The War of Wars (46 page)

He was rescued early in 1798 by the aristocratic Phélipaux, a figure on whom Baroness Orczy may have modelled the Scarlet Pimpernel. Remarkably Phélipaux had been in the same class as Napoleon Bonaparte. They had shared a desk and frequently fought each other, with Phélipaux establishing himself as Bonaparte’s academic superior. From the outset of the Revolution, Phélipaux took the royalist side, trying to start a revolt in 1795 before being arrested, escaping and then being rearrested in 1797. The following year he planned the daring escape of Sir Sidney Smith by seducing his gaoler’s daughter and then arriving with four friends disguised as policemen at the main gate of the prison.

When Smith escaped, he was given command of a ship of the line, the 80-gun
Tigre
, and Phélipaux sailed with him. Acting independently of Nelson, to the latter’s intense irritation, he was appointed commander of the Alexandria Squadron in place of Hood. Hearing of Napoleon’s expedition to the Holy Land, he sent Phélipaux off in the
Theseus
to Acre. There the renegade French royalist persuaded Djezzar to remain in the stronghold and strengthened his fortifications. Smith in his ship and two smaller vessels soon followed him there with several gunboats.

When Napoleon took the port of Haifa and established his headquarters at Mount Carmel, which overlooked the Bay of Acre, to his dismay he spied British ships already there. The French flotilla carrying Napoleon’s siege artillery arrived in the bay that foggy day and ran straight into the British squadron: six of the French vessels were captured, although three escaped. It was a bitter blow to the French.

Napoleon nevertheless ordered a siege, positioning his camp beyond the range of Acre’s guns and digging trenches in a zigzag towards the walls in classical fashion to protect the besiegers from the fire of the fortress. The French had few guns, having lost most of their siege artillery, and only a slightly larger force than that within the castle – some 13,000 men. Worse, Smith was able to use the captured French guns against Napoleon’s army. Smith’s ships were also able to bombard
the French assailants from the sea. The British had control of the waters which surrounded two-thirds of the fortress and were able constantly to resupply their forces from the sea, while Napoleon had more limited supplies.

The impetuous Napoleon attacked the fortress during the early hours of 28 March with the aim of making a breach in the walls which could be scaled. The fortress and the British ships opened up with a retaliatory fire that killed forty French gunners and knocked out all but seven of their guns. Then the French infantry attacked en masse and the Turks momentarily began to withdraw from the ramparts only to be beaten back to their posts by Djezzar in person. The French proved unable to mount ladders up to the next level, which was thirty feet above the walls, and fled.

Napoleon sought to blow up the main tower with a mine and attacked again three days later. The French were beaten back and Napoleon’s stepson, the eighteen-year-old Eugène de Beauharnais, was wounded. To celebrate the repulse of the French, Djezzar had several hundred prisoners he held within the fort massacred. Smith made a futile attempt to stop this.

Napoleon now had to turn to face another enemy: a convergence of Turkish-led armies in his rear mustering to help Djezzar. Characteristically, the French commander chose to attack. Some 4,500 men were marching from the region of Galilee. General Kléber, with a force of 1,500 men, was ordered to rout it near Cana, scene of the miraculous conversion of water to wine. Another force was moving east from near Lake Tiberias. General Murat, with two infantry battalions, marched to meet them and launched an immediate attack down a slope on the Turkish troops: some 5,000 Turks fled and Murat’s men fell upon the spoils.

Kléber now found himself facing the Pasha of Damascus’s huge army beneath Mount Tabor – some 25,000 cavalry and 10,000 infantry. The French, intimidated by this vastly superior force, were attacked, and for ten desperate hours fought from within their infantry squares. As Private Millet wrote: ‘We would gladly have given up the little bread we had for some bullets and gunpowder. We had not had time to eat, and even if we had had time, we could not have taken advantage of it,
because we were so worn out with thirst and fatigue that we could not even speak. At a short distance there was a lake, which the division was unable to reach, so that there was no way of refreshing ourselves.’

It seemed only a matter of time before they were overrun and slaughtered in a potentially fatal blow to the surreal expedition. Fortunately Napoleon had learnt of their plight. Reaching a hill above the battlefield in the nick of time, he ordered two cannon to be fired. The effect was instantaneous: ‘The Ottomans panicked and turned to flight. Seeing this, the commander had another cannon shot fired, and the rout became general. The Ottomans scattered in all directions, toward the mountains and into the valleys. The French who watched this from a distance rejoiced at the spectacle and broke into peals of laughter.’

The Battle of Mount Tabor had been won with only a score of casualties among the French. Kléber’s men marched forward. Millet remembered: ‘Here we were, wading up to our waists in the water of that same lake of which, only a short while ago, we craved to drink a cup. But we no longer thought of drinking but only of killing and of dyeing the lake red with the blood of those barbarians, who only a moment before had hoped to cut off our heads and drown our bodies in that very same lake, where they themselves were drowned and which was filled with their corpses.’

Napoleon spent two nights at Nazareth, where that convert to Islam and his atheist-indoctrinated men rediscovered their childhood Christianity and celebrated a
Te Deum
and a christening. The monks at the nearby monastery tended the French wounded.

On his return to Acre, an exultant Napoleon learnt that his old rival Phélipaux had died, probably of the plague. The French commander ordered another mine to be placed at the base of the main tower prior to a further assault. Peyrusse wrote:

Its only effect was to blow up a corner of the tower . . . The grenadiers boldly charged the breach, although it was clear that it was impossible to penetrate it. The enemy, installed at the top of the tower and hidden behind the battlements, flattened our troops with
rocks, shells, and hand grenades. However, since nothing could turn back our troops, the Turks resorted to two or three powder kegs which they threw on them. All our men were suffocated, although a few managed to run away half-burned.

Another attack the following day yielded much the same result. Smith recalled: ‘I am here amusing myself very well in my favourite way, harassing the heroes of the great nation, and making them feel that the very best thing that can happen to them is to become my prisoners, for by this means they will get their bellies full and go home to their families.’ However, he experienced a serious mishap. Captain Miller of the
Theseus
had collected some seventy shells which had failed to explode with the intention of packing them with British gunpowder. A midshipman was appointed to do this but accidentally exploded one of the shells, which set off the rest. Miller and forty others were killed, while fifty were wounded and the
Theseus
was reduced to a wreck.

Reinforced at last by the arrival of siege artillery overland, Napoleon staged another attack on 6 May, which was repulsed, and then another, before at last the seventh assault took the tower. Then the assailants swarmed into Djezzar’s gardens, where they were mown down from the inner line of defences. Meanwhile the Turks too had received reinforcements of artillery; but they were deeply apprehensive that Napoleon, who had made a huge breach in the walls and now held the main tower, would win after all.

On 10 May, when a Turkish fleet carrying an army of 7,000 could be seen approaching but became becalmed, Napoleon ordered his men into a frenzied last assault over the half-burnt and putrefying bodies of Frenchmen killed in earlier attacks. Kléber himself played a huge part. A French contemporary wrote: ‘Kléber, with the gait of a giant, and his thick head of hair, had taken his post, sword in hand, on the bank of the breach, and animated the assailants. The noise of the cannon, the shouts, the rage of our soldiers, the yells of the Turks, mingled themselves with the bursts of his thundering voice.’ Amid appalling carnage, the assault was beaten off.

It had been Napoleon’s last throw. He had lost so many men he could continue no longer: some 1,200 had been killed in the fighting,
some 1,000 had died of the plague and more than 2,000 were wounded or ill. Smith wrote triumphantly: ‘Could you have thought that a poor prisoner in a cell of the Temple prison – an unfortunate for whom you refused, for a single moment, to give yourself any concern, being at the same time able to render him a signal service, since you were then all-powerful – could you have thought, I say, that this same man would have become your antagonist, and have compelled you, in the midst of the sands of Syria, to raise the siege of a miserable, almost defenceless town?’ Napoleon’s hatred of Smith was such that his name could not be mentioned in his presence for decades.

Napoleon decided to retreat having lost a third of his men – a decision up to now unparalleled throughout his career. He ruthlessly told his chief doctor: ‘If I were in your place, I should put an end to the sufferings of our plague patients and, at the same time, to the danger they represent for us, by giving them opium.’ This the doctor refused to do; so the ministering angel suddenly turned murderer of his own men. He had the fifty plague victims in the hospital poisoned so as not to hold up his retreat. Although some of his later supporters have denied the truth of this episode, virtually all French witnesses confirmes it and Napoleon himself said he had left laudanum beside the plague victims so that they could administer it themselves. He may also have feared further infecting his troops. Smith volunteered to take all the wounded and sick aboard his ships, but Napoleon out of pride refused.

Napoleon now resorted to propaganda. He spent four days looting the town of Acre to inflict revenge, to disguise his preparations for retreat and to be able to claim victory. He wrote to Menou in Cairo:

I shall bring many prisoners and captured flags with me. I have razed Djezzar’s palace and the ramparts of Acre, and I have bombarded that city in such a manner that no one stone remains in its place . . . Djezzar is seriously wounded. I am anxious to see you and to get back to Cairo, all the more so since I see that, despite your zeal, a great number of wicked men are trying to disturb the public peace. All this will vanish as soon as I arrive just as the clouds yield to the first ray of the sun.

Napoleon wrote to the Directory brazen lies to excuse his lifting the siege of Acre: ‘The occasion seemed to favour the capture of Acre, but our spies, deserters, and our prisoners all reported that the plague was ravaging the city and that every day more than sixty persons were dying of it . . . If the soldiers had entered the city . . . they would have brought back into camp the germs of that horrible evil, which is more to be feared than all the armies in the world.’

Peyrusse, the army paymaster, reported the dismal state of his army on the subsequent retreat:

We had no means of transportation whatsoever and we had a thousand or twelve hundred wounded and sick to carry with us, besides about forty pieces of artillery . . . All the rest, guns of every calibre, mortars, shells, bombs, muskets, bullets – that is, virtually the entire ordance – had to be buried in the fields and on the beach. We blew up the gunpowder we had left; all the caissons were piled up and burned in the plain . . . Everything was ready for our departure . . . when, on May 20, the enemy made a lively sortie; it lasted almost all day. The fire was terrible. The enemy kept on throwing himself into our trenches, but Reynier’s division . . . kept pushing him back with heavy losses.

Bearing more than 2,000 sick and having picked up a further 1,000 or so along the way, in a gruelling foreshadowing of the retreat from Moscow, they moved under enemy harassment, laying waste to what settlements there were, so as to deny provisions to their pursuers. Bourienne wrote:

I saw with my own eyes officers who had limbs amputated being thrown out of their litters [by their bearers] . . . I have seen amputated men, wounded men, plague-stricken men, or people merely suspected of having the plague, being abandoned in the fields. Our march was lit up by torches with which we set fire to the towns, the villages, the hamlets, and the rich harvests that covered the land. The entire countryside was on fire . . . We were surrounded by nothing but dying men, looters, and arsonists. The
dying, by the roadside, were saying in a barely audible voice, ‘I am only wounded, I haven’t got the plague.’

On 30 May the defeated force reached Gaza. It took ten days to cross the Sinai desert amidst appalling suffering. Only 5,000 troops survived, yet on 14 June Napoleon was back in Cairo, parading his gruesome defeat as a great triumph. Back in Egypt he found that two rebellions had broken out against French rule: one in Alexandria and one in Cairo. In Alexandria, a self-styled Mahdi or Moslem holy man had led several thousand followers into seizing Damanhur and had slaughtered the French garrison before being dispersed by a larger French force which massacred some 1,000 of these zealots in the small town. In Cairo, where Napoleon’s returning force joined the remaining garrison of 15,000, 3,000 of whom were sick, he began the mass execution of the Moslem protestors. General Dugua, who had to carry this out, proposed ‘Since executions are becoming frequent at the Citadel, I intend to substitute a head-chopper
(un coupeur de têtes)
for the firing squad. This will save us ammunition and make less noise’. ‘Agreed,’ Bonaparte wrote in the margin.

On 15 January Napoleon learnt of the arrival of a Turkish fleet – which he had claimed he had destroyed – off the coast of Alexandria. There were five battleships, three frigates and fifty troop transports, supported by the British squadron of Sir Sidney Smith. The Turks soon captured Aboukir Fort: they had around 7,000 men. (Napoleon claimed the figure to be 18,000.)