Napoleon in Egypt (55 page)

According to another eyewitness, Captain Krettly, on at least one occasion, “the first batch of prisoners were shot, the rest were charged by the cavalry, but the hearts of the French soldiers were overcome by horror, their limbs numbed . . . no one, or almost no one, could bring himself to strike them down . . . they were forced into the sea, where they attempted to swim, trying to reach the rocks a few hundred meters off shore . . . which saved our soldiers from the sad spectacle of seeing them massacred one by one without being able to defend themselves. But they were not saved in the end, since these poor unfortunates were overwhelmed by the waves.”
²⁶

Other eyewitness sources also tell of unspeakable horrors—of prisoners being enticed to their death by French soldiers reassuring them, using “the Egyptian sign of reconciliation in use throughout these lands,”
²⁷
of prisoners on the beach frantically piling up the corpses of their dead comrades in a vain attempt to hide from the bullets and bayonets of their murderers. The slaughter went on for three days—throughout March 8, 9 and 10.

Napoleon’s responsibility for this massacre is undeniable. In a letter written on March 9 to his chief of staff, Berthier, he states plainly: “You will order the adjutant general to lead all the artillerymen and other Turks, who were captured bearing arms at Jaffa, to the seashore and to shoot them, taking such precautions as necessary to ensure that no one escapes.”
²⁸
In his memoirs, he simply records the taking of “2,500 prisoners, of whom 8 or 900 were from the garrison at El Arish. These latter thus . . . violated their parole: they were sent to the firing squad. The others were sent to Egypt.”
²⁹
In this way Napoleon suggests that the atrocity was within the rules of war, which strictly speaking it may have been, although the promise given by Crosier and Beauharnais could be seen as having compromised this. But he also suggests that fewer than a thousand prisoners perished, which is certainly not the case. Other firsthand accounts put the number of those massacred at anything from double this figure up to 4,000; some suggest even more.

Napoleon was well aware of what he was doing: this was terror tactics, intended to intimidate the enemy and have its effect on Djezzar’s garrison at Acre. Even the paymaster Peyrusse knew this, but he could not help drawing another obvious conclusion, remarking at the end of his long letter to his mother: “This example will teach our enemies that they cannot count on our French decency; [but] sooner or later the blood of these 3,000 victims will be avenged on us.”
³⁰

On the very same day that Napoleon issued his order to Berthier, he wrote to the sheiks and
ulema
of the surrounding region: “I have no intention of making war against your people, for I have only come to make war against the Mamelukes and Djezzar-Pasha, who I know is your enemy. I thus offer you, for the time being, the choice of peace or war.”
³¹
He reinforced this message in God-like terms, promising “to strike my enemies like fire from heaven. It is best for you to understand that all human efforts against me are useless, because all that I undertake is bound to succeed. The example of what has happened at Gaza and at Jaffa must make you realize that if I am terrible to my enemies I am good to my friends, and above all clement and merciful to the poor people.”

On March 9 he also wrote to Djezzar at Acre:

The provinces of Gaza, Ramla and Jaffa are in my power. I have treated with generosity those of your troops who have submitted to my will. I have been severe with those who have violated the rules of war. In a few days I will march on Acre. . . . But what reason have I to deprive an old man who I do not know of a few years of his life? When God gives me victory I wish, by his example, to be clement and merciful not only to the people but also to their leaders. . . . Become my friend again [
sic
], be the enemy of the Mamelukes and the English. . . . Send your response with a man who is invested with your full powers and is aware of your intentions.

At the same time as Napoleon was in his tent dictating this letter to Bourrienne, others in the French camp had retired to their tents for different reasons. Bernoyer wrote: “During the barbaric executions I took to my tent in the attempt to blot out the noise of shrieking and grim cries of the dying who were being pitilessly slaughtered. Soon, the decomposition of this quantity of unburied bodies made itself felt in our camp. It poisoned the air with its stench, which threatened to endanger our lives.”
³²

Yet the lives of Napoleon’s troops were already in mortal danger. On March 10 Major Detroye recorded in his journal: “In General Bon’s division men are suffering from an illness with buboes, which results in sudden death. The doctors assure everyone that it is not the plague.”
³³
But the rumors quickly spread, and two days later Detroye recorded: “Many soldiers have succumbed to . . . this disease which is believed to be the plague, and this belief has become so strongly held that four men, who caught the disease, have committed suicide.”

Napoleon, together with his chief medical officer Desgenettes, took measures to halt the spread of the disease. Desgenettes knew that there had been cases of the plague in Jaffa, despite the denials by the Turkish prisoners: he had learned that during the night Turkish orderlies had thrown the victims over the walls. He rightly suspected that many of the new cases of plague amongst the French had been picked up during the overrunning of the city and the mayhem that had followed, which had inevitably brought the soldiers into close contact with the inhabitants. Consequently, he ordered that all clothes and precious fabrics pillaged from Jaffa were to be surrendered for immediate destruction. Those who succumbed to the disease were kept in wards isolated from other patients, and the cadavers were buried in sealed lime pits. Despite such measures, he and Napoleon did their best to avoid panic by maintaining the myth that this mystery disease was not in fact the plague, though in private they were forced to concede the truth.

Napoleon and Desgenettes responded in their own differing ways to the disease. Desgenettes insisted upon setting an example in the wards and treated many of the victims personally. In the interests of medical science, he went even further: “One day, in the middle of the plague ward, I plunged my lancet into the pus of the bubo of a convalescent . . . and made slight incisions with it in my groin and near one of my armpits, without taking any other precaution than to wash myself with water and soap.”
³⁴
Amazingly, this brave and dangerous experiment did not prove fatal; in fact, it served as a crude inoculation. (Jenner had published his pioneer work on vaccination in the previous year, but this referred to smallpox. Desgenettes evidently had a hunch that it applied equally to other contagious diseases, including the plague, but he must have known that he was gambling with his life.)

Napoleon adopted a characteristic view of the disease, which he would retain throughout his life: “It is one of the peculiar traits of the plague that it is most dangerous for those who are afraid of it; those who let themselves be overcome by fear almost always die of it.”
³⁵
This attitude may have been at variance with the orders and measures taken to combat the spread of this disease, but there can be no doubt that Napoleon believed what he said. On March 11 he even went so far as to pay a personal visit to the isolation wards where soldiers suffering from this bubo-inducing disease were laid out. He later recalled in his memoirs: “His presence brought great consolation; he made them treat several patients in front of him. They were piercing the buboes in order to induce the disease to its crisis. He touched those who seemed to be most discouraged, in order to prove to them that they only had an ordinary illness, not one that was contagious.” Desgenettes, who was no friend of Napoleon, confirmed what happened, and went further, describing how “for more than an hour and a half, maintaining an attitude of complete calm, [Napoleon] witnessed every detail of the patients’ treatment. Finding himself in a cramped ward which was over-filled with patients, he helped lift, or rather carry, the hideous corpse of a soldier whose tattered uniform was befouled by the spontaneous bursting of an enormous abscessed bubo.”
³⁶

This may be seen as a typical act of hubris, or alternatively one of supreme bravery, aided by an erroneous belief in willpower and an overweening self-belief. Is it mere accident that this hazardous and selfless act should have come just a day after he had been responsible for the most cold-blooded atrocity he would ever commit? The coincidence would seem to be significant. Could his venture into the plague wards have been an act of superstition, some kind of compensation for his feelings over the massacre? Napoleon’s notion of his own destiny was certainly superstitious: was his exposure of himself to the plague a tempting of fate which, if survived, would serve to confirm his sense of destiny?

All we can do is speculate here—though Napoleon himself was not concerned with such psychological self-unraveling. Similarly, he was never in any doubt as to the effect of his actions. Recalling in his memoirs his visit to the plague wards in Jaffa, he would pronounce: “As a result of what he did, the army were persuaded that it was not the plague.” Although this is doubtful, Napoleon’s actions amongst the plague victims would certainly have had a reassuring effect on the troops. This incident at Jaffa would later enter Napoleonic mythology when it was depicted in a highly dramatic (though entirely imaginary) painting by the romantic artist Gros, who would make his name by depicting illustrious events from Napoleon’s life.

Not all those amongst the hospital staff reacted with their commander-in-chief’s sangfroid. Before Napoleon moved on he appointed Adjutant General Grézieu to run the monastery plague-hospital. Grézieu was mortally afraid of the plague and immediately locked himself in the commandant’s quarters, a house adjacent to the monastery, only venturing to issue his orders through a hole in the wall. Despite these precautions, he died within twenty-four hours of his appointment, and according to his assistant Malus: “His death had the effect of inducing in the men an oriental fatalism with regard to their survival.”
³⁷
Malus, who now had the unenviable task of taking charge of the hospital, has left a chilling picture of the situation:

For ten days I dutifully spent every morning there amidst the revolting stench of excrement, with the sick crammed into every corner. Not until the eleventh day did I myself begin to feel ill, when a raging fever and violent headaches forced me to my bed. . . . Half the garrison had already been struck down, and the men were dying at the rate of thirty a day. . . . Only one in twelve of those who caught the disease would manage to survive.
³⁸

Malus would be amongst these fortunate few.

Before leaving Jaffa and setting out for Acre, Napoleon established
divans
of sympathetic local sheiks in El-Arish, Gaza and Jaffa. These were men who had all suffered under the tyrannical Djezzar, and their loyalty was assured. The French could also rely upon the loyalty of the local Christian, Druze and Jewish populations, who formed sizable minorities in the region, and who now saw themselves as liberated from Muslim domination. Napoleon then summoned Menou from Rosetta to take on the post of overall governor of the entire Palestine region.
^*

Napoleon and his four divisions now moved north, often marching through driving rain, arriving sixty miles up the coast at Haifa on March 17. Here they found that Djezzar had evacuated the port, with-drawing his troops to the stronghold of Acre, where he evidently intended to make his final stand. Napoleon set up his headquarters on the slopes of the 1,500-foot Mount Carmel, from where he could look down over the entire sweep of the gulf towards Acre, which could be seen in the distance ten miles up the coast. Yet what now lay before him came as a distinct shock. Through his eyeglass he saw that the British battleship
Theseus
(a veteran of the Battle of the Nile), along with the battleship
Tigre
, a number of British gunboats and a Turkish flotilla, had taken up stations off Acre. He learned that they had arrived just two days previously.

Napoleon immediately dispatched instructions to Damietta, ordering that Captain Standelet should not put to sea with the flotilla carrying the French heavy siege guns which was to rendezvous with him at Acre. If Standelet had already left he was to be pursued with all haste and told to put in at Jaffa. But this order was too late: Standelet and his nine-ship flotilla were already approaching Mount Carmel. By now a sea mist had begun to form, and the French flotilla had already rounded Mount Carmel before they saw the British battleships and their escorts, which quickly put on sail and began converging upon the French. Napoleon watched from his vantage point as the naval maneuvers took place, as if in slow motion, far below him. In the nick of time, Captain Standelet managed to take evasive action and make his getaway, along with two of his escort ships, but the six unmaneuverable transport ships carrying the heavy siege guns were all captured and taken in tow towards Acre, where their cargo was unloaded in readiness for use against the French.

The following day, March 18, 1799, Napoleon and his army began taking up positions before the city walls of Acre.

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