THE DISASTER AT ACRE[8]
[Footnote 8: References as before. Add Masson: Napoleon et
les femmes, Josephine. Ernouf: Le General Kleber. Larrey:
Relation historique. Belliard: Bourrienne et ses erreurs.
Guitry: L'Armee en Egypte. Memoirs of Lavalette, Bourrienne,
Miot de Melito, and Lucien de Bonaparte.]
Islam and the French -- Plans to Revolutionize the East -- The
News from Europe -- Bonaparte's Recommendations to the Directory
-- The Invasion of Syria -- Murder of Turkish Prisoners --
Importance of Acre -- The Battle of Mount Tabor -- The Siege of
Acre -- Desperate Courage of Besiegers and Besieged -- Defeat of
Bonaparte -- His Estimate of Human Life -- The Retreat to Egypt.
[Sidenote: 1798--99]
"This is the moment," said Bonaparte, on hearing how Brueys's splendid
fleet had been annihilated, and the line of retreat to France cut off,
"when characters of a superior order assert themselves." "The
English," he cried on another occasion, "will compel us to do greater
things than we intended." So far from his activity being diminished in
the isolation of Egypt, it was redoubled. To preserve the fiction of
his mission as the restorer of Ottoman power, the tricolor and the
crescent floated everywhere side by side, while prayers were said for
both France and Turkey in the mosques. The utmost respect was paid to
the Koran and its precepts. Menou and a number of others made an open
profession of Islam. To soothe all popular apprehension, existing
institutions were changed only to strengthen them, while contemplated
reforms were to follow in proportion as increasing public
enlightenment demanded them. In particular, the utmost respect was
paid to marriage customs, and no license among the common soldiers was
tolerated. In marked contrast was Bonaparte's own conduct. An
intercepted letter written from Alexandria to his brother Joseph
expressed jealous doubts of Josephine's fidelity--or, rather, a
certainty of her infidelity. From that instant his own licentiousness
became a scandal even to the loose notions of his train. But outwardly
he affected the inflated speech of a semi-divine messenger; once,
while visiting the burial crypt in the pyramid of Cheops, he pretended
to a mufti that he was a proselyte, and pronounced with an air of
conviction the Mohammedan creed. Every element in the population,
however,--Copts, Turks, Greeks, and Arabs,--was courted, and made to
share in the administration. Printing-presses were established, and
the French scholars, though surprised and disenchanted by what they
found, united into an institute, and began the study of every possible
improvement in political, social, and domestic economy. Nor was the
army forgotten: the captured Mamelukes and other available youth were
enrolled in the French battalions, and taught the drill and discipline
of war. Even the scattered Bedouin received the conqueror's flattering
attentions with ever lessening distrust.
All this was part of a plan to effect a religious and political
revolution in the East, the two to move hand in hand, by an appeal to
Mohammedan zeal for cooeperation with those who had already destroyed
Christianity in Europe. Talleyrand was to have been the representative
in Constantinople of the same idea. But in disregard of his promise he
stayed at home, and neither the Sultan, as the political and religious
head of Islam, nor its devotees, were for a moment deceived. On the
well-known principle that offers of peace come best while war is
hottest, Bonaparte's iron hand was shown in certain most stringent
regulations, and one determined insurrection was put down with
merciless rigor. The domestic relations of the people were sacred, but
they must buy indemnity with the payment of all their cash; and
treasure, wherever found, was seized for the army chest. The old city
barriers of Cairo were broken down, and fortified turrets were built
in their places. Resistance of any kind met with quick punishment, and
heads fell throughout the land with such regularity and frequency as
to force from the natives a recognition of Bonaparte as el Kebir, the
Exalted.
The utter isolation of summer, autumn, and winter would have been
intolerable but for such occupations. Only a single official despatch,
and that a most insignificant one, reached Egypt from France during
this interval; and the rush of events in Europe was for months utterly
unknown to the castaway army. In fact, but two efforts were made to
forward news--an astounding proof of the feeling in Paris. The
Directory had failed in their attempts to cajole the Sultan, and a
message from Bonaparte arrived too late to influence him; for, on
receipt of news from Nelson's victorious fleet, the Turkish monarch
hesitated no longer, and accepted the proffered alliance of Russia.
The only certain news from Europe which was generally disseminated in
Cairo was contained in a package of Italian newspapers brought into
Alexandria by a blockade-runner. Through them it was known that the
invasion of Ireland, having been precipitated by a misunderstanding
between the secret society of United Irishmen and the Directory, had
failed; that Malta and Corfu were blockaded; that the Spanish fleet
was significantly inactive; and that all Europe was arming for the
renewal of hostilities in the spring. Bonaparte made every effort to
communicate with Paris. Some of his frequent despatches certainly
reached their destination; but, going by circuitous routes, they were
belated. This very fact, however, went far in France to surround him
with a halo of romance, and to glorify the legend, never eradicated
from French imaginations, that the national arms had subjugated the
land of the Pharaohs. As every day revealed the incapacity of the
Directory in the face of an exasperated and united Europe, the fancied
splendor of Bonaparte's feats neutralized any remnants of suspicion
remaining in the minds of the people regarding their absent victor.
The conquering republic was over the sea; it was a spurious one which
had remained at home to be humiliated.
Disquieting rumors of Bonaparte's death, said to have been spread by
English and Russian agents, were prevalent during a part of December;
but while at their height they were allayed by the arrival, direct
from the seat of war, of a budget dated October seventh. The condition
of the colony was described in glowing terms, but the gist of the
despatches was that the Spanish admiral must be goaded to activity,
and that the fleet from Brest must be sent to cooeperate with him in
the Mediterranean, in order to restore the prestige of France in the
East. As for the writer himself, he hoped, should war break out again
in Europe, to return in the spring. Meantime, the Neapolitans were
marching on Rome, a fact which inclined the vacillating and harassed
directors to act on the suggestions of their real master, although
they kept his recommendations secret.
It was, therefore, not entirely without a cooerdination of plans that
the Army of Egypt, strengthened and refreshed, made ready to move in
February. The Turks, under the viceroy, Achmet, styled Jezzar, the
Butcher, were mustering in Syria, and it was necessary to anticipate
them. Kleber was put at the head of twelve thousand men, and, after
dispersing the eight hundred Mamelukes who had retreated in the
direction of Rahmaniyeh, he advanced some days' march to El Arish,
which was at once beset. Bonaparte tarried at Cairo for a few days,
and then having learned that the congress at Rastadt was still
sitting, and that war, though imminent, was not yet declared, set out,
reaching El Arish on February seventeenth, 1799. Three days later the
Turkish garrison, composed largely of volunteers, surrendered. They
were paroled, and ordered to march toward Damascus. Gaza fell with the
exchange of a few musket-balls, and important munitions of war were
delivered into the hands of the French. On March fourth the invaders
were before Jaffa, which had a garrison of four thousand men, a part
of Jezzar's army. After three days' bombardment a breach was made in
the walls, and two thousand troops who had taken refuge behind
caravansary walls surrendered under promise of their lives; the rest,
it is said, had been killed in a massacre which immediately followed
the assault.
No French victory was ever marked by more unbridled license than that
which the victorious troops practised at Jaffa. But what followed was
worse. Although the prisoners of war were too numerous for the
ordinary usage, yet they should have been treated according to the
terms of quarter they had exacted. On the seventh a council of war
unanimously voted that the old rule under which no quarter is given to
defenders in an assault should be applied to them. For two days
Bonaparte hesitated, but on the ninth his decision was taken. A few
Egyptians were sent home, and the remainder of the prisoners, together
with the eight hundred militia from El Arish, were marched to the
beach, and shot. In the report to the Directory the total number was
put at twelve hundred. Two eye-witnesses estimated it--one at three
thousand, the other at four thousand. "I have been severe with those
of your troops who violated the laws of war," wrote the author of the
deed to Jezzar. No mention of the fact or excuse for it was made in
any other portion of his correspondence at the time. All winter long
he had been dealing as an Oriental with Orientals, and this was but a
piece of the same conduct. The code of Christian morality was far from
his mind. In January, for instance, he had ordered Murat to kill all
the prisoners of a hostile tribe in the desert, whom he could not
bring away; and in the same month identical orders were issued to
Berthier concerning another horde. The plea which is made by the
eulogists of Napoleon, and by some recent military writers, for this
wholesale execution, is that among these slaughtered men the garrison
of El Arish, which had surrendered, had been found again with arms in
their hands; that they were deserving of death according to all the
laws of war; and that, as to the rest, there were no French prisoners
for whom to exchange them, and no provisions to support them;
consequently their presence with the army would jeopardize its
success, and it was therefore justifiable to diminish the enemy's
resisting power by their execution. Those who believe that in any war,
whether just or unjust, the practice of barbarity is excusable if it
lead to speedy victory will agree with that opinion.
Bonaparte had foreseen that of all the Syrian towns the Pasha's
capital, St. Jean d'Acre, which was on the shore, and not inland like
the places so easily taken, would make the strongest resistance.
Accordingly he had provided a siege-train, and had despatched it by
sea from Alexandria. The English squadron in those waters, now in
command of Sir Sidney Smith, was in the offing when the French army
arrived on the coast. Approaching in order to open fire, the English
admiral became aware after a few shots that his enemy had no
artillery. Divining the reason, he swiftly put to sea, and easily
captured their transports. Phelippeaux, a French emigrant who had
graduated from the military school at Paris only two days before
Bonaparte, was sent by Smith to superintend the fortification of the
city with the very guns destined for its destruction. The siege of
Acre thus became a task quite different from any hitherto imposed on
the French. Supported by an English fleet, and easily provisioned
under protection of their guns, the city might have made a determined
stand even against an enemy with cannon; but to one without artillery
it was likely that its resistance would be effectual. And so it
proved; for under the ancient Gothic walls of a city whose name
recalled the fleeting dominion of the Frank crusaders, Bonaparte's
dreams of an Oriental empire vanished forever. On March nineteenth he
sat down before them, with really no dependence except on fate. In
spite of discouragements, however, a breach was effected on the
twenty-eighth by means of a mine, but the assault was repulsed.
Day followed day without an important incident, until in the third
week an army of twenty-five thousand men, under Abdullah, approached
from Damascus to relieve Jezzar. Kleber set out to check their march,
and the first skirmish of advance-guards occurred at Nazareth. For
eight hours Junot, in the van with a few hundred men, stood firm
against a tenfold force; and even when the whole French division
arrived the overwhelming superiority of the Turkish numbers was not
perceptibly diminished. Bonaparte was not far behind. Leaving a
respectable array before the town to keep up appearances, he hurried
away with the rest, and by a forced march debouched on April sixteenth
into the plain of Esdraelon. In the distance, at the foot of Mount
Tabor, he could see a cloud of dust and smoke, in the midst of which
the ranks of Kleber's division seemed buried beneath the masses of his
foe. Throwing his fine cavalry on the Turkish flanks, the
commander-in-chief, at the head of the infantry, caught his enemy
unawares from behind the whirling sand which had concealed his
presence. The result was an utter rout of the Turks, who fled by the
mountain passes in complete disorder.
Bonaparte returned victorious to Acre, and resumed the siege with a
grim determination such as even he had not often felt. He had good
cause. Another messenger from the Directory, traveling with
comparative directness by way of Genoa, had arrived with despatches
and newspapers dated as late as February. Two Austrian generals, Mack
and Sachsen, had put themselves at the head of the Neapolitan army,
and were about to march on Rome. An Austrian army division had already
begun hostilities by entering the Grisons, thus violating the
neutrality of the allied Helvetian Republic. Russia, Turkey, and
Austria were in coalition: Russia would despatch troops to defend the
Turkish capital and to aid in conquering Italy. Two new French armies
were in the field. Moreau, the only first-rate general in France, was
still under suspicion of complicity with Pichegru, and although
permitted to accompany the Army of Italy as a volunteer, had been
passed over in the choice of commanders. Jourdan, whose consistent
democracy as a member of the Five Hundred had restored him to favor
and rank, was to command the Army of the Danube; Joubert was to
succeed Bonaparte in Italy. As for himself, he was left unhampered by
instructions, but three alternatives had suggested themselves to the
Directory--that he should either remain in Egypt and complete his
colonial organization, or else press on to India and there supplant
the English power, or, finally, march straight to Constantinople and
attack the Russians. The tone of the despatches was one of anxiety.
From earliest times Acre had been the key of Palestine; if Bonaparte
should secure it, he would become the arbiter of his own destiny and
of the world's. With Palestine, Egypt, and India at his feet, the
tricontinental monarchy of his dreams was realizable; or else, in the
same case, he could return to Paris with laurels unknown since the
crusades, and put the copestone on the nearly completed structure of
military domination in France and Europe. To the end of his days he
imagined, or represented himself as imagining, that he would have
altered the world's career by choosing the part of Oriental conqueror.
We may call these notions dreams, or fancies, or visions, or what we
will; they were sane conceptions in themselves, although it is not
likely that England would have been conquered in the loss of India.
She had been vigorous without it; she could have survived even that
blow. For the moment the fall of Acre appeared to be an antecedent
condition to either of the courses which were in the mind of
Bonaparte.
But the siege was not prosperous. The assault and the defense during
the attack in March had been alike desperate, and French valor had
been futile. A fleet was now on its way from Constantinople to throw
additional men and provisions into the town. At the same time
Phelippeaux had constructed a new girdle of forts inside the walls,
and had barricaded the streets. In the interval, however, the French
had brought up some heavy guns from Jaffa, and were making
preparations to renew operations. A breach was easily effected, and a
few gallant fellows seized the tower which controlled the outworks and
curtain; but the storming party was repulsed, and the men in the
tower, though they held it for two days, were finally so reduced in
numbers that they succumbed. This exasperated the French soldiers
intensely. For the first two weeks of May there was scarcely a break
in the succession of assaults. The fierce struggles which occurred in
the breaches, on the barricades, even in the streets, to which the
French once or twice penetrated, resulted in an appalling loss of
life; but neither party quailed. Before long a pestilence broke out in
the French camp, and the hospitals established at Jaffa and elsewhere
were crowded with sick and dying.
On May seventh Kleber's division was called in for a conclusive
onslaught, and in the face of a double fire from Sir Sidney Smith's
cannon and the guns on the walls, both the first and second works were
scaled and taken. All was in vain. Every house rained bullets from
embrasures made for the purpose, and the entering columns retreated on
the very threshold of their goal. Three days later a second equally
desperate attempt likewise failed. In all, the siege lasted sixty-two
days; the French assaulted forty times, and twenty-six sallies were
made by the garrison; four thousand soldiers and four good generals
from his splendid army were the sacrifice of human life which
Bonaparte offered at Acre to his ambition. Finally, the squadron from
Constantinople having safely arrived, news came that another was
fitting out at Rhodes to retake Egypt itself. Nothing was left but to
draw off, and on the seventeenth the siege was abandoned. The retreat
began on the twentieth. At Jaffa Bonaparte passed through the hospital
wards calling out in a loud voice: "The Turks will be here in a few
hours. Whoever feels strong enough, let him rise and follow us."
As a votary at the shrine of science he believed, both then and later,
in the lawfulness of suicide; and he now coldly suggested murder to
his surgeon-general, hinting that an overdose of opium would end the
sufferings of those plague-stricken men who would have to be
abandoned. It was long believed that such a dose actually had been
administered to the sixty or more who were left behind. But the
conclusive evidence that the report was false is in the fact that when
Sir Sidney Smith occupied Jaffa the sufferers were still alive.
Napoleon to the last defended the suggestion as proper, though he
falsely denied having made it himself, and untruthfully declared at
St. Helena that he had delayed three days to protect the dying
patients. With cynical good nature, he told the fine story of how the
noble French army surgeon Desgenettes had rejected the criminal
suggestion, replying that a physician's profession was to save, not to
destroy, human life. The rebuke was particularly scathing because the
heroic doctor, in spite of his conviction that the plague was
contagious, had already inoculated himself with the disease in order
to allay the panic of the terror-stricken soldiers. The army was
reduced to eight thousand. After a nine days' march through the
burning sands, the exhausted columns of the French reached Cairo. Such
was the unparalleled vigor of the survivors that a few days' rest and
proper food sufficed to recuperate their strength.
More wonderful still, they soon believed themselves to have returned
with crowns of victory. Their crafty general explained that but for
the terrible heats of Syria, the pest, and the expedition from Rhodes,
which threatened their rear, they would have leveled the walls of
Acre and destroyed Jezzar's palace, returning with standards and
spoils to confirm France's dominion in the hearts and fears of the
Egyptians. The volatile and sanguine soldiery, unwilling to admit
defeat even to themselves, half believed this was true, and soon by an
easy transition came to hold the mere suggestions as actual facts.
Berthier was instructed that the native authorities at Cairo were to
be so informed by an advance agent, General Boyer. The few important
prisoners whose lives had been spared were to be conveyed, with due
display of captured standards, to the citadel of Cairo, and there
imprisoned with the public announcement "that a great number of such
were coming." The litters of the wounded French officers Lannes,
Duroc, Croizier, and Arrighi were to be quietly carried in on
different days. In one emphatic paragraph are the instructions for
Boyer: "He is to write, to say, to do everything which may secure a
triumphal entry." So adroitly were truth and fiction intermingled and
confused by Bonaparte and his agents, that in spite of various
attempted risings the country as a whole remained quiet. Murad,
however, who had fled to Nubia, and had there remained in concealment
until informed of the proposed Turkish expedition, soon reappeared
with the remnants of his cavalry, for the purpose of cooeperating with
the Sultan's forces. For weeks he came and went among the people so
mysteriously that the French guards could never seize him. Bonaparte's
superstition was awakened by the stealthy and uncanny movements of his
enemy, and in July he gave vent to his nervous irritation in a request
to one of his subordinates either to kill or worry to death the object
of his dread. "Let him die one way or another, I shall be equally
obliged," were his words.