The Campaigns of Napoleon

by David G Chandler

  The situation outside Acre, however, was far from Bonaparte’s liking. Ever since the failure of the first assault, French morale had sunk low. Captain Doguereau recorded in his diary, “Many of us were of the opinion from that moment on that we could never take the place.”19 Furthermore, the plague was retaining its grip on the army; in the middle weeks of April there were 270 new cases, and every day a number of fresh corpses were carried from the rough hutments on Richard Coeur de Lion’s Mount for hasty burial. The field artillery was also running short of solid shot and Bonaparte had to resort to offering a cash reward for every enemy cannonball retrieved by his men. However, the passing weeks saw the elaboration of the French trenches and fieldworks, and a sortie by the garrison was driven back on the 7th, but two days later this success was overshadowed by the mortal wounding of General Caffarelli, who had an arm shot away. His subsequent death on the 18th was a heavy loss to the army and to Bonaparte personally. The general gloom was not even relieved by the news that the second flotilla carrying the remaining half of the long-awaited siege train had safely anchored at Jaffa three days earlier.

  The heavy guns were dragged overland with great difficulty, but by the last day of April they were in their prepared positions and the bombardment commenced. Aware that the prospects of success were fast receding, Bonaparte brought up part of Kléber’s division into the trenches and launched five more desperate assaults on Acre between the 1st and 10th May. Only that of the 8th came anywhere near success, when Lannes and Rambauld fought their way into the town at the head of 200 grenadiers only to find that the defenders had prepared a series of interior defense lines of equal impregnability, and Lannes was once again severely wounded. The last assault was made on the 10th, but General Bon was soon mortally wounded and Bonaparte’s aide-decamp, Croisier, at last found the death he had been seeking since the previous July,* and the attack was called off. Even Bonaparte had to admit that he was beaten and that he had no real prospect of further success in Syria. The town and garrison of Acre had never been completely invested, supply by sea continued unchecked, and now a new convoy brought Turkish reinforcements from Rhodes to swell the numbers of the garrison. Only one realistic course remained open to the French army: to raise the siege and retreat to Egypt. Sixty-three days of unremitting toil and eight costly assaults had been of no avail.

  The taste of failure was bitter, and Bonaparte did all he could to conceal the reality of defeat from the people of Egypt by issuing a victorious proclamation on May 17. After congratulating his men on the victory of Mount Tabor (justly), he continued: “After having maintained ourselves in the heat of Syria for three months, with only a handful of men, after capturing 40 guns and 6,000 prisoners; after razing the fortifications of Gaza, Jaffa, Haifa and Acre [a little artistic license crept in here], we shall return to Egypt. I am obliged to go back there because it is the season of the year when hostile landings may be expected.”20

  The problems involved in the proposed retreat were daunting. First there was the matter of 2,300 sick and wounded, and Admiral Perrée did little to ease this burden when he suddenly sailed for Alexandria after refusing to embark the worst cases in the Jaffa flotilla. In some desperation Bonaparte suggested the killing of the hopeless cases, but in this he found bitter opposition from Dr. Desgenettes and the matter was dropped for the time being. The army was ordered to carry all the casualties with it, and this placed a hopeless strain on the already over-burdened transport service. From the 18th to the 20th the French siege guns hurled their missiles at Acre without ceasing, using up ammunition, but at the end of the third day all the heavy pieces were spiked, leaving the army with only 40 field guns.

  A second difficulty was the need to break contact with the enemy, who proved extremely tenacious. A mass of stores were set on fire and the retreat began, but General Reynier was forced to fight a protracted and bitter rearguard action in the trenches throughout the 20th. Even then the break was incomplete, and the retiring columns were perpetually harassed by clouds of Turkish horsemen. Jaffa was reached on the 24th, and a four-day halt was ordered while desperate efforts were made to evacuate the military hospitals; most of the unfortunates were expected to walk, and a few were shipped out in the handful of craft still available (most of them straight into the arms of the Royal Navy), but Bonaparte resorted to mercy killing for the immovable cases. Not surprisingly morale sank to a new nadir, but the general implacably forced his men on. On the 30th, Gaza was reached; thereafter followed the painful trek through the Sinai Desert which lasted for four seemingly endless days. The men suffered terribly and vented their spleen on the head of their commander; mutiny was only narrowly avoided on several occasions, but the march went on. At last, on June 3, the survivors limped into Katia and fell like starved vultures on the drink and supplies stored there. The Syrian adventure was over.

  What had it achieved? The Army of Damascus was scattered, and this left Bonaparte’s hands free to deal with the Army of Rhodes, but none of the other objectives of the campaign materialized. The Sultan was more determined than ever to push the war to a victorious conclusion, and the Royal Navy still enjoyed the unrestricted use of the Palestinian coast. For this incomplete achievement the cost had been very heavy: 1,200 men had been killed, and 1,000 had died of the plague, an additional 2,300 were ill or seriously wounded, and thus no less than a third of the original army was put out of action for one reason or another. However, Bonaparte’s flair for propaganda was by now well developed, and after resting and re-equipping his shattered legions, he staged a triumphal march through Cairo on June 14 which deluded all but the best-informed onlookers.

  In fact the commander in chief was already considering leaving the country; if need be, without his army. A little European news was now filtering through to him thanks to Sir William Sidney Smith, who was attempting to wage psychological warfare by smuggling ashore month-old copies of German newspapers, all full of the disasters befalling France on other fronts. Their grim story of impending disaster, however, seemed to offer Bonaparte an opportunity to conceal his own failure in the Orient, and at the same time enable him to pose as the saviour of France, returning to the Republic to deliver it from its external foes and from the bungling incompetence of the Directory. It was personally expedient for Bonaparte to abandon Egypt; none of the conditions that had made it an attractive theater in 1798 were still valid a year later; by no stretch of the imagination could the Orient be described as the major theater of the war, nor was there much remaining prospect of advancement. On June 21, therefore, Bonaparte issued secret instructions to Admiral Ganteaume, ordering him to hold the frigates La Murion and La Carrière in immediate readiness for sea.

  Two more months were destined to elapse, however, before Bonaparte left Egypt. In the first place he was anxious about the proximity of the Royal Navy to Alexandria, for he had no desire to end up an English prisoner of war. Secondly, he hoped that pressure on the home fronts would force the Directory to recall him to France, thus neatly compelling them to shoulder the responsibility. To this end he sent a dispatch to Paris dated June 29 which revealed for the first time the extent of his losses as 5,344 men, and contained an appeal for 6,000 reinforcements which he well knew were unlikely to be forthcoming. Thirdly, he wished to receive reliable information about the political situation in France before committing himself irretrievably to an open bid for power; and lastly, there was the matter of the Army of Rhodes to be attended to.

  During the greater part of the Syrian campaign, Desaix had retained firm control over Upper Egypt while Dugua kept order in Cairo, but in the Delta the situation had been far from satisfactory. Two full-scale revolts had to be faced; first that of the Emir El-Hadj Mustafa, and shortly afterward a second rising led by a Moslem fanatic named Ahmed, who declared himself to be the Mahdi.* In due course these rebellions were suppressed, but ambushes and massacres of isolated detachments continued to take their toll. All was comparatively quiet when Bonaparte returned to the scene, but it w
as well known that Murad Bey was plotting another blow, and in consequence the commander in chief ordered the execution of thirty-two influential hostages and prisoners within the dungeons of the Cairo citadel between June 19 and 22 on a series of trumped-up charges. Ruthless measures of this sort excited considerable vocal opposition from certain members of the Institute, and on the 29th Desgenettes freely spoke his mind at a public meeting, but was allowed to get away with it unscathed. Nevertheless, “Sultan El Kebir,” the “Ruler of Fire,” was clearly becoming a tyrant.

  Dissensions and wrangles were abruptly cut short by the news of the long-awaited invasion of Egypt by the Army of Rhodes. On July 11 a Turkish fleet of 60 transports, escorted by Smith’s squadron, anchored in Aboukir Bay, and within a few hours the aged general Mustapha Pasha and 15,000 Turks were swarming ashore. The French batteries were soon overrun, but the garrison of Aboukir Castle held out until the 18th. Its resistance partly accounts for Mustapha’s extraordinary inaction; not a man left the beaches for two whole weeks, and this gave Bonaparte his chance to strike a decisive blow. On the very day that the invasion was reported, the French army left Cairo, and by the 18th it had covered the 100 miles to Rahminaya; six days later 10,000 men were converging on Lake Aboukir. Bonaparte decided to attack immediately without waiting for Kléber’s division to arrive, confident that his 1,000 cavalry could clinch the issue as the Turk was for the time being lacking in this arm, his horse transports being still at sea.

  The battle of Aboukir on July 25 was a short but sharp struggle, and was of a type very different from those of the Pyramids or Mount Tabor in that the French cavalry for the first time really came into its own. The French infantry fought their way through three successive lines of Turkish entrenchments, greatly assisted by the stupidity of the Janissaries who repeatedly left their positions in search of French heads, but the coup de grâce was delivered by Murat at the head of his cavalry shortly after midday. The dashing Gascon found the knowledge of the ground acquired the previous July of the greatest assistance, and the Turks were swept back by the ferocity of his charge; after a fierce struggle, in which Murat personally engaged the enemy general and was wounded in the cheek, the Turkish headquarters was captured together with many senior enemy officers. The Army of Rhodes disintegrated and made for the sea, more than 2,000 being cut down or drowned attempting to swim out to the shipping, while a further 2,500 found themselves shut up in Aboukir Castle where they were starved into submission by Menou a week later. Thus Bonaparte repulsed the second arm of the Sultan’s “pincers” for a loss of 220 men killed and 750 wounded. After the battle, the French rule in Egypt was again comparatively secure, although the casualties, added to those of the Syrian campaign, were rapidly paring down the military efficiency of the army, and Bonaparte’s determination to quit the Eastern sphere was made even firmer.

  On August 11, Bonaparte was back in Cairo, delivering a threatening harangue to a chastened assemblage of Sheikhs in the Divan. Twelve days later, he was gone. A new batch of two-month-old newspapers from Smith, sent ashore on August 2, had revealed the full extent of Suvorov’s and the Archduke Charles’ victories in North Italy and Germany, and Bonaparte realized his moment had come. Moreover, unknown to him, the Directory had sent off a dispatch on May 26 suggesting that he and his army should be evacuated by the fleet of Admiral Bruix, and this missive, together with the failure of Bruix to sail for the East, subsequently provided Bonaparte with at least a flimsy excuse for abandoning his command and returning alone although he had already in fact left Egypt before this order reached the theater. Finally, Ganteaume was at last able to report on the 17th that the Anglo-Turkish fleet had left Egyptian waters; the way was clear for the frigates to reach the open sea, and that same evening Bonaparte left Cairo for the coast.

  Until the very last moment Bonaparte confided his intentions to nobody, and even on the 17th only the handful selected to accompany him back to Europe were let into the secret. It is interesting to note the men he considered indispensable to his future plans; of the savants only Monge and Berthollet were chosen, although at the moment of sailing, the poet Grandmaison was added to their number at Monge’s entreaty; of the soldiers, only Berthier, Lannes and Murat were general officers; the rest comprised the general’s household, the aides, Duroc, Lavalette, Merlin and Beauharnais, his secretary Bourienne, his newly acquired Mameluke servant Roustam, and a handful of others led by Andréossy, Marmont and Bessières, with 200 men of the Guides. No one else was invited, not even the comely Bellitote, and on August 22 the small French squadron sailed for France.

  The mood of the troops left behind when they learned of Bonaparte’s desertion can well be imagined. Most vociferous of all was the towering Republican, General Kléber, suddenly pitchforked, without so much as a day’s notice, into command of a dwindling army of homesick men with a treasury already seven million francs in debt. A bitter complaint to the Directory referred to his erstwhile commander in chief as “ce petit bougre.” Few believed Bonaparte’s written assurances that he returned to France for reasons of “geographical necessity” and that he would spare no efforts to arrange the evacuation of his former comrades. Most felt that he had ratted.

  Oblivious to the turmoil he left behind in Egypt and already planning his next moves against the Directory, Bonaparte enjoyed a comparatively uncomplicated sea journey of 47 days’ duration. Owing to bad weather, the first week of October was spent in Ajaccio, where the young general impatiently basked in the adulation of his fellow Corsicans, but on October 9, 1799, after a near encounter with Lord Keith’s battle fleet, Bonaparte set foot once more on French soil at Fréjus ignoring the quarantine regulations. On this critical occasion he was at once hailed as a hero thanks to the arrival, four days earlier, of the news of his victory at Aboukir. The tidings of Bonaparte’s return sped fast to Paris where the Directory met to consider the implications, while his panic-striken wife took coach to meet her husband before he could reach Paris, where the spiteful members of the Bonaparte family were determined to achieve her ruin. Unfortunately, she selected the wrong road and shot past her husband, and as a result General Bonaparte reached his house in the Rue de la Victoire in the early hours of the 16th to find it empty. A tearful Josephine was only two days behind him, however, and a stormy scene ensued. She found her baggage stacked in the hall, and for a long time Bonaparte was adamant that his wife must go, but a combination of her feminine wiles and the entreaties of his stepchildren, Eugène and Hortense de Beauharnais, broke his resolution, and when Lucien Bonaparte called to greet his returned fratello the next morning, to his dismay he found husband and wife snugly in bed together.

  So ended the adventure of Egypt, at least for General Bonaparte. For the 30,000 French isolated in the Valley of the Nile, two more years of suffering were to pass before the repatriated survivors saw the shores of their homeland once more.

  This General Dumas was the father of the novelist, Alexandre, and should not be confused with General Matthieu Dumas, the engineer, who figures prominently in later chapters.

  The third battalions of each demi-brigade were left to form the garrison of Egypt.

  See p. 222.

  The “Mahdi” was reputedly the direct descendant of the Prophet Mahomet.

  22

  THE BALANCE SHEET OF FAILURE

  The military lessons of the Egyptian interlude are not so dramatic as those of later campaigns, but nevertheless some interesting points can be brought out. In the first place the superiority of well-trained and disciplined European troops over numerically more numerous but tactically medieval Oriental levies was clearly demonstrated in half a dozen battles. The campaign also shows how strength of will can overcome the problems posed by unfamiliar climate and terrain, by disease and homesickness. The whole enterprise was undertaken at a considerable risk, as the narrow escape from Nelson during June 1798 showed very clearly, but seen as a diversionary operation the expedition undoubtedly contributed to the burdens of the British cabi
net and created great, if unrealistic, anxiety for the safety of India. Perhaps the most significant feature was the role played by sea power; the Battle of the Nile had little immediate effect on the outcome of the land campaign, but in the long run it doomed the Army of Egypt and the French colonial experiment to failure. The disproportionate advantages conferred by command of the sea are clearly shown in the Acre episode, when Sidney Smith’s small squadron was able to render practical assistance to the beleagured garrison, deprive Bonaparte of half his heavy artillery at a blow, and thereafter escort Turkish reinforcements into the town. Bonaparte later admitted the havoc Smith’s ships wrought with his plans: “If it had not been for you English I would have been Emperor of the East,”21 he once lamented—rather imaginatively. One further feature needs stressing: the importance of accurate and exhaustive intelligence. The incident of El Arish may appear small in itself, yet its effect on Bonaparte’s timetable for the Syrian campaign was extremely serious, and the ultimate fate of the French invasion was largely determined by the inopportune and avoidable eleven-day delay involved.