, fared far worse. Unlike most of the expeditionary force, who came from the Army of Italy, these were men from the Army of the Rhine, who had not fought under Napoleon before, had not experienced his charismatic leadership, and felt little loyalty towards a man whom they regarded as no more than an upstart young Corsican. The soldiers, and officers, of the Army of the Rhine were notorious for their indiscipline and unwillingness to obey orders with which they disagreed. This was after all the army that had adopted that most revolutionary of anthems, “La Marseillaise,” as its battle song:

                                                      Liberty, beloved Liberty,
                                                      Fight alongside her defenders!
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It was the soldiers of the Army of the Rhine who had resisted the Directory’s attempt to have Desaix arrested. When a good general gained their loyalty they stood by him, taking their lead from his example. And this was certainly the case with their commander in Egypt, the twenty-seven-year-old Swiss-born Jean-Louis-Ebenezer Reynier, a highly intelligent and brave soldier who had also earned their respect by looking after them. However, much like his men, Reynier was also a willful individualist, liable to act on whim when the spirit so moved him, and quick to pick an argument with anyone who questioned his decisions. He tended to treat staff officers with disdain, and simply disregarded any higher orders he considered wrongheaded. The Revolution had certainly produced a new breed of young generals, and a new breed of fighting men, who together were capable of defeating any army in Europe when they believed in what they were doing. Such men had been released from a social hierarchy where superiors were simply obeyed; their strength now came from their self-belief. Over the years, the revolutionary mob had begun to evolve into individual citizens who held their own opinions and acted accordingly.

It did not take General Reynier long to find fault with his orders after leaving Alexandria. With some justice, he complained that his men were insufficiently rested after their long sea voyage. Compared to most of the others, his division had been lucky: they had not been involved in the assault on Alexandria, and had merely guarded the beachhead alongside Desaix’s division. But there was no denying that Napoleon’s haste to move on Cairo had resulted in some lapses in organization. For the first leg of the march from Alexandria he had made no adequate provision for supplies—a not uncommon failing with Napoleon, who as an artillery officer had never fully grasped the needs and limits of infantry on the move. In Italy this had not proved a serious failing: his army had lived off the land. In Egypt, this had proved possible for Dugua moving south from Rosetta along the cultivated edges of the Nile delta, but in the desert there was simply nothing to live off. Even Desaix, whose men were the first to enter the villages, quickly found that they had been deserted, all livestock gone, their stores of food all vanished. Only occasionally did one of his more resourceful officers discover some small concealed cache of dried lentils or dates, which hardly went far amongst the men. Likewise, the assurance of the local guides that there were wells along the route to Damanhur was only true in the most literal sense. There were indeed a few village wells, but not sufficient to water a division of 4,600 soldiers. Desaix’s men had quickly drunk almost all the water available, with the result that the men of Reynier’s following division soon ran out. Their general’s open criticism of this state of affairs filtered down to the men, who were reduced to a demoralized and pitiful state. First the heat, then the lack of water, began to take a terrible toll. The ranks of marching soldiers started disintegrating into broken groups, a number of which soon fell into disarray. Some of the men began running after the mirages; others stumbled and fell to the ground, so enfeebled that they were unable to rise; others strayed off into the desert, where they fell prey to the Bedouin or were simply never seen again. One member of Reynier’s division described how, after blundering over burning sands towards visions of water that always disappeared,

all of us were overcome with despair. My sadness isolated me from the sufferings of others. I was dumb to the cries and groans of my companions in misfortune who implored our assistance as they lay dying. Too much suffering closes the heart to all feeling for humanity, and drained of all emotion I saw them fall at my feet. Each man followed his own path in mournful silence. We barely looked with compassion at the mutilated bodies we encountered at every pace. . . . When finally Damanhur appeared before us, we felt the same joy as sailors seeing a rainbow after a storm.
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As indicated by the reference to mutilated bodies above, the Bedouin continued to harass the outer columns of the advancing divisions, picking off stragglers, isolated soldiers, or even occasional messengers. According to Denon: “Adjutant-general Galois was killed carrying an order from the general-in-chief [Napoleon]” and “Adjutant Delanau was taken prisoner just a few paces from the army whilst crossing a ravine: the Arabs demanded a price for his ransom, then disagreed amongst themselves whilst sharing this out, and to put an end to the dispute, blew out the brains of this fine young man.” Denon also recalled how “Mireur, a distinguished officer, who was suffering from a bout of melancholic distraction and did not respond when called to come closer, was assassinated 100 paces from an outpost.”
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In fact there are several versions of this particular incident, involving the cavalry commander General Mireur. According to his fellow officer Desvernois, the incident happened later at Damanhur, where Mireur angrily confronted Napoleon. During the course of this encounter he blamed Napoleon for the suffering of his men on the march from Alexandria, denouncing him in no uncertain terms for his ineptitude over supplies, even going so far as to condemn the entire expedition as a reckless adventure which was doomed from the outset. In Mireur’s stated opinion, the sole purpose of the expedition appeared to be nothing more than to gratify Napoleon’s personal quest for glory. Napoleon apparently heard him out in silence, and then simply turned on his heels and left. Whereupon Mireur, realizing that his career was at an end, fell into a deep depression. According to Desvernois, “The following morning before daybreak he mounted his horse, rode out into the desert, and then committed suicide by shooting himself in the head.”
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Desvernois even claims to have found Mireur’s body, still holding the pistol in his hand. However, several contemporary memoirs cast doubt on this suicide, and there is some evidence that Desvernois’s account may all have been hearsay. The official version resembled Denon’s account, stating that the general had been murdered and robbed by Bedouins.

Whatever the case, there is no doubting that a number of soldiers on the grueling march from Alexandria to Damanhur did commit suicide. Adjutant General Boyer, in a letter to his father, expressly states that “some, seeing the suffering of their comrades, blew their own brains out.”
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Corporal François also states in his memoirs that “many soldiers who were unable to get water killed themselves.”
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Such sensational stories would inevitably have spread like wildfire through the army, and one could easily have become attached to General Mireur’s death. Precisely how many men took their lives during the course of this forty-mile march through unforgiving desert without adequate supplies remains a vexed question. Such lurid events are always prone to exaggeration; on the other hand, it is hardly surprising that men were reduced to ultimate despair in such alien circumstances—the maddening
khamsin
, the mirages, the delirium of heat and thirst, the marauding Bedouin, and the sight of their dying comrades. Even the more reliable sources tend to split on this matter, and not always along expected lines. The French historian La Jonquière, who often favored Napoleon, claimed that men even took to committing suicide in front of their generals, whereas the twentieth-century Egyptian historian Shafik Ghorbal regarded such reports as “grossly exaggerated.”
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Most modern sources now tend to agree that “a few hundred men”
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amongst the four divisions that marched on Damanhur (around 18,000 men in all) were lost on the way—either died of privation, committed suicide, or were killed by the Bedouin. Many thousands of others must have suffered dreadfully, for it is known that the leading two divisions were forced to leave Alexandria without medical supplies, as the vessel carrying much of the medicine and hospital equipment had accidentally been sunk in the harbor during the rapid unloading of the fleet. Only after the departure of Desaix and Reynier was it possible to equip six field ambulances. Even Napoleon in his memoirs, written in exile on St. Helena, when he tended to adopt a rather rose-tinted view of his former exploits, conceded in a somewhat flimsy gloss: “No water could be found anywhere on the way from Alexandria [to Damanhur]. The army was not equipped to march over such terrain. It suffered a great deal from the heat and the sun and the absence of any shade or water. It developed a dislike for those vast deserted plains, and especially for the Bedouins.”
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