Napoleon in Egypt (38 page)

By the time Menou’s armed escort arrived on the scene, the attackers had all returned to their village, where they had barricaded themselves in behind the fortified mud-brick walls. The French attacked the village, and a fierce engagement continued throughout the afternoon and into the night, with bursts of heavy fire exchanged on both sides. When at midnight the village went quiet, the French discovered that the villagers had managed to escape undercover of darkness. Marmont recalled in his
Mémoires
: “We lost twenty soldiers, killed or wounded; and General Menou had his horse shot from under him. The unfortunate Joly had had his head hacked off, we later found his mutilated body.”

September also saw a rise in the Bedouin harassment of the French lines of communication. Back in Cairo, Napoleon doubled the armed escorts for his couriers and took punitive measures wherever possible, which ensured that most of the couriers reached their destination. However, the British naval blockade meant that Napoleon and his army were all but cut off from the outside world. Yet at least one communication from the Directory in France did manage to get through, though not without some difficulty.

The Directory’s message had been dispatched from Paris on July 6, carried by courier Lesimple, who embarked from Toulon on July 17 aboard the sloop
L’Anénome
, under the command of Captain Garibou.
L’Anénome
made its way along the Italian coast, calling in at Civitavecchia to pick up General Camin and several other military personnel bound for Egypt, before finally departing Malta on August 26, by which time they had been informed of the British blockade of Egypt. With the aid of a good following wind, Captain Garibou arrived off the African coast near Marabout, five miles to the west of Alexandria, in the early hours of September 2. Here he waited for a few hours, intending at daybreak to navigate the coastal shoals and sneak into Alexandria harbor, but at five
A.M.
L’Anénome
was spotted by some of the British warships maintaining the blockade. Owing to the freshness and direction of the wind, escape proved impossible, so Captain Garibou put Lesimple ashore with a small armed escort, and then beached his ship, with the aim of unloading his passengers, together with the arms and ammunition he had on board, so that they could make their way along the coast to Alexandria. Unfortunately, the sea was so rough that in the course of this exercise the ammunition became soaked, rendering it useless for any defense against the Bedouin who were known to infest this region.

The group began making their way as best they could along the shore, carrying some of the luggage and bearing a large French flag in the hope that they might be spotted by a French patrol. In no time the first few Bedouin appeared. They gestured for the French to follow them inland, but the French insisted upon continuing on their way towards Alexandria. When a larger group of mounted Bedouin appeared on the dunes, the French soon found themselves under attack. As they fled, abandoning their luggage, the Bedouin leapt on it, leaving the French under the impression that they were only interested in robbing them of their possessions. So when the Bedouin continued to pursue them, the French reasoned that they must be after their clothes and whatever they might be carrying in them. One of the passengers, Devouges, described what happened next:

I stripped myself stark naked, imagining this was the only way to avoid being killed. General Camin was also stripping off beside me, but unfortunately he removed neither his cap nor his shirt nor his pants. . . . a Bedouin chief on horseback galloped up to him, taking aim with his rifle. The general sank to his knees asking for his life to be spared, turning aside the butt of the rifle which was already pointing at his chest. Then he raised himself once more and staggered back a few paces, but the pitiless Moor blasted him back onto the sand and he was stripped of his clothes.
⁷

Whilst the others were being attacked around him, Devouges made a run for it, stark naked, plunging into the sea even though he could not swim. Here he came across General Camin’s adjutant Bella, and together the two of them struggled vainly against the high wind-driven breakers which were forcing them back towards the shore. Bella took his hand, as much a gesture of farewell as to hold out against the force of the waves, and they clung to each other in terror, watching as their comrades were murdered on the beach.

Then our turn came. Two of the brigands waded into the sea up to their waists. The first aimed at Bella, who was in front of me, and his shot hit Bella, going in through one side of his neck and out the other. “I am lost, my friend,” he cried to me, letting go of me to raise his hands to his wounds. Two streams of blood ran down his shoulders. For a moment the sea separated us. The second brigand was taking aim at me, but before his finger could pull the trigger I plunged into the sea.

Somehow Devouges escaped, and later “I felt a body beside me, floating alongside two others. I raised its head: it was Bella. The body of a poor little twelve-year-old child was floating beside him.”

The Bedouin eventually rounded up those of the group who had managed to escape—around twenty in all, including Lesimple, who was still clinging to the remnants of his dispatches from the Directory—and they were held to ransom. As soon as this news reached Kléber in Alexandria, he paid the ransom, and then sent Lesimple under escort to Cairo. On September 8 Lesimple finally arrived at his destination and presented his dispatches from the Directory to Napoleon. All that was left was a message congratulating Napoleon on the taking of Malta.

As it happened, Napoleon had that very day been completing the latest of his regular reports for the Directory. This was the one in which he had blithely informed his political masters: “Everything is perfectly fine here. The country is under control and the people are becoming accustomed to our presence. The rest is just a matter of time: all the institutions which can speedily bring this about are in place. . . . Mistress of Egypt, France will before long be mistress of the Indes.” Beneath these breathtaking claims, he now added a brief note: “Courier Lesimple has just this moment arrived. His ship was beached before Alexandria, and he could only save part of his dispatches. All he had was a letter from you dated 18 Messidor [July 6]. . . . He was probably carrying others which have been lost.”
⁸

Two vital points arise from this tale. Firstly it demonstrates not only the hazardousness, but also the sheer length of time dispatches took to reach Cairo from Paris—over two months, with no guarantee of delivery. And secondly, this confirmed to Napoleon that he was now entirely his own master, free to act as he pleased. More even than in Italy, he alone now ruled the territory nominally under his command. He was able to introduce reforms, found institutions, make Egypt into anything he pleased. Here, as a result of its shambolic political structure and historical stasis, was a
tabula rasa
upon which he could write anything he wished. Any orders the Directory might send him would be out of date, and therefore liable to be irrelevant, by the time they arrived in Egypt. Napoleon was thus free to dream of “France [becoming] mistress of the Indes,” as he tactfully put it. In fact, if the situation remained as it was, with the British navy controlling the Mediterranean, he realized that he alone could be master of the Indes—France would have no say in the matter.

There was only one small cloud on the horizon of this blue-skied geopolitical fantasy. And this was not the present reality of Egypt, which remained barely under control: becoming complete master of Egypt was “just a matter of time.” There remained the question of how the Turkish authorities had reacted to his invasion of what was, nominally at least, their sovereign territory. Had Talleyrand managed to convince the Porte that France had no hostile intentions towards its long-time ally the Ottoman Empire? Even in his optimistic letter assuring the Directory “everything is perfectly fine,” Napoleon still felt the need to remind them that “I am waiting on news from Constantinople.”

As we have seen, Napoleon had written as early as August 19 to the Directory asking, “Is Talleyrand in Constantinople?”
⁹
Three days later, taking matters into his own hands, he wrote to the Turkish sultan’s chief minister, the grand vizier: “The French army, of which I have the honor to be commander, has entered Egypt to punish the Mameluke beys for the insults that they have ceaselessly inflicted upon French business interests.” Working on the assumption that Talleyrand had not yet arrived, he informed the grand vizier: “Citizen Talleyrand, minister of foreign affairs in Paris, has been named on behalf of France as the ambassador to Constantinople. . . . He is furnished with powers and instructions to negotiate, conclude and sign any agreement which will remove any difficulties arising from the occupation of Egypt by the French army, and to consolidate the ancient and vital friendship which should exist between our two powers.”
¹⁰

Napoleon’s further pleas during the following weeks concerning Talleyrand’s whereabouts received no reply. Then, early in October, General Marmont, who had taken over from Kléber as governor of Alexandria, informed Napoleon in Cairo that the blockading British squadron had been joined by a number of warships flying the Turkish flag. Marmont had consequently interviewed the captain of a Turkish caravelle which had put into Alexandria harbor, and told Napoleon: “The Turkish captain is deeply convinced of the friendship which the Porte has for us, he did not believe there was any hostility, and he claimed that the Turkish naval ships off Alexandria had been rounded up in the Aegean islands by the British, and were at present under their control.”
¹¹
The Turkish captain had also revealed some interesting background information: “He told one of our officers that he had received news of the sensation caused in Constantinople by our entry here; that at first there had been much anger, but that when the official note arrived opinion had changed, and that the Sultan had dispatched everywhere small warships bearing orders to respect the French.” This “official note” may have been the letter sent by Napoleon, soon after his arrival, to Pasha Abu Bakr, the sultan’s representative in Egypt, informing him that “I have no intention of doing anything against the Sultan.”
¹²

However, soon after Marmont’s report from Alexandria, the French got wind of a rumor circulating in Cairo that the Porte had declared war on France. Napoleon refused to believe this, and on October 30 he dispatched the interpreter Bracevich and Ibrahim-agha, a local dignitary of Turkish extraction, to Alexandria, where they were instructed to sail out to the blockading fleet on a ship flying the Turkish flag, thus indicating that the French authorities in Egypt still recognized Turkish sovereignty. Bracevich and his party were to go aboard the commanding warship, on the pretext of conducting a neutral parley, and “to try and pick up all possible intelligence concerning our position with the Porte.”
¹³

The French boarding party were received with due civility, as well as some amused astonishment that they should be sailing under the Turkish flag. Bracevich was informed by the British commander Commodore Hood that Turkey had declared war upon France, news that was reinforced by the presence of the venerable Turkish naval commander of Rhodes, Hassan Bey. This was duly relayed back to Napoleon, although General Marmont in Alexandria remained unconvinced. He informed Napoleon that “during the last four days the enemy has begun firing at our fort at Aboukir, but quite uselessly and with no other effect than the death of one man.” However, he had observed the Turkish warships taking part in this operation and had noticed “never does a Turkish ship approach one of our batteries without being followed by a British ship . . . one remains persuaded that these ships are not an expedition coming from Constantinople, but a few warships, found cruising or at Rhodes, and rounded up by the British.”
¹⁴

Napoleon was inclined to agree. Rumors of a Turkish declaration of war continued to circulate in Cairo, but he remained convinced that this was all part of a British attempt to undermine French rule in Egypt. In order to confirm his suspicions, he decided to send a second mission to the blockading fleet, and on November 16 he briefed Lieutenant Guibert, a promising young officer in the Guides, for this delicate mission. Napoleon’s briefing to Guibert is highly revealing:

You will let drop, in the course of the conversation, that I often receive news from Constantinople overland. . . . You will also say to them, as if inadvertently, with a lack of reticence that will easily be attributable to your youth, that since the first days of September I have daily dispatched a courier to France . . . if they ask from where they have departed, just say you don’t know. . . . You will say to them that I am at present at Suez, letting drop casually that you believe a large number of battleships have arrived there from the Isle de France [Mauritius]. . . . You will also say that if they are having difficulty with supplies of fresh water or anything else which they need to make life bearable, you know that I am quite willing to provide them with such things.
¹⁵

It is evident from this that Napoleon suspected the British were just as much in the dark as himself, and that he was in a better position to bluff than they were. After all, Turkey was France’s ally, and Talleyrand was due to sort things out with the Porte. The British communications were stretched to their very limits, and they may well have felt threatened by the prospect of a French fleet arriving to relieve the blockade. Yet if this was the case, they were giving nothing away. Lieutenant Guibert was received coldly but politely by Commodore Hood, who allowed him to talk freely with those on board. As Guibert later reported back to Napoleon: