Napoleon spoke to the sick, comforted them and raised their morale; the incident was immortalized in 1804 in Antoine-Jean Gros’ painting Bonaparte Visiting the Plague House at Jaffa. Napoleon said, ‘As general-in-chief he found it a necessary part of his duty to endeavour to give them confidence and reanimate them, by visiting frequently, himself, the plague hospital, and talking to, and cheering, the different patients in it. He said he caught the disorder himself, but recovered again quickly.’32 (There is no corroborating evidence for this claim.) Napoleon believed la peste to be susceptible to willpower, telling someone years later that ‘Those who kept up their spirits, and did not give way to the idea that they must die . . . generally recovered; but those who desponded almost invariably fell a sacrifice to the disorder.’33
• • •
Napoleon left Jaffa for Acre on March 14, the day before the British commodore Sir Sidney Smith and the French royalist military engineer and Brienne contemporary Antoine de Phélippeaux arrived off the port with two Royal Navy frigates, HMS Theseus and HMS Tigre. The Anglo-Russo-Turkish alliance had little common purpose except a desire to turn back French conquest, but that was enough for the Royal Navy to try to prevent Acre from falling to Napoleon. The city had been captured in 1104 by the crusading King Baldwin I of Jerusalem, who built walls 8 feet thick. The intervening centuries had left its defences much weakened, but the walls were still there, if not so high, and there was a deep moat. Defending the port were about 4,000 Afghans, Albanians and Moors, Jezzar’s efficient Jewish chief-of-staff, Haim Farhi – who had lost a nose, ear and eye to his master over the years – and now Commodore Smith with two hundred Royal Navy seamen and marines, and the talented Phélippeaux. They added sloping glacis defences, reinforcing the bases of the walls at an angle, and constructed ramps to get cannon up onto the walls (which had been impossible at Jaffa as the walls were too weak). Some of these defences can still be seen today, along with some naval cannon positioned by Smith.
On March 15 Napoleon, Lannes and Kléber easily thrust aside an attack by Arab cavalry from Nablus in a skirmish at Kakoun, suffering only forty casualties. Three days later, Napoleon was forced to watch in horror from the cliffs above Haifa as his flotilla of nine vessels under Commodore Pierre-Jean Standelet, carrying his entire siege artillery and equipment, rounded the Mount Carmel promontory straight into the clutches of Tigre and Theseus. Six ships were captured and only three escaped to Toulon. Most of Napoleon’s heaviest weaponry was then taken into Acre and turned against him. In an equally unmistakable signal that the course of events was turning, Jezzar reverted to form and beheaded the messenger sent with peace terms.34
Napoleon began his assault on Acre at noon on March 19, surrounding the town with fortifications and trenches at a distance of 300 yards. He hoped that the light artillery he had, and sheer French élan once a breach was made, might still capture the city. Although his headquarters were on the Turon hillside 1,500 yards from Acre – coincidentally the place Richard the Lionheart had chosen for the same job in 1191 – some of his siege lines had to go through a mosquito-infested swamp, which soon caused malaria outbreaks. The French set to work digging trenches and making the fascines, gabions and saucissons needed for fortifications.
‘At first the place looked indefensible,’ considered Doguereau, ‘and unlikely to hold out for eight days. It was thought that we only had to present ourselves before Acre, when the memory of the fate of Jaffa, which we had taken so easily, would terrify the Pasha.’35 With the benefit of hindsight, Doguereau concluded that Napoleon ought to have gone back to Egypt at that point, as Jezzar was in no position to threaten Egypt after the loss of El-Arish, Gaza, Jaffa and, on March 18, Haifa, which Napoleon could have garrisoned before withdrawing. But he had not yet defeated the Turkish army that was massing at Damascus, which had been the primary purpose of his invasion.
Napoleon launched no fewer than nine major and three minor attacks on Acre over the next nine weeks. At the same time, he had to send off forces to defend himself from Turks, Arabs and Mamluks, who fortunately came piecemeal rather than in co-ordinated assaults. At one point he ran so low on ammunition that he had to pay soldiers to pick up cannonballs fired from the city and from Royal Navy vessels; they received between a half-franc and a franc each, depending on the calibre. The French weren’t the only ones being incentivized; one of the explanations for the large number of Turkish sorties (twenty-six) was that Jezzar was paying a high bounty for French heads.36 (Of the four skeletons found on the battlefield in 1991, two had been decapitated.) On March 28 a cannonball buried itself three paces from Napoleon, between his two aides-de-camp, Eugène and Antoine Merlin, the son of the new Director, Philippe Merlin de Douai. Part of a tower fell down during a bombardment, but the subsequent attack failed because the ladders were too short, which understandably demoralized the men. One Turkish sortie was repelled only after several hours’ fighting. Sappers started to dig under a different tower, but they were foiled by counter-mining.
Meanwhile, Napoleon sent Murat off to capture Safed and Junot to take Nazareth to foil any relief attempts from Damascus. When on April 8 Junot defeated a raiding party of Turks in a skirmish near the village of Loubia with no losses, Napoleon described it as ‘a renowned combat that did credit to French sangfroid’.37 A far more serious engagement, indeed one that justified the entire Syrian campaign, was fought six days later.
• • •
The battle of Mount Tabor is a misnomer, since it was actually fought on nearby Mount Hamoreh, although Kléber had marched around Tabor, which was 8 miles away. Kléber’s intentions had been very bold, to attack the far larger Turkish and Mamluk army of some 25,000 that had been massing at Damascus with his 2,500 men at night at the springs where the Turks were watering their horses and camels (a long process, as a thirsty camel can drink about 40 litres). However, when the sun rose at 6 a.m. on April 16, Kléber’s force had not yet crossed the central Jezreel valley and was in full view of the Turks, who attacked across the plain. He had plenty of time to form two large squares, which despite being quickly surrounded stayed in formation as they trudged up the gently inclining slope of Mount Hamoreh, where the enemy could use their cavalry to less effect. By noon, at which point he had been fighting in the heat for six hours taking losses, and getting low on water and ammunition, Kléber successfully effected the dangerous and difficult manoeuvre of merging the two squares into one.
He had earlier warned Napoleon that he was in contact with a large body of the enemy, so Napoleon took over Bon’s division and marched to Nazareth in an effort to help him. By the time he got there on the 16th, Kléber was already engaged, so Napoleon drove his men in a circling manoeuvre from the west on to Mount Hamoreh. Ignoring one of the most basic rules of warfare, Pasha Abdullah of Damascus had failed to post scouts to watch for just such an attempt to relieve Kléber. Marching south-east from Nazareth, Napoleon could see from the smoke and dust where Kléber – outnumbered ten to one – was fighting. He appeared at about noon on the battlefield directly behind the Turks. His route climbed the watershed of the ridge, so there was no line of sight that even Turks on horseback could have used to spot him. Although the Vale of Jezreel looks flat from afar, there are undulations and natural curves in the ground of between 30 and 60 feet. Looking across the vale from the (untouched) battlefield today, it is easy to see how these contours hid Napoleon’s force as it rounded Mount Hamoreh and took the Turks completely by surprise in their rear, a dream combination for any general and one that Napoleon exploited to the full. Although they fled before really significant losses could be inflicted, the Ottoman army was completely scattered and their hopes of reconquering Egypt wrecked.
After the battle, Napoleon slept at the convent in nearby Nazareth, where he was shown the supposed bedchamber of the Virgin Mary. When the prior also pointed out a broken black marble pillar and told his staff, ‘in the gravest manner possible’, that it had been split by the Ang
el Gabriel when he ‘came to announce to the Virgin her glorious and holy destination’, some of the officers burst out laughing, but as one of them recorded, ‘General Bonaparte, looking severely at us, made us resume our gravity.’38 The next day Napoleon revisited the Tabor battlefield, a common practice of his, before returning to Acre for more attacks and counter-attacks throughout late April.
On April 27 the army lost one of its most popular commanders when gangrene set into a wound in Caffarelli’s right arm, which had been hit by a cannonball some days earlier. ‘Our universal regrets accompany General Caffarelli to the grave,’ Napoleon wrote in his Order of the Day. ‘The Army is losing one of its bravest leaders, Egypt one of its legislators, France one of its best citizens, and science an illustrious scholar.’ Those wounded at Acre included Duroc, Eugène, Lannes and four brigadiers, and on May 10 Bon was mortally wounded under its walls. The officer corps was thus at the forefront of the action, a key aspect of their service that won them their soldiers’ affection and respect. In one bombardment from Acre, Berthier’s aide-de-camp was killed standing near Napoleon, and Napoleon was himself knocked over by ‘the effect of the commotion of the air’ as a cannonball passed close by.39 With paper for cartridges no longer available, one Order of the Day required all unused paper to be handed in to the quartermasters.
On May 4 a surprise night attack was attempted, but failed. Three days later, with the sails of a Turkish naval relief force seen on the horizon, Napoleon sent Lannes to try to storm the city. The enterprising general managed to get a tricolour onto the north-east tower but no further, and was subsequently expelled. By now Napoleon was describing Acre to Berthier as a mere ‘grain of sand’, an indication that he was considering abandoning the siege. He was also convinced that Sir Sidney Smith was ‘a kind of lunatic’, because the British commodore had challenged Napoleon to single combat under the walls of the city. (Napoleon replied that he didn’t see Smith as his equal, and ‘would not come forth to a duel unless the English could fetch Marlborough from his grave’.)40 Smith also devised the forging of an ‘intercepted’ letter from Napoleon to the Directory bemoaning his army’s perilous situation. Copies were distributed around the French army by deserters, and it was said that when one was handed to Napoleon he ‘tore it up in a great rage’ and forbade anyone to discuss it. This ruse de guerre certainly fooled the Turks, whose ambassador in London sent a copy to the Foreign Office under the impression that it was genuine.41
Easily Smith’s finest piece of psychological warfare, however, was neither disinformation nor misinformation, but simply supplying Napoleon with true information. Under a flag of truce, he sent over several editions of recent British and European newspapers, from which Napoleon was able to piece together the series of disasters that had recently overtaken French arms. Napoleon had been actively trying to obtain newspapers since January; now he could read of Jourdan’s defeats in Germany at the battles of Ostrach and Stockach in March and Schérer’s at the battle of Magnano in Italy in April – only Genoa was left to France in Italy. Napoleon’s brainchild, the Cisalpine Republic, had collapsed and there were renewed risings in the Vendée. The newspapers made him realize, as he explained later, that ‘it was impossible to expect reinforcements from France in its then state, without which nothing further could be done’.42
On May 10, a brigade attacked Acre at dawn – climbing over the decomposing remains of their comrades from earlier attacks, but not deliberately using them as scaling ladders as alleged by British propagandists. As an eyewitness recalled, ‘some got into the town, but, assailed by a hail of bullets and finding new entrenchments there, they were compelled to retire to the breach’. There they fought for two hours, cut down by the crossfire.43 It was to be the last assault; the next day Napoleon decided to raise the siege and return to Egypt. ‘The season is too far advanced,’ he told the Directory; ‘the end I had in view has been accomplished. My presence is required in Egypt . . . Having reduced Acre to a heap of stones, I shall re-cross the desert.’44
The proclamation he made to his troops was just as disingenuous as his claim to have reduced Acre to rubble: ‘A few days more, and you would have captured the Pasha in the very middle of his palace, but at this season the capture of Acre would not be worth the loss of some days.’45 (On re-reading his Acre proclamation years later, Napoleon ruefully admitted: ‘C’est un peu charlatan!’46) He also told the Directory that he had heard reports that sixty people were dying of the plague in Acre every day, implying that it might be better not to capture it anyhow. In fact Jezzar didn’t lose anyone to the plague throughout the siege.47 It was however true that he needed to re-cross the desert before the heat made it impassable.
Napoleon had indeed accomplished ‘the end I had in view’ at the battle of Mount Tabor; the only reason to take Acre had been to pursue his dream of attacking India via Aleppo and setting up a French Empire in Asia stretching to the Ganges, or possibly to capture Constantinople. Yet, as we have seen, these were romantic fantasies rather than achievable ends, especially once the Syrian Christians made it clear they were going to stay loyal to Jezzar (not least because Smith cleverly collected all Napoleon’s proclamations to the Muslims and gave them to the Syrian and Lebanese Christians). ‘But for Acre the whole population would have declared for me,’ Napoleon lamented years later.48 ‘My intention was to take the turban at Aleppo,’ which he believed would have won him 200,000 Muslim adherents.
On May 20, 1799 the French army quietly left their siege lines, moving off between 8 and 11 p.m. to avoid attacks from Theseus and Tigre as they marched some miles along the beach.49 They were forced to spike twenty-three cannon they couldn’t remove, burying some and throwing others into the sea.* ‘General Bonaparte remained on the hillock throughout the withdrawal,’ recalled Doguereau, only leaving with the rearguard.50 Napoleon had suffered the first significant reverse of his career (since Bassano and Caldiero could hardly count as such), and he had to abandon any dream of becoming another Alexander in Asia. He later summed up his glorious aspirations, claiming: ‘I would found a religion, I saw myself marching to Asia, mounted on an elephant, a turban on my head, and in my hand a new Koran that I would have composed to suit my needs.’51 There was undoubtedly an element of self-mockery as well as fantasy in his portrayal of his ambitions. It seems hardly likely that he would actually have converted, though he clearly thought about it. Later, he would tell Lucien, ‘I missed my destiny at Acre.’52
Whether because he was angry at this, or to deter Jezzar from following him closely, Napoleon employed scorched-earth tactics on the way back to Egypt, laying waste to the Holy Land. Similar tactics were later to be used against Masséna by Wellington in his retreat to Lisbon in 1810, and of course by the Russians in 1812. He had to leave fifteen badly wounded men behind in the hospital at Mount Carmel in the care of the monks; all of them were massacred when the Turks arrived, and the monks were driven from the monastery they had occupied for centuries.53 On the retreat to Jaffa, harried in the rear by Arab tribesmen from Lebanon and Nablus, Napoleon ordered some of his cavalry to dismount so that their horses could be used for the sick and wounded. An equerry asked him which one he wanted reserved for himself, upon which Napoleon hit him with his riding crop, shouting: ‘Didn’t you hear the order? Everyone on foot!’54 It made for good theatre (unless you were the equerry). Lavalette said it was the first time he had ever seen him strike a man.
Arriving at Jaffa at 2 p.m. on May 24, Napoleon was confronted with an agonizing dilemma. With a gruelling desert crossing ahead, he would have to decide what to do with those plague victims who could not make the journey back to Cairo, since the nature of their illness meant they couldn’t be put on ships. ‘Nothing could have been more horrible than the sights brought before our eyes in the port of Jaffa throughout our stay there,’ recalled Doguereau. ‘The dead and dying were everywhere, begging passers-by for treatment or, fearful of being abandoned, praying to be taken on board ship
. . . There were plague victims in every corner, lying in tents and on the cobblestones, and the hospitals were filled with them. We left many of them behind when we left. I was assured that steps had been taken to prevent them falling alive into the hands of the Turks.’55 The ‘steps’ taken were laudanum (opium) overdoses, administered in food by a Turkish apothecary after Desgenettes protested that euthanasia contravened his Hippocratic Oath. From the French eyewitness accounts there seem to have been around fifty men who died in this way.56 Napoleon himself put the number killed at around fifteen, but he defended his actions passionately: ‘Nor would any man under similar circumstances, who had the free use of his senses, have hesitated to prefer dying easily a few hours sooner, than expire under the tortures of those barbarians.’57 To the Bourbon and British accusations that he was wantonly cruel to his men, which began as soon as the Syrian campaign was over, he replied:
Do you think that if I had been capable of secretly poisoning my soldiers, or of such barbarities as have been ascribed to me, of driving my carriage over the mutilated and bleeding bodies of the wounded, that my troops would have fought under me with the enthusiasm and affection they uniformly displayed? No, no; I should have been shot long ago; even my wounded would have tried to pull a trigger to despatch me.58
While the Jaffa mercy-killings were twisted by propagandists to blacken Napoleon’s reputation, there seems no reason not to accept his aide-de-camp Andréossy’s conclusion that ‘those few who were killed were past recovery, and that he did it out of humanity’.59
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