by Alan Schom
At Rahmaniya the leading four divisions were given a badly needed forty-eight hours’ rest, though the grumbling resumed when it was discovered that despite wheat supplies there were no ovens, and hence still no bread. Then at 4:00 P.M. on July 12, General Desaix at the head of the column was ordered to resume the march and clear the still-uncharted route for the remainder of the army, while General Andréossy received orders to begin boarding several hundred artillerymen and their equipment on the Nile flotilla that was to accompany the army as it proceeded upriver. As they set out, the first reports reached Bonaparte’s mobile headquarters of a large army under Egypt’s most powerful Mameluke military commander, Murad Bey, blocking their path well to the south, just outside Cairo, and moving slowly in their direction, supported by a large and powerful river flotilla of their own.
Delighted at the prospect of confronting the enemy on the battlefield, Bonaparte in turn ordered Desaix to advance quickly along the Nile as far as Shubrakhit and be ready to attack at dawn.
Twelve days after the first units of the French expeditionary force had set foot on Egyptian territory, the two sides were jockeying for position preparatory to the clash that both hoped would be decisive.
At 2:00 A.M. Bonaparte ordered the army to break camp and advance on Shubrakhit, where intelligence reports informed him that an initial force of about four thousand Mameluke cavalry was already awaiting him, extending from that village to the banks of the river, where they were reinforced by several entrenched artillery batteries and eight to ten gunboats. Occupying two hamlets before Shubrakhit, the five French divisions formed into five large, time-tested battle squares to meet the formidable Egyptian cavalry. No sooner had the French fixed their bayonets, however, than the enemy charged.
The French opened fire with howitzers and cannon. Foiled by this unexpectedly lethal barrage across the mass of their cavalry, the Mamelukes wheeled sharply to the left to sweep around the French rear instead.
Meanwhile, parallel to the army along the Nile, Captain Perrée was finding his boats outgunned by the stronger Mameluke gunboat division. Sinking one French boat, the Mamelukes succeeded in boarding a French galley and a gunboat before being repulsed by an intensive firefight. But Arab artillery along the banks from the direction of Shubrakhit took the French by complete surprise. For a while Perrée’s flotilla found “it becoming almost impossible to hold their own,” forcing them to land General Zayoncheck’s twelve hundred troops on the opposite (right) bank of the river, where they too came under withering Mameluke fire. But despite enemy artillery and a wound in the arm, Perrée finally succeeded not only in repulsing the Mameluke onslaught but also in blowing up a large Egyptian gunboat, though all his men, including the scientists and civilians, had to take up muskets in order to save their necks. As Berthier later put it, “When it was a case of fighting the enemies of the fatherland, every Frenchman was a soldier.”
Meanwhile the Mameluke cavalry, unimpeded by any countering French cavalry, continued to sweep northward well behind French lines as far as Miniat Salahmah, before being repelled by the “vigorous fusillade” of Reynier’s, Vial’s, and Dugua’s infantry, then falling back to their own lines as suddenly as they had appeared. Quick to size up the situation, Bonaparte unleashed his small cavalry, backed by the infantry, ordering a full-scale pursuit and seizing their entire artillery at Shubrakhit in the process.
It turned out that the French had actually been facing twelve thousand enemy troops, peasants and slaves joining the three thousand or so Mameluke cavalry. But despite the original terror, the Battle of Shubrakhit had been easily won by the French in their first real, if brief, test of strength with their Egyptian opponents. Berthier’s battle report summed up French casualties as minimum and Egyptian figures at about three hundred. But the invaders still faced an entire, powerful army before them.
After pillaging Shubrakhit and then resting briefly, late on July 13 Bonaparte ordered the army to resume its march. Artillery and other wheeled vehicles in particular were soon sinking into seemingly bottomless sand dunes or getting stuck while crossing the innumerable small dry canals. For men lacking food and sleep ever since landing in Egypt, “this march [was] one of the hardest yet,” according to one company commander, with large numbers of soldiers continuing to die of hunger, exposure, and exhaustion daily. But Bonaparte was unrelenting, pushing his weary men to the point that the entire army of bitter, undisciplined malcontents collapsed, disintegrated, or simply mutinied. “The army in general is grumbling,” Belliard confessed, “and the officers by now equally discontent, let their famished soldiers break rank and wreak havoc on the villages along our route and steal whatever they wanted.” Even the threat of marauding bedouin no longer affected these men, as the number of stragglers increased. And due to Napoleon’s slapdash “planning,” there were still no food stores to be brought to exhausted troops at the end of the day, the commissary officers providing no logistical support whatsoever. The result was furious and half-demented French soldiers running amok through impoverished, undefended villages and hamlets as they passed, despite Napoleon’s strict injunction to the contrary (including an immediate death penalty for the guilty). Until the army could provide food and drink for the troops, and a reasonable degree of relief from the sweltering heat, there was no way to maintain order and discipline.
The worst pillaging was committed by General Vial’s battalions, who caused fear and panic wherever they went. “It is hard to imagine a more thoroughly ill-disciplined army,” Colonel Laugier lamented more than once. “The tears of village men and the cries of their women create a terrible din,” the women climbing up to the flat roofs of their mud houses, wailing, waving their shawls frantically back and forth, and “all that under the very eyes of the Commander in Chief himself. As he passed the scene, he angrily ordered General Dugua to remain behind with his men to restore order and find rations for the troops.” Frustrated and exhausted after carrying heavy packs over seemingly endless sandy wastes, day after day, their throats parched and raw from the clouds of red dust kicked up by the preceding battalions, their feet bleeding and blistered from the sand rubbing in their shoes, (when they even had shoes), beset by infernal July temperatures hovering between no and 120 degrees — all this combined to leave men and officers alike near the end of their tether. “Instead of aiding the men, their commanders, the brigadier generals, increased it by their own insubordinate acts [before the divisional generals and even Napoleon] in front of the troops themselves,” Laugier sadly remarked. When Dugua finally found a large store of beans, enough in fact for several brigades, the civilian quartermaster “simply refused to distribute them among the troops,” an astonished Laugier noted. When then confronted by angry brigadiers, the quartermaster “protested that he was not their personal galley slave!” although of course that is what he was being paid to be.
Hunger was now so rife as they passed through the last several miles of sand dunes that the French were reduced to killing the transport animals on which their very existence depended, including the donkeys carrying their baggage and munitions, even eating some of the dogs the officers had brought with them. Four more artillerymen in Desaix’s advance division died anyway, their names added to the list of hundreds already recorded. Meanwhile bedouin cavalry continued to snipe along their flanks. And then when at last they did reach some more crops, those troops who followed found that Desaix’s angry men had set fire to ripe grain still in the fields because they had no means of milling it, leaving nothing for the desperate and unruly divisions of Vial and Dugua, or for the peasants who had planted it. “By the time we arrived, we did not even know where to find hay and barley for our horses.” Bonaparte as usual omitted any mention of this catastrophic foul-up in his reports to Paris.
Instead he pushed on as fast as possible, now approaching Wardan, while ahead of them Murad Bey, who had escaped practically unscathed in his lightning attack, regrouped. If Bonaparte did not strike within the next few days, he woul
d no longer have an army with which to face the foe. Finding himself virtually unheeded in his attempts to keep his own troops in hand, he did the only thing left for him to do. He pushed them on remorselessly to confront the enemy. One really good battle and a victorious entry into the Egyptian capital would solve all his problems, he felt. In any event, that was the only solution, apart from retreating to the sea and admitting defeat.
But even nearing Cairo did not cheer the troops as, to their dismay, they again encountered stretches of sand dunes. The nights were still very damp and cold, with river fog spreading inland. “This march is the worst yet,” Belliard glumly reported.
On July 18, just three miles from Wardan, the situation changed drastically — as usual, in that land of stark contrasts. “There we suddenly came upon a rich valley, filled with splendid copses of sycamores and palm trees,” which should have cheered up the disconsolate troops. But after days of sand-covered waste without any source of water whatsoever, upon reaching Wardan and the Nile again, the commissary officers still refused to gather and distribute food for the men. The famished troops mutinied. “Although the troops were clearly weary after their long march, that did not prevent them from pillaging and leaving a souvenir behind of our passage here,” as Belliard put it. By this time, at Wardan, Bonaparte — who had witnessed so many villages devastated by his swarm of men despite his threats — was at the end of his tether. “He went into a terrible rage about the pillaging,” Colonel Savary confided to his personal journal. The situation was bad, Belliard agreed, and “if the Mamelukes had attacked us at this time, they would have done a lot of harm. The troops, worn out by the broiling heat, were just barely able to stagger along,” while their artillery had proved unmaneuverable, often stuck in the sand dunes.[189]
Finally a desperate Bonaparte disobeyed his own instructions and ordered the seizure of local sheep and crops. He had no choice. It was also from there at Wardan that the first flicker of hope appeared for the army, hinting that the end — or at least their immediate goal — was in sight when “from above the sand dunes, at long last we saw the famous pyramids of Giza...and the high minarets of the city of Cairo, our promised land. This hope gave fresh courage to the weak among us,” Colonel Savary acknowledged.[190] But for all that the discouragement of the army was still running deep, from outspoken brigadier generals to the lowest recruit, one angry trooper confronting the great man himself as he passed, snarling, “Well, general, you are going to lead us to India next, are you?” Bonaparte snapped back, “Certainly not with the likes of you!”[191]
What saved Bonaparte and his army at this point was Wardan itself — the vast fields, the rich coolness offered by the shade of its welcoming oases, and the abundance of food found there and along the Nile. The troops finally were fed and their anger momentarily appeased. But even before they had rested, Napoleon was ordering his sometimes disobedient and even outspokenly rude brigade commanders to have the men clean their sandy muskets and artillery in preparation for the forthcoming battle. Scouts were even now confirming the formation and extension of Murad Bey’s large army standing between them and Cairo, supported by Ibrahim Bey’s separate army on the east side of the Nile. The choice was no longer theirs. There would be a colossal confrontation, a head-on clash between Napoleon’s twenty-four thousand men versus Murad’s eighteen thousand, as well as Ibrahim’s reputed one hundred thousand (mainly unarmed and untrained peasants).[192] If Napoleon wanted to reach Cairo, or even survive, he would first have to destroy the Mameluke hosts with their backs to the wall, protecting their homes, families, and all they owned.
Later, after a day’s badly needed rest, the five divisions round Wardan formed by brigade once again and set out at 3:00 A.M. At 9:00 A.M. on July 20, Bonaparte and his staff mounted their horses, finally “leaving the sand dunes and the mountains behind,” Savary happily noted. They had reached the point, known by the Arabs as the “Cow’s Belly,” where the Rosetta and Damietta branches joined, forming a larger single Nile River, further broadened by the formation of a series of long, largely treeless islands. “The plain we are crossing is lovely and rich and covered with several villages,” the colonel continued, the French reaching al-Qaratayn by five that afternoon.[193]
The next day Captain Perrée’s river flotilla joined them there, while General Zayoncheck continued to keep pace on the opposite side of the Nile.
Major Detroye had found the same disheartening marching conditions on the right bank of the river as well. “Nothing has been more difficult than our march to Cairo,” he recorded in his journal. “The sky is burning, the earth hotter still from the sun. We arrive late and leave before sunrise. Our bivouacs are often made in constantly shifting sand, and the nights are soaking with river dampness.” And although there was plenty of drinking water, from the Nile, and some meat from freshly slaughtered water buffalo, chickens, and pigeons, as well as watermelons and beans, there was “almost never any bread and no wine, no eau de vie.” The only things he forgot to complain about were the vipers and the ubiquitous Egyptian scorpions. If food and drink were not the principal problem in this particular brigade, however, leadership was.
General Zayoncheck was hardly the ideal commanding officer on such a campaign, at least according to Major Detroye. “The general...appears to have all the qualities of an honest man, but none of those of a good general officer. Lacking character, energy, and basic forethought, he manages to let his troops go hungry here where food is so abundant.” They were surrounded by food, but it was in fact rarely collected and distributed. “Failure to punish wrongs, combined with real need, results in pillaging, and every village we [in Zayoncheck’s brigade] camp near is ravaged by us, while during the day’s march the column is in utter disorder.” But Napoleon and his chief of staff liked Zayoncheck, and Berthier’s reports to the Directory as usual suppressed disagreeable truths, instead praising Zayoncheck as “an extremely good leader.”[194]
With the confluence of the Damietta and Rosetta branches of the river behind them, the undulating horizon of furnacelike waves of heat, desert haze, and sand dunes of the left bank were giving way to immense flat fields of beans, watermelons, sugarcane, and black currants. These were interrupted by occasional yellow stretches of thistle gladiolas and blue indigo, amid numerous farming villages situated on raised mounds, surrounded by small orange and lemon groves. If a third of each village lay in ruins, and the habitable mud huts were “really filthy and stinking,” the French at least found “the men to be quite tall and well built,” though their women appeared “small, skinny, and hideous,” with the children running around completely naked until the age of seven or eight. Nevertheless, given the swath of destruction they had left behind, surprisingly they found these villagers “very hospitable.” As for their music, however, played by tambourines, cymbals, and flageolets, producing “most unpleasant sounds,” they could have done without it.
Meanwhile Captain Perrée’s flotilla, with Monge, Berthollet, Bourrienne, and the other civilians aboard, along with hundreds of troops, was gradually being reduced in number, as several of the larger vessels ran aground in the low waters. By the time they reached the main channel of the Nile, Perrée found himself with only eight very crowded lateen-rigged feluccas (the workboats of the Nile) and a mere four gunboats.
General Bonaparte’s desire to close with Murad Bey’s army on the plains now less than eighteen miles ahead of them was accompanied by considerable anxiety. The French cavalry, down to a few hundred mounted men, suffered from tactical inferiority and disintegrating morale, with almost no loyalty left to its commander in chief. The French had little hard evidence about Mameluke strategy; it was enough to know that the Mamelukes had resolved to fight them before Cairo, at a village called Imbabah. Thus Bonaparte pushed relentlessly on. Finally at 4:00 P.M. his dust-covered column, several miles long, came to a halt near the villages of Waraq al-Hadar and Bashtil, just one and a half miles from Murad’s imposing army.
Murad Bey’s
army, combined with Ibrahim Bey’s force across the river, looked impressive, if not intimidating. What the French did not know, however, was the fear that their earlier routing of Murad’s forces at Shubrakhit was at this very moment causing in Cairo. This news, historian Abd al-Rahman wrote, “intensified the terror of the people...The east and west banks were full of our artillery and troops...despite all these preparations the [Mameluke] princes were frightened,” and the wealthier families of Cairo arranging “to have transport laid on in the event of our military reverses, requiring them to flee, while government officers prevent the lesser inhabitants from attempting to leave the city.” In the meantime Sayid Umar Effendi, leader of the sharifs,[195] bearing the large green flag of the Prophet taken from the Citadel, was “escorted by several thousand men armed with sticks, loudly reciting prayers as they marched to reinforce the position at Bulaq. The whole of Egypt was in a state of turmoil and panic,” al-Rahman continued, “everyone imploring Allah to give them a victory over the French.” Left in the capital were the women, children, and elderly, hidden behind the faceless mud walls of their homes, the streets of Cairo abandoned to the bands of “murderers and brigands now controlling the city.” Angry mobs seized most of the Europeans, Christian Arabs, Copts, Greeks, and Jews, along with everything of value from their churches, monasteries, synagogues, and homes. “They wanted to kill all the Jews and Christians,” noted al-Rahman, and only strong intervention by the remaining Mameluke authorities prevented full-scale massacres. “Every day they learned that the French were getting closer and closer to Cairo, and no one in authority could agree as to what dispositions to take. The [Egyptian] troops had no confidence in their own armies, and nothing [efficacious] was done to meet the French.”[196]
