Napoleon in Egypt (69 page)

Soliman was apprehended on the spot, and soon brought to trial, a nicety that astonished El-Djabarti, who recorded the proceedings as well as the final verdict: “The court sentenced Soliman of Aleppo to have his right hand burnt and then to be impaled. He must remain exposed on his spike until his corpse is devoured by the vultures.”
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Precisely what this entailed was recorded by the newly promoted Sergeant François, who was present at Kléber’s funeral, which took place in the Christian cemetery outside the walls of Cairo: “After the funeral ceremony the cortege set off back into the city, ending up at the esplanade outside the Institute building, which had been chosen as the spot for Soliman’s execution. A great number of the city’s inhabitants were gathered around and below the mound . . . awaiting the arrival of the condemned.”
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What happened next is described in gruesome detail by François, who was standing “five or six paces from the place where the execution took place.” It involved a nine-foot spike, in a scene that is not for the faint-hearted:

The executioner laid the condemned man on the ground on his stomach, and with a knife made a large incision in his anus; shoving the tip of the spike into this incision he forced it into the body with heavy blows from a mallet. When he felt the spike reach as far as the breastbone, he bound the man’s arms, raised him in the air and fixed the foot of the spike in a hole which had been dug in the ground. Throughout this frightful torture, the wretched Soliman made not a sound.

One could only imagine the effort of will it required to conceal his torment. Once the spike was erected, Soliman cast his gaze over the spectators, and cried out, in Arabic, at the top of his voice, the Moslem profession of faith: “There is no other god but God, and Mahommed is his prophet.”

François goes on to describe how at one stage a soldier was moved by Soliman’s entreaties, and offered him some water. But the notorious Barthelemy—who was in charge of the execution—prevented him, telling the soldier that this would only interfere with the proceedings and thwart justice because it would kill Soliman instantly.

Kléber was succeeded as the French governor of Egypt by Menou, who quickly proceeded to make himself unpopular with both his fellow Muslims and his fellow officers. He began by insisting that Egypt should remain a French colony, and that all means of negotiating an end to this state of affairs should cease forthwith. He brought his young Arab bride to live with him in Elfi Bey’s palace, where much to the annoyance of the savants he insisted upon sleeping with the Rosetta Stone beneath his bed for safekeeping. Previously, the eccentric fifty-one-year-old had been regarded by many of his young French colleagues as something of a joke, and he now succeeded Kléber only because his age ensured that he was the longest-serving, and thus the senior, general. As a commander-in-chief succeeding two highly charismatic commanders-in-chief, Menou cut an unprepossessing figure: he was pot-bellied, uninspiring in manner, and his appearance remained as scruffy as ever. The state of his uniform, his long, unwashed locks and his general lack of grooming had habitually irritated Napoleon, though he had overlooked this when Menou was safely out of sight as governor of Rosetta. Napoleon had positively warmed to him when he heard of his conversion to Islam and marriage to an Arab woman, holding him up as an example to his fellow officers and urging them to follow suit.

Menou had disliked Kléber, and considered his administration to have been hopelessly inefficient and corrupt. As a result, one of his first actions on taking office was to make a purge of all officers who had been close to Kléber. Anyone who had the temerity to disagree with him was instantly dismissed; in consequence, Kléber’s former chief of staff Damas, the long-suffering financial supremo Poussielgue, as well as the savant and former politician Tallien, the financial commissioner Dauré, and many senior officers such as the adjutant-general Boyer, were all dismissed and ordered home to France to face court-martials and the ending of their careers in disgrace. Even so, Menou proved as competent an administrator as he had been in Rosetta, and the general running of the army soon improved, despite the growing scarcity of almost anything that an army required.

Kléber’s victory at Heliopolis, and his suppression of the Cairo disturbances, had left the country largely pacified. But the international situation ensured that such a state of affairs could not last. The British were determined to eliminate any threat to their colony in India, and this meant ejecting the French from Egypt, a task which they realized could only be done by a well-equipped, well-armed and well-disciplined force, such as the British army. Large-scale plans were set in motion accordingly. Working in coordination with the Porte, a British expeditionary force of 17,000 men commanded by General Abercromby landed in March 1801 near Alexandria, followed by a Turkish landing further down the coast. Shortly afterwards a combined British and Indian force, commanded by General Baird, would land at Kosseir on the Red Sea.
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Menou’s reaction—or lack of it—was disastrous: Abercromby was given days, and then weeks, to establish his bridgehead. When Menou finally marched north to confront the British, he left half his force behind to guard Cairo, thus ensuring that he faced the invading force with inferior numbers, rather than the superior force he had at his disposal. On March 21, 1801, a full three weeks after their landing, the 15,000-strong British expeditionary force was confronted by Menou’s 12,000 men at Canopus, between Alexandria and Aboukir. The British eventually prevailed, but not until after heavy losses on both sides—as many as 4,000 French soldiers were captured, wounded or killed, and as many as half that number of British soldiers were killed or wounded. Abercromby received a leg wound from which he died several days later, and on the French side General Lanusse was also fatally wounded. The latter was so disgusted with Menou’s tactics that as he lay on his deathbed he famously informed his commander-in-chief that he was not even fit to be an onion-peeler in a Paris restaurant. This assessment had some truth: had Menou marched from Cairo immediately he heard of the British landing, taking all his troops with him, he would certainly have defeated Abercromby’s force. He would then have had time to turn on the Turkish force, which consisted of the remnants of the army defeated at Heliopolis, once again under the command of the ineffectual grand vizier, and this time weakened by an outbreak of plague spreading through its ranks.

As it was, Menou moved from one calamity to the next. Having been defeated, he retreated with the remnants of his force to Alexandria, where he barricaded himself behind the city walls, leaving the British and Turkish armies free to take Rosetta and Damietta. British engineers then set about excavating a channel connecting the dried-up Lake Mareotis to the sea, thus flooding the lake and effectively cutting off Alexandria from the rest of Egypt, ensuring that the British needed only a marginal force to maintain a siege.

The British now advanced on Cairo, where General Belliard commanded a force of 12,000 men. Belliard considered the possibility of marching south to join up with Murad Bey, who was on his way with 15,000 Mamelukes. But this option was nullified when Murad Bey unexpectedly died and his successor chose to side with the British. Belliard was worried about the low morale of his men, and eventually decided to avoid further bloodshed by negotiating a surrender. On June 22 he dispatched an envoy to the British, and peace terms were eventually agreed. Ironically, these were almost exactly the same as those agreed by Kléber, Sir Sidney Smith and the Turkish representatives some eighteen months previously. Smith and Kléber may have been acting beyond their powers, but their vision of the larger picture appears to have been no less faulty than that of their superiors; and had the El-Arish Convention been implemented, thousands of French and Turkish lives—as well as hundreds of British lives—would have been saved.

By the night of July 4, a week after the peace agreement had been signed, the French preparations for leaving Cairo were well under way. In the midst of this, a detachment of the camel corps arrived in Cairo from Alexandria, bearing from Menou “the order to defeat the British or die in the attempt.”
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The reaction of the French in Cairo is best summed up by Malus: “As General Menou knew that we were in no fit state to fight, that we could do nothing and that we were surrounded by vastly superior forces, this order could only have come from a man who had lost all reason.”

Belliard ignored the order, and on July 6 the first detachment of French troops marched out of Cairo with full military honors, bearing the coffin containing the embalmed body of General Kléber, their bands playing solemn funeral music. They embarked upon river craft at Boulac, and proceeded down the Nile, with Kléber’s coffin on the leading boat beneath a large black flag. Despite all this face-saving pomp, they were in fact a sorry crew: of the 13,000 French soldiers, savants, administrators, officers’ wives and others who departed from Cairo, over a tenth were infected with diseases ranging from dysentery to syphilis. The last of the French were still leaving Cairo two weeks later when the contingent of 5,000 British and Indian troops under General Baird arrived from Kosseir, having traveled down the Nile.

Belliard and his men were transported to Rosetta, where they were embarked upon British ships, ready for the journey across the Mediterranean back to France. As part of the peace agreement, the savants were permitted to take with them all their voluminous research, rock and other samples, stuffed animals and so forth—but despite their vigorous protests they were not permitted to keep the Rosetta Stone.

Meanwhile Menou continued to hold out in Alexandria, where his 7,000 troops were quite easily contained by the surrounding water and a British encampment of 4,000 men. In fact he could easily have attacked this force, but he was now more concerned with fighting other battles, namely against the generals under his command, whom he blamed for his defeat at the Battle of Canopus. His second-in-command, General Reynier, a hero of the Syrian campaign, was eventually arrested for insubordination—i.e., venturing to criticize Menou—and would be deported, along with the likes of Poussielgue and Boyer, for court-martial in France. (Napoleon would personally intervene to have the case against Reynier dropped.)

So why on earth was Menou holding out in Alexandria? In fact, there was an element of method in his madness: he was awaiting the arrival of Admiral Ganteaume, who he felt sure would soon arrive with a fleet of ships bringing military reinforcements. This was a forlorn but not altogether misguided hope. Napoleon had ordered Ganteaume to sail back to Egypt almost as soon as he had been created First Consul. In February, Ganteaume and seven battleships containing 5,000 troops had succeeded in evading the British blockade of Toulon, only to return to port rather than risk losing the ships and men to the British, who now controlled the Mediterranean. The same procedure had taken place again a month later. By now Napoleon’s fury knew no bounds, and Ganteaume was ordered to sea once more in May, with instructions to disembark in Libya and march overland along the coast to relieve the Army of the Orient in Egypt. In June Ganteaume finally arrived at Derna in Libya, where he was refused permission to land and disembark his force. He then set off for Crete, where his squadron managed to capture the British battleship
Swiftsure
, whereupon to Napoleon’s further exasperation he returned to Toulon in July with his prize in tow. By coincidence, in that very same month another French flotilla arrived off Egypt. Instead of much-needed reinforcements and arms, this brought the contingent that Napoleon had promised to send to the Army of the Orient to improve its morale—a group of comedians, magicians and actresses. The British offered to allow the French flotilla to land at Alexandria, but Menou declined this generous gesture. On September 2 he finally agreed to a truce with the British, accepting much the same terms as those agreed by both Kléber and Belliard.

In October 1801 the last of the Army of the Orient left Egypt for France. What had begun with such high hopes just over three years previously had ended in barely concealed humiliation and farce. And of course there was tragedy too. Of the 40,000 Frenchmen who had set out, around 24,500 soldiers and nearly 2,000 sailors were repatriated by the British. Several thousand wounded had been shipped back to France prior to this. Official sources claimed the overall death toll at around 6,000; others put the figure at more than 20,000. It is impossible to assess an exact figure, but in all between 10,000 and 15,000 Frenchmen were probably killed or died of disease during the occupation of Egypt, as well as many times that number of Muslim warriors and Mamelukes—all in the vain attempt to impose European civilization upon a backward people whose religion encouraged them to regard all change and all foreigners with the deepest suspicion.

After the French left Egypt, British and Ottoman forces continued to occupy the country, and Ibrahim Bey returned. There followed a period of more or less chaotic Mameluke rule, until in 1803 the British withdrew and the Albanian Mohammed Ali, who had swum to safety at the Battle of Aboukir, gradually took power, which he retained for over forty years. Mohammed Ali would maintain close links with France, which would play a major role in the archaeological expeditions that now began exploring the ruins of Upper Egypt. In 1869 the French engineer Ferdinand de Lesseps would fulfill Napoleon’s dream by constructing the Suez Canal.

During Napoleon’s last years in exile on St. Helena, he would often return to the theme of his “Oriental dream,” insisting: “I would have done better to remain in Egypt; by now, I would have been emperor of all the East.”
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He would elaborate his plans: “If Acre had yielded to the French army, a great revolution would have taken place in the East. I would have founded an empire there, and the destiny of France would have been left to take another course.”
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He would even picture the future: “After ten years of French administration the fortification of Alexandria would have been complete; this city would be one of the most beautiful fortified spots in Europe [
sic
]; its population would be considerable . . . by way of the Ramaniyah canal, water from the Nile would arrive throughout the year . . . communication between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean would be open . . . shipyards would be established at Suez . . . sugar, cotton, rice, indigo would cover Upper Egypt . . . locks and pumps controlling the flooding of the Nile . . . a colony as powerful as this would not be long in declaring its independence. . . . After fifty years, civilization would have spread to the interior of Africa by way of Senaar, Abyssinia, Darfur, and Fezzan; several great nations would have come into being, and would be enjoying the benefits of Western culture, of science, and the religion of the true God—for it is through Egypt that the people of central Africa must receive enlightenment and happiness.”
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It is noticeable that even towards the end of his life he failed to understand the reason for his defeat in Egypt: the same reason why Egypt could not have ruled Africa in the nineteenth century—his underestimation of sea power. It seems that he had always regarded ruling France, and then Europe, as the less attractive option: “The smallest things can bring about the greatest events. If only Acre had fallen, I would have changed the face of the world.”
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