by Alan Schom
In a final letter of appeal, dated July 26, Brueys reminded Bonaparte that “we are floating between hope and despair.” They were out of bread and almost out of water. What is more, his ships were still unprotected in the event of an attack. And if things were not bad enough, at least three thousand of his men were in the hospital, ashore in some capacity, or simply AWOL, including many rebellious officers. “Without food, or naval repairs,” he told Bonaparte, “the fleet is now paralyzed.” Nevertheless, two days later, on receiving news of the spectacular French victory at the Battle of the Pyramids, the overjoyed Brueys rose from his sickbed to issue a victory proclamation to the fleet concluding: “Vive la République, mes camarades! Our brave brothers-in-arms have taken the city of Cairo, the capital of Egypt,” and ordered a twenty-one-gun salute to be fired from every ship and frigate, and doubled their usual reduced rations of food and drink.
On July 30 Napoleon finally replied, informing Brueys that he had already ordered “fifty boatloads of wheat and rice, which he would now find awaiting him in Alexandria, which he must enter most quickly.” In fact Napoleon dispatched orders for those provisions to Damietta and Rosetta only that same day. Furthermore, Napoleon added, the English danger was now over. “The entire conduct of the English leads me to believe that they are limiting themselves to the blockade of Malta” and therefore would not be expected in Egyptian waters for the time being.
This letter never reached the unfortunate Brueys nor, indeed, did these fabled fifty boatloads of supplies. It was a cruel hoax, leading the admiral to believe he would receive this food, and soon. But as Napoleon himself openly quipped time and again: “In this world one must appear friendly and make many promises, but keep none.”[206] Meanwhile, apart from half a dozen small feluccas of rice, enough to feed the fleet for just another day or so, Brueys had received no provisions whatsoever — no meat, no vegetables, no wheat or flour, and precious little water. Weakened by a diet of half rations for the past few weeks, and with dysentery racking a large part of the crews remaining on board — Brueys himself was still convalescing from a near-fatal attack — the French fleet remained an anchored target that August 1, when Lieutenant Charrier reported the sighting of the British fleet on a direct course for Abukir Bay.
At the first sighting of the enemy, without waiting for orders, Rear Adms. Blanquet du Chayla and Pierre de Villeneuve had rushed aboard the Orient, where Brueys called an immediate war council that included chief of staff Rear Admiral Ganteaume and Commodore Casabianca. Voices and tempers rose as they discussed how best to cope with this unexpected situation. Blanquet was the only senior officer to vote to put to sea, the more cautious Villeneuve and Ganteaume supporting the equally prudent flag commander’s view to fight at anchor. If the French were at a critical disadvantage now as a result of their failure to have posted frigates several miles offshore to warn them of any intruders, not to mention having been caught with a quarter of their battle crews ashore, they nevertheless held a distinct advantage in firepower over the British. In a sea fight their superiority in power and range could have made a great difference, but not here in close quarters. And with the British coming at them at a front angle, it was impossible for the French to bring their big guns around even to bear on them. To counterbalance the traditional British tactic of breaking through the battle line of their opponents and isolating each vessel, Brueys now ordered stream cables to be secured between ships, from bowsprits to sterns, in effect making one immense chain through which the British could not pass. But, as Lieutenant Charrier noted, like so many others “that order was not generally executed by the ships’ captains,” though most did drop a second main anchor, locking their formation in place.[207]
“I will bring the French Fleet to Action the moment I can lay hands upon them,” a determined Admiral Nelson had promised time and again, and on July 25, with fresh word of the French in Egypt, he had set sail from Syracuse with his thirteen warships and one gunship on a direct course for Alexandria for a second time. Almost seven hundred miles later, off the coast of Egypt at dawn on August 1, Nelson dispatched two seventy-four-gun ships, ahead of the fleet to reconnoiter the situation. Taking a bearing on the Pharos and Pompey’s Column, they duly reached Alexandria by noon. But finding only a few French ships in the old port — and not the war fleet itself — they continued eastward, making their discovery shortly afterward, immediately signaling the fleet and Admiral Nelson, “The Enemy is in Abukir Bay.”[208] It was the moment Nelson had been waiting for since his arrival in the Mediterranean in May. It was now 3:00 P.M., which meant that they would not have many hours of daylight ahead of them if action began today, and Nelson had neither accurate charts of the bay nor local pilots. But he was determined not to let the French escape him once more after having traversed the entire length of the Mediterranean — some 2,600 miles — and halfway back again, to find them.
To the surprise of none of his captains, Nelson therefore immediately hoisted the general signal high above his double-deck flagship, the Vanguard: “Prepare for Battle and for Anchoring by the Stern...I mean to attack the enemy’s van and centre,” he informed his captains at five o’clock, as they closed in on Abukir Bay, planning to attack the French ships in pairs, one on either side or at the bow and stern. If they lacked enough ships with which to attack the entire French battle line, at least they had a better chance of destroying or capturing those they could attack by applying this time-tested tactic. And then thirty minutes later, he hoisted the signal they were all eagerly, if nervously, waiting to receive: “Form Line of Battle as Convenient.” At 6:20 P.M. the French ships in their turn finally hoisted their colors, opening fire as the first two British ships entered the bay.[209]
Nelson’s plan was as dangerous as it was bold. Attacking in waters that he neither knew personally nor had a chart or pilot for. He was literally going in blind, and with the sun already nearing the horizon. Admiral Brueys for his part was taken completely by surprise, expecting the English to attack the following day, by which time he hoped to have the rest of his crews back onboard. But with a northerly breeze behind him and under a full press of sail, Nelson plowed through, in the process losing the seventy-four-gun ship Culloden when it ran aground (before the fight had even begun). With the sun quickly sinking, the British selected their opponents and dropped anchor alongside them. Nelson, despite a raging tooth and headache, and Brueys, still weakened by weeks of dysentery and raging fever, were both determined to fight to the end.
Cannonfire soon flashed generally across the western side of the bay as the thirteen French and fourteen British ships commenced a free-for-all.
That the French did as well as they did, given the weeks of very low rations, attrition by illness and greatly reduced crews (and most of them now under fire for the first time), was surprising, but the results not so. At 9:00 P.M. Captain Hood’s Zealous captured the Guerrier, although another British ship, the Bellerophon, pierced by French thirty-six-pounders and left a floating ruin, was already out of action. The high point of the fierce onslaught came at approximately 10:15 P.M., when Brueys’s Orient, the pride of the navy, blew up with most of its crew and officers, causing a deafening explosion and the ground to tremble at General Kléber’s headquarters at Alexandria, more than fifteen miles away, where “a bright flash of flame as big as a warship rising rapidly in the air” was seen against the night sky, “the flame growing larger and larger, until it changed into a cloud of black smoke, mixed with showers of luminous sparks.” Lieutenant Maissin, a survivor of the tragedy, recalled: “The explosion of the flagship was followed by a mournful silence, as both navies, struck with horror, ceased fire.”[210] Later that night Kléber began receiving the first eyewitness reports from a boat he had dispatched to the scene, which, he acknowledged, “give the most painful details of the [French] squadron and of their battle.”[211] In fact the preliminary results, which would take several more days to assemble, were indeed disastrous.
At 4:00 A.M., with the moo
n still high over the horizon, the French, having gathered some of their dead and wounded, opened fire again, much to the surprise of Nelson, as the Tonnant, totally dismasted but unvanquished, joined by the Guillaume-Tell, Généreux and Timoléon blazed away, however sporadically, from the end of the French battle line at several British ships. Just how much could human beings take? It seemed impossible, but the battle continued off and on the rest of the morning as the remaining ships were finally silenced and two almost untouched ships of the line, the seventy-four-Gun Genereux and the eighty-gun Guillaume-Tell, with Admiral Villeneuve aboard, escorted by two forty-gun frigates, the Justice and Admiral Decrès’s Diane, slipped their cables around eleven o’clock and successfully escaped northward, the British too weary and battered to give serious chase.
The toll on ships and men was one of the most appalling in naval history. Of the thirteen French ships of the line, one had exploded, one had been destroyed by her own crew after running ashore, and nine had surrendered to the British. Regardless of one’s perspective, French bravery and sheer perseverance under the most horrifying circumstances was in most cases nothing less than heroic. The once-mighty triple-deck Tonnant, though reduced to a hulk, kept her blackened colors flying from the splintered stump of her mainmast until the morning of July 3, when British sailors managed to board her, finding the decks littered with 200 of her crew and officers dead or wounded, out of a complement of 608. In addition five French ships of the line were entirely dismasted, while two others had lost two masts each. Of these the British were later able to sail six back, jury-rigged, as prizes to Gibraltar for repairs, and recommissioning into the Royal Navy. (The most famous of these, the Spartiate, was manned by the British against the French seven years later at Trafalgar.) The British captured and burned what was left of them.[212]
Nor were the British spared the inevitable rigors of battle. The Bellerophon was entirely dismasted by French guns — though she had never surrendered, nor indeed had any of the other British ships. Several others had lost some of their masts.[213] The British lost 218 men killed and 678 wounded. Admiral Nelson, with a head wound, later received a peerage for his gallant role.
Given the state of the French fleet, it was hardly surprising that its casualty figures were shocking. The French put their own dead at seventeen hundred killed or drowned, fifteen hundred wounded, and another three thousand taken prisoner. Of the eight thousand men manning the French fleet during the battle, only eighteen hundred escaped unscathed.[214] In addition to Admiral Brueys, French casualties included nine captains, including Captain Casabianca and his nine-year-old son. Despite Napoleon’s later vicious remarks about Brueys, the forty-five-year-old vice admiral had fought courageously once hostilities had commenced. Wounded severely in the head and the hand early in the battle, half an hour later his left thigh and leg were blown off by an English cannonball, and still he refused to leave his quarterdeck where he soon expired.[215]
When Napoleon received the news of the almost total destruction of his fleet, he was, in the words of Louis Bourrienne, “simply stunned,” it took some time for the full implications to sink in. Never in his career willing to accept responsibility for anything that went wrong — whether on land or sea — and instead quick to shift all blame to others, Napoleon naturally did so again now. In his reports to Paris he claimed it was all Brueys’s fault. If he had only “obeyed orders” and entered Alexandria “within twenty-four hours” as directed, this would never have happened. Of course, no such orders had ever been given to the vice admiral. “If in this fatal event he made mistakes,” Napoleon closed, “he expiated them through a glorious death.”[216]
On Napoleon’s orders Brueys had in fact had the harbor entrance explored for channels deep enough to permit his fleet of battleships to enter Alexandria. All soundings proved negative, as Napoleon himself had then reported to Paris. Four months after the naval disaster, however, Napoleon ordered Rear Admiral Ganteaume — now in command of the diminished fleet — to inform Paris that the fleet could indeed have entered Alexandria! For once the weak Ganteaume stood his ground, defying his chief. “I would accept such a responsibility only under the most urgent of circumstances, my opinion being that entry into the port will always be very dangerous for any ship drawing more than twenty feet of water.” The smallest of the French fleet drew close to twenty-two feet.[217]
The other alternative Napoleon had mentioned, the possibility of going to Corfu, had been rendered impossible because the fleet still had not been completely unloaded or victualed, nor had Brueys received a specific order from Bonaparte to sail to Corfu, unless threatened by “a very superior force,” which was not the case at all on August 1. Instead he could anchor in Abukir Bay if Alexandria proved impossible. Even if Brueys had wished to set sail, as he had considered doing when the British were first sighted, it had proved impossible because 3,000 men were on shore. With nearly empty water casks and food supplies sufficient for a few days at sea, no responsible fleet commander would have ordered his ships to put to sea for Corfu.
Nevertheless, when later reporting to the Directory, Napoleon persisted in accusing Brueys of having disobeyed orders by not entering the old port of Alexandria, which he could have done — nonsense, of course — and of remaining at anchor in Abukir without taking sufficient defensive precautions, which was partially true. Abukir had not been properly fortified, nor had the beach, and frigates had not been assigned to coastal waters to maintain a lookout for a powerful English fleet known to be in the vicinity (although Napoleon himself thought Nelson was blockading Malta). Finally Bonaparte again repeated the blatant lie to the Directory that, “Upon leaving Alexandria on [July 5] I ordered the admiral to enter the port of that city within twenty-four hours, or if he found that he could not do so, to promptly discharge the artillery and materiel, and sail for Corfu.”[218] Napoleon continued, asserting that he left Alexandria believing that his (nonexistent) orders had been followed. As Bourrienne reminds us:
The full truth was never to be found in Bonaparte’s dispatches when that truth was even slightly unfavorable and when he was in a position to dissimulate. He was adept at disguising, altering, or suppressing it whenever possible. Frequently he even changed the dispatches of others and then had them printed, whenever their view differed from his own or might cast some aspersion on his reputation and actions...He never hesitated to disguise the truth when he could make it embellish his own glory. He considered it sheer stupidity not to do so.[219]
So of course Napoleon failed to inform Paris that he had ignored Brueys’s numerous pleas — and those of other officials — to revictual the fleet, just as he did not mention the fact that the navy had been weakened physically by living on reduced rations for some time before the battle took place. Nor did he mention that Admiral Brueys had nearly died of dysentery and was still very weak on the day of the battle. And naturally Napoleon could not reveal to Paris that he had failed to obtain the basic naval intelligence required for the commanding admiral under his orders, and that he had subsequently dispatched an entire battle fleet to a country without even knowing whether the ships could pass into the safety of that country’s only harbor.
The full implications of the naval defeat soon began to make themselves felt. Without a navy, and with the loss of his important superior officers (Brueys was dead, and Villeneuve and Decrès had managed to escape to sea), Napoleon and his entire army now found themselves literally marooned. All around them lay vast stretches of remote, barren desert. The only other way out of Egypt was to the northeast, up the coast through the Turkish province of Syria, but large garrisons of Turkish troops blocked the way at Acre, Damascus, and Aleppo. Napoleon had informed his brother Joseph back in July that once in Cairo he hoped to return to France “within a couple of months.” That now seemed impossible with the destruction of France’s Mediterranean fleet. The entire sea lay open to the unchallenged supremacy of the British Royal Navy, which could do as it pleased, while the only other squadron
s in the eastern Mediterranean, those of Russia and Turkey, were now against the French as well. This in turn meant British warships successfully sealing the Egyptian coast, preventing Napoleon not only from escaping from Egypt as he had been envisaging but also from receiving badly needed reinforcements, munitions, and supplies from France. One month after their arrival, Napoleon and his army were — to all intents and purposes — virtual prisoners in Egypt.
In the absence of Admiral Brueys it fell to Divisional General Bonaparte to notify the next of kin of the death of his commanding officers, and on September 4 he duly wrote to the father — himself a vice admiral of the French navy — of Henri-Alexandre Thévenard, captain of the Aquilon:
Your son was killed by a cannonball while commanding on the quarterdeck. I now fulfill a very sad duty in informing you of this, Citizen General. But he died without suffering and with honor. That is the only consolation that can lessen a father’s pain. All of us here are subject to the same fate...Fortunate are those who die on the field of battle. They live eternally in the memory of posterity.[220]
It was a rare thoughtful moment for Napoleon. But it soon passed, for there were other, more pressing matters to cope with, such as extricating himself from his self-inflicted Egyptian débâcle.
Chapter Nine – In the Shadow of Defeat
‘They [the Directors] have a grudge against me and hate me; they will let me perish here.’
The real impact of the French invasion army’s total isolation was apparent to one and all. English cruisers flagrantly patrolling Egyptian waters and blockading Alexandria were a constant reminder of just how drastically the French situation had changed, including the diminished likelihood of their being rescued by another French fleet. For no individual was their new, painful position more dramatically clear than for General Kléber, governor of Alexandria.
