Beware of Heroes: Admiral Sir Sidney Smith's War against Napoleon

by Peter Shankland

  Because the Turks were only five miles from the city, and they had already re-established their customs house in Alexandria, Kléber requested the Vizier to retire to the frontiers of Syria. He replied that he would never retire. At this juncture, Lieutenant Wright at last arrived at French Headquarters with Lord Keith’s letter for Kléber; according to the Syrian historian, Nicolas le Turc, when Kléber read it he bellowed like an angry camel. He had it translated into French and, on 17th March, issued it to his troops in the form of a proclamation:

  Soldiers! This is a letter which I have just received from the Commander-in-Chief of the English fleet in the Mediterranean:

  On board His Majesty’s ship the Queen Charlotte, January 8th, 1800.

  Sir, I have received positive orders from His Majesty not to consent to any capitulation with the French troops which you command...except on the condition that they lay down their arms, give themselves up as prisoners of war, and abandon all the vessels and all the stores in the port and town of Alexandria to the allied powers...All vessels found to have French troops on board will be forced by the officers of the ships under my command to re-enter Alexandria, and any encountered in European waters...will be held as prizes and all on board considered as prisoners of war.

  Soldiers! We can reply to such insolence only by victories: prepare for the combat.

  He sent a declaration of war to the Grand Vizier to which he added these words:

  The blood we are about to shed will be upon the heads of the authors of this new dissension...Your Highness in his habitual wisdom will easily distinguish who is responsible for the clouds that have arisen.

  On the following day, the 18th, he sent the women and the baggage into the forts. At 11 p.m. he reviewed his troops on a plain covered with corn and thick grass near the ruins of Heliopolis. He addressed them as follows: ‘My friends, you know the justice of our cause...You possess nothing in Egypt but the ground you stand upon. Retreat one step, and you are lost.’ He formed them into squares, and at 2 a.m. on the 20th moved towards the Turkish headquarters.

  At 4 a.m. enemy skirmishers appeared and threatened their front while 6,000 horsemen, commanded by Nadir Pasha, son of the Grand Vizier, and Ibrahim Bey, the Mameluke, rode round their left and threw themselves into Cairo. The Egyptians welcomed them with delirious joy, and began a massacre of the Christians. Encouraged by this success, the Grand Vizier sent messengers to Kléber calling upon him to surrender and to entrust himself to his mercy. He sent them back quicker than they came.

  Then the main Turkish army appeared, perhaps 40,000 men, in a huge cloud of dust. The French opened fire on them with sixty guns, and with small arms from their serried ranks, and repulsed wave after wave of charging horsemen. At 3 p.m. the attacks wavered. Then the French advanced, and the Turks broke and fled. In another hour the plain was deserted except for the dead and the dying, and the swarms of Arabs who appeared like vultures to prey on them.

  During the next two days Kléber drove the wreck of the Turkish army right out of Egypt and into the pitiless desert. He captured the Grand Vizier’s fabulously wealthy camp with its great gold-embroidered tents with hangings of silver, and it was pillaged like a rich caravan. He nearly captured the Grand Vizier also. It was Captain Lacy, the special messenger Lord Elgin had sent to urge him to attack the French, promising him an easy victory, who dashed into his tent when all was lost and persuaded him, just in time, to fly for his life.

  Chapter Thirteen – The Passing of a Great Republican

  Meanwhile in London Kléber’s intercepted dispatch and Elgin’s denunciation of Sir Sidney had confirmed Ministers in their opinion that the French army was on its last legs. They were still under the impression that they had acted wisely, in ordering that no capitulation should be allowed, when Captain Maitland and Colonel Douglas brought them the text of the Convention of El Arish with the news that it had been signed and ratified.

  There was consternation in the Cabinet. To win the war it was a paramount importance, in their eyes, that the Allies should act in concert, and they feared that both Russia and Austria would be mortally offended by the Convention. And yet, if they broke it, they would be accused by France, by Turkey and by Egypt of a breach of faith. In this dilemma they decided that it must be honoured, but that Sir Sidney himself must be disowned and repudiated. They were acutely conscious of their responsibility to the nation for the whole conduct of the war. They would not risk losing it in order to be just and loyal to one individual officer, although he had served them well.

  They announced His Majesty’s disapprobation of the terms of the Convention, which they considered to be more advantageous to their enemies than their situation entitled them to expect. The Captain commanding H.M. Ships on the Coast of Egypt, they said, ought not to have entered into an agreement of that kind without the sanction of his commanding officer. But, as the General commanding the enemy’s troops appeared to have treated him as a person whom he bona fide conceived to possess such authority etc. etc., they would, from scrupulous regard to the public faith, abstain from any act inconsistent with the engagement to which Captain Sir Sidney Smith had erroneously given the sanction of His Majesty’s name.

  To get round the awkward fact that his plenipotentiary powers had not been withdrawn, they adopted the story, put forward by Elgin, that these powers had been granted to him solely for the act of signing the Treaty of Friendship, conveniently ignoring their own written instructions that he was ‘to provide for the full execution of the engagements to be entered into under the Treaty’. Thus they publicly censured the man upon whom they had lavished praise only a few months ago for exercising the same powers for which they now condemned him. Grenville went even lower and accused him of acting contrary to the Treaty of Friendship because Turkey had no right to make a unilateral agreement with the enemy. This statement was immediately refuted by Elgin who affirmed that the Turks had taken no step without consulting the accredited representatives of their allies; but the story gained currency, and the one man who had faithfully observed the Treaty both in spirit and in deed was considered to have broken it.

  The only part of Elgin’s conduct that was not approved was his attitude to the ‘stratagem of war’. Grenville’s reaction was the same as Sir Sidney’s but it took him more words to express it. He replied to Elgin:

  With respect to the shocking proposal which you mention as having been made by the Reis Effendi for retaliating the treachery of which the French have been guilty by an act of equal perfidy and cruelty, you are to express in the strongest terms His Majesty’s abhorrence of it, and to declare if necessary his fixed resolution to proceed to any extremity rather than to suffer such an act to be committed...I cannot indeed but regret that your lordship should at all have restrained the expression of the sentiments which such a proposal must have excited in your own mind...

  Orders were sent to Keith to permit the French troops to return to France under the Convention and to guard against any treacherous attack upon them by the Turks. Sir Sidney was to be relieved of his command and sent to some other theatre of war. Ministers now considered that the Egyptian question was settled; but events had already overtaken them. A week before the news reached them that the Convention had been signed, their action in obstructing it had brought disaster to the Turkish army at Heliopolis.

  Kléber had returned from pursuing the Grand Vizier to find the whole of Cairo, except the forts and the Citadel, in the hands of the Turks. He offered them reasonable terms, which the leaders would have been glad to accept, but the mass of the citizens with desperate, almost insane courage, took matters into their own hands, murdered Kléber’s emissaries, flew to the barricades and defended their city street by street. It took five weeks of bitter fighting to reduce it.

  Kléber allowed the Turks to leave with their arms in their hands, law and order were re-established, the streets were cleaned, the mosques purified, the bodies buried. He extorted huge contributions from the wealthy sheikhs, and he for
ced the Coptic tax-collectors, who had enriched themselves under Bonaparte, to disgorge their ill-gotten gains. He established a stern but equitable system of tax collecting, and put his finances in order with the aid of a nice bonus of eighty Turkish merchant ships that had put into Egyptian ports, trusting to the Convention. He was able to pay his troops and to provide new uniforms. He continued Bonaparte’s policy of recruiting and training native troops from the Sudan. He abolished the system of requisitions, and ordered that all supplies taken were to be paid for. He ordered the savants to collect all the results of their researches with the idea of having them printed in one series of volumes on their return to Paris.

  He could now sit at his headquarters in the Elfy-Bey Palace and survey his work with considerable satisfaction, smoking his monumental pipe and letting the glowing embers fall on to the parquet floor. There was no cloud on the horizon. With the Turkish army scattered, Sir Sidney Smith discredited, and Djezzar in revolt against the Porte and at war with the Druses, the favourable moment had come to carry out Bonaparte’s plan of marching through Syria and threatening Constantinople; but it was not his way to sacrifice the life of a single soldier for his personal glory.

  At the beginning of June 1800 he received a letter from Morier who said he had the honour to communicate to him that his Britannic Majesty was giving orders to his fleets to accord free passage to the French troops in Egypt, and that passports would be supplied from his ambassadors extraordinary and plenipotentiary with the Sublime Porte: ‘Therefore the obstacles which you have always alleged hindered on your side the execution of the Convention of El Arish will no longer exist as soon as you and your army wish to evacuate Egypt.’

  Morier had let his papers, consisting of notes and a journal, fall into his enemy’s hands. From these Kléber had learned of the contemplated treacherous attack upon his army. He dictated this reply to his secretary, Lévesque:

  The notes make it clear in an unequivocal way that the said Morier is formally charged, as he says, to put into execution a stratagem of war under cover of a treaty. It is my duty as a Frenchman to give the said Morier due warning of our decision; any person presenting himself on his behalf to the French army in Egypt will be considered as a spy, and treated as one. In accordance with the customs of all nations, he will be hanged from a tree. The same fate is reserved for him, should he dare to present himself in person. This Morier will surely be disavowed by Lord Elgin, in whose name he has the audacity to speak.

  In spite of this rebuff there was still hope that the Convention might be renewed, because Kléber had shown consistently in his correspondence that he felt he had been right to agree to it. Neither the seizure of power by Bonaparte nor the defeat of the Turks had caused him to alter his opinion. On 12th May Lord Keith authorised Sir Sidney to re-open the negotiations, and to proceed upon them in the same manner as if no interruption had occurred. He had temporised about transferring him away from the Levant, saying that he was looking for a suitable officer to replace him. Perhaps the explosive effect of his letter to Kléber, written in unreflecting obedience to his orders, had caused him to be more circumspect about Egyptian affairs.

  Sir Sidney at once wrote to Kléber and prepared to pay his long-deferred visit to him in Cairo. Then, suddenly, everything was too late. Kléber, walking in a garden near the Elfy-Bey Palace, was stabbed to death by an Arab whom he had mistaken for a beggar. The Arab, who had come from Aleppo, confessed that he had been sent by two captains of the janissaries who had been in the army defeated at Heliopolis.

  ‘I must ever regret Kléber,’ Sir Sidney wrote, ‘almost as much as if we had been friends instead of opponents; we had fought long enough to respect and understand each other.’ He saw in his death the death of the republican cause in France, of the possibility of a government with which his own people could live in peace.

  He went at once to the Grand Vizier’s camp at Jaffa to find out if the Turkish authorities were implicated: he came to the conclusion that it was an act of private vengeance. When he received an answer to the letter he had addressed to Kléber, it was signed by General Menou, renegade leader of the Colonist Party in the Army of Egypt who had assumed command by right of seniority. Menou accused the Turks of Kléber’s assassination and, regarding the Convention, he said that as Sir Sidney had referred it to his Government, he would do the same and submit it to the Consuls who now governed France.

  In this perplexing situation, the Grand Vizier appointed Sir Sidney and the Captain Pasha to act for him. To signify his confidence in them he held an investiture in the camp and presented each of them with a pelisse of honour.

  Replying to General Menou on the same evening Sir Sidney told him that the Grand Vizier had formally and officially declared that he had not the slightest knowledge of those who were guilty of the assassination. This, he thought, was a true and sincere statement. He asked Menou, on behalf of the Vizier, for a clear and precise answer to the proposal that the French should evacuate Egypt. He said that he was authorised to agree to such arrangements as the necessity of the circumstances might dictate because the admiral under whose orders he served was at a considerable distance, and although he was not in a position to offer any new proposition, he was ready and disposed to receive any that the general might make to them.

  The reply to this letter was not more encouraging than the first, but at least it made the situation clear: General Menou did not intend to evacuate Egypt, and the war would have to go on.

  On the day upon which Kléber was assassinated, 14th June, 1800, the French defeated the Austrians at Marengo. General Desaix, who had just returned from Egypt, was killed while leading the final charge that turned the tide of battle and gave the victory to Bonaparte: he died not only on the same day as Kléber, but almost at the same hour.

  As a result of this battle, Bonaparte’s authority as First Consul was firmly established in France, and Austria was knocked out of the war. Russia was withdrawing also, because of various disagreements with her allies and the failure of the British army’s campaign in Holland. Thus the advantages that Ministers had expected to gain by sacrificing the interests of Turkey, and by throwing Sir Sidney to the wolves, had turned out to be wholly illusory. Wriggle how they would, they were in the situation of the man who had sold his soul to the Devil and didn’t get paid for it. They found they couldn’t make peace with France, except upon disadvantageous terms because, as Sir Sidney had warned them, Bonaparte expected compensation elsewhere as the price of surrendering Egypt. And as long as the French remained there it would be necessary to keep a naval force both in the Eastern Mediterranean and in the Gulf of Suez, to prevent them from spreading in almost any direction, and particularly to the eastward. And there were Sir Sidney’s letters before them, begging them to accept Egypt, as it required only their consent and the thing was done. They had listened to everyone except to the man who was actually dealing with the situation, and they had let the chance irrevocably slip. His reasons and his justification for the Convention were clearly set out with an authority that could not be denied: he told them, as it was his duty to do, of the mistakes they had made, and of the immediate and the long-term effects of their decisions. He did not hide his distress that whatever way the balance now inclined, Britain would be thought to have acted dishonourably, and that much blood would be spilt uselessly.

  There were some awkward moments in the House of Commons when the opposition, led by Sheridan, Tierney, Grey and Hobhouse, wanted to know why the question of the evacuation of Egypt had been allowed to become the stumbling block of peace, and why the terms of the Convention had not been accepted. Was not Sir Sidney Smith joined with his brother, they asked, as joint plenipotentiary of Great Britain at the Court of Constantinople? Had he not power to treat at Acre when he had offered to convey the French army out of Egypt, individually or in the aggregate? Did His Majesty’s ministers countermand the orders under which, it was presumed, he acted? Did not Lord Elgin instruct Sir Sidney to get the French o
ut of Egypt by all possible means?

  Mr. Grey made the same point that Lord Keith had made, that Sir Sidney was the British Officer commanding on the spot, and nothing was more undeniable than that every military commander had power to accept any stipulations which his prudence might direct him to agree to with the enemy, without having any special authority for the purpose. Ministers’ defence was that Sir Sidney had acted without authority. Their ample majority enabled them to defeat the opposition’s motions for copies of the instructions they had given Sir Sidney, of Keith’s letters to Kléber, of Lord Elgin’s correspondence, and for a committee of enquiry. But their colossal blunder was now apparent to all, and some of the ministers had uneasy consciences about it.

  Henry Dundas, Secretary for War, who had not been present at the Cabinet meeting at which it had been determined not to accept a capitulation, and who had always doubted the wisdom, he said, of the orders they had issued, wrote to Lord Spencer: ‘My words had almost stuck in my throat when I defended that measure in the House of Commons, and I am sure I see not the possibility of defending it when the whole business comes to be known in its full extent.’

  Lord Spencer answered him on the following day, ‘I feel the strength of your argument on the subject of Egypt, and I own I have felt the same kind of impression upon it ever since I became more fully acquainted with the real state of things there than I was when I concurred in the determination...to resist the French army’s return.’ And he admitted in a letter to Sir Sidney, ‘I think it would now be impossible for anyone not to allow that the policy of that Convention was such as to recommend its execution.’