‘All we could see in this new project was another chance of glory as well as incalculable hardships,’ recorded Captain Moiret, adding that the moment his men had been told they were to march out to Syria the grumbling ceased; they set off in high spirits on 6 February 1799.1
Bonaparte assumed that after a quick march his advance guard would capture the presumably well-stocked fortress of El Arish, and he did not take sufficient supplies with him. As the troops marched over the Sinai, hugging the Mediterranean coast, they ran out of victuals and were reduced to drinking brackish water and eating seaweed, which gave them dysentery. ‘We ate dogs, donkeys and camels,’ Bonaparte admitted to Desaix. It was not just the troops who were grumbling by the time he joined his vanguard at El Arish on the evening of 17 February. His generals too were fed up, and his theatrical rhetoric only irritated them. General Kléber, an experienced soldier who had served in the Austrian army before the Revolution, was difficult to ignore with his Homeric stature, booming imperious voice and tendency to use it to say what he thought. ‘Never a proper plan, everything goes by leaps and bounds, every day rules the action of that day,’ he declared of Bonaparte’s method. Yet even he had to admit that this ‘extraordinary man’ possessed something which set him apart and lent him an authority he could not dispute. ‘It is to dare, and to keep daring, and he carries that art to the limits of temerity.’ That capacity was to be tested severely over the next weeks.2
Desperate to move on but fearful of leaving possibly mutinous generals behind to continue the siege, Bonaparte offered the garrison of El Arish generous terms, and it capitulated on 20 February. The men were allowed to leave with their arms and baggage under oath that they would not bear arms against France for twelve months. The chief surgeon of the Army of the Orient, Dr Dominique-Jean Larrey, disinfected the fort against the plague, which had broken out in the area, and established a hospital before they set off for Gaza.3
They were now marching through fertile country, but under drenching rain that turned the tracks to seas of mud. Entering Gaza after a brief skirmish, Bonaparte made a pompous speech informing the inhabitants that he was bringing them liberty. He addressed the griefs of his own men with an order of the day full of references to the Philistines and the Crusaders. To some soldiers who complained of lack of food he said that the Roman legionaries had eaten their leather equipment but kept going.4
On 3 March they reached the pretty town of Jaffa. The officer sent under a white flag to summon its defenders to surrender was beheaded and his body thrown into the sea. This enraged the troops, who after three days of siege stormed the defences and entered the town. While the soldiers who had been defending it withdrew to a citadel, the French unleashed their rage on the mainly Christian population in an orgy of looting, rape and murder. ‘One would require very dark colours in order to paint the hideous scenes which took place,’ recorded one officer. Worse was to follow.5
Two of Bonaparte’s aides, his stepson Eugène and Captain Croisier, had persuaded the soldiers holed up in the citadel to surrender by assuring them their lives would be spared. When he saw them filing out, Bonaparte flew into a rage with his stepson, asking him what he was supposed to do with them, given that he could neither feed them nor spare men to escort them back to Egypt. As they were mostly the same men who had been released on parole at El Arish, after deliberating for some time with his senior officers he concluded that they all deserved to be shot. When Berthier pleaded for their lives, Bonaparte told him to go and join a monastery. Over the next couple of days some 1,500 to 2,000 men (accounts vary) were led out onto the beach and shot, bayoneted or drowned. According to one officer, ‘the heart of the French soldier heaved with horror’, but it had not done so during the sack of the town, after which the camp had turned into a bazaar where loot, including women, was traded.6
Bonaparte’s decision to execute the prisoners was seized on by the British and has been made much of by his detractors ever since, but cities which resisted generally suffered the consequences, and British troops behaved no better during the concurrent war in India against the Mahrattas, or later in the Peninsular War; the Spanish and British treatment of those who surrendered at Bailén would be a good deal less humane. The morality of the time was far removed from present-day standards, and it was accepted that a general had to put his own men first.7
They may have expressed reservations, but the nerve required to act decisively earned Bonaparte the respect of his officers and men. Visiting the town, he inspected the hospital and impressed his entourage by walking among the plague victims, talking to and touching them. To set an example to reluctant orderlies, he allegedly approached one patient, ‘pressed the bubo and forced out the pus’. Whether he actually did this or not, the story circulated among the troops, enhancing his standing.8
Image was important, and Bonaparte could not be accused of underestimating its power. ‘You should know that all the efforts of humans are powerless against me, as everything that I undertake must come to pass,’ he announced in a proclamation to the inhabitants of the area. ‘Those who declare they are my friends prosper. Those who declare themselves my enemies perish.’ In another, to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, he warned that ‘I am as terrible as the fire of heaven to my enemies, clement and merciful to the people and to those who wish to be my friends.’ Some of his entourage were growing anxious over what appeared to be an increasingly delusional sense of his role, and expressed fears that he was being carried away by belief in his ‘fate’ and his ‘destiny’. He may by this stage have been bolstering himself psychologically in a situation which was growing increasingly perilous.9
The army marched on to Acre, which it reached on 19 March. The city was the seat of the Ottoman governor of Syria, Djezzar Pasha (Ahmad Pasha al-Jazzar), a Bosnian by origin, known colloquially as ‘the butcher’ (in 1790 he had drowned all the women of his harem and honoured his favourite by personally eviscerating her). Bonaparte sent him an offer of accommodation, stating that there was no reason for them to be enemies. The Pasha’s response was to massacre the Christian population of the city.10
Bonaparte’s siege artillery, which had been sent by sea, had been intercepted by the British, and many agreed with Kléber, who said bluntly that it would be impossible to take a place defended by European methods with Turkish ones. Bonaparte ignored them, and the first assault, on 28 March, nearly succeeded. Two days later the defenders made a sortie, which was successfully repulsed. On 1 April Bonaparte made a second attempt to storm the defences, in which he was nearly killed by an exploding shell, and this was followed by another sortie, which was also repulsed.11
Meanwhile Ottoman forces were gathering to relieve Acre, with some 7,000 warriors from Nablus and 40,000 under the Pasha of Damascus moving south. Bonaparte sent Murat with 500 infantry and 200 cavalry out to confront him, while Junot covered his flank at Nazareth with a smaller force. Junot was himself assailed by superior forces and Bonaparte sent Kléber to assist him, but they both found themselves facing more than ten times their own number at the foot of Mount Tabor. They sent urgent messages to Bonaparte and held off the Turks for a full day before being relieved on 16 April by Bonaparte, who had made a night march of forty kilometres.
The following day he visited Nazareth, where he attended mass and stood godfather to a soldier who wished to be baptised. Two days later he was back at Acre planning another assault. This, and the next one, failed just as the first two had done. Without siege artillery the only way to breach the walls was to dig tunnels and trenches in order to place mines underneath them, a painstaking and dangerous business at the best of times. It was made no easier as, being low on powder and shot, the French artillery could not supply adequate covering fire, while the British naval squadron under Commodore Sydney Smith was not only resupplying the defenders, but also bombarding the French trenchworks.12
Most of Bonaparte’s generals were by now clamouring for him to give up and return to Cairo. He was regularly hissed and booed by the troops, but he insisted on trying yet again to take the fortress. There was undoubtedly an element of personal pique involved: this was his first setback, and he could not accept it, the more so as the man directing Sydney Smith’s guns was Le Picard de Phélippaux, a hated classmate from Brienne who had emigrated and fought against the Republic. A weightier motive for Bonaparte’s determination to take Acre was that the Druze and the Shiite Muslims who made up the population of the region were keen to rise up against their Ottoman overlords; if Bonaparte could crush Djezzar, he would be able to raise the whole region, march on Damascus and Aleppo and force the Porte to switch sides, thus denying all facilities in the eastern Mediterranean to the British and confirming France’s possession of Egypt. But the prospect was dim: news had begun to trickle through that in Europe the coalition against France had gone over to the offensive.13
Following the failure of a final assault on 10 May, Bonaparte accepted the inevitable. He sent a report to the Directory announcing that he had destroyed Acre, which, he assured them, was not worth holding on to as it was a ruin full of plague victims. As usual, he diminished his losses. He despatched another declaration to the Divan in Cairo which made even more outrageous claims – that Djezzar was wounded, that he had sunk Turkish ships, and so on. Before striking camp, he praised his troops in an address which suggested that although they had been about to capture Acre they were needed more urgently elsewhere, and promised them more glory ahead.14
The march back to Cairo took twenty-five days, and they were among the worst many of the soldiers would remember. They trudged in temperatures in the forties, with no shoes to protect their feet from the scorching sand, and at night the rags to which their uniforms had been reduced could not protect them from the cold of the desert night. They only found food and water sporadically. Many of them were wounded and some sick; those who could not walk were carried on improvised stretchers.15
Before striking camp outside Acre, Bonaparte had suggested to Dr Desgenettes that those suffering from the plague and those so badly wounded that they could not be moved should be given fatal doses of laudanum, assuming that if they were left behind they would fall victim to the barbarous practices of the enemy. Desgenettes replied that his duty lay in preserving not ending lives. Bonaparte then approached the pharmacist Boyer and ordered him to prepare the potions. There is no certainty as to what followed, at Acre and at Jaffa and Tentura, where there were also several hundred sick and wounded. The available evidence is wildly discrepant, all of it written down after the events. The British press, conflating Acre and Jaffa, painted a black picture of the evil French general poisoning hundreds of his men. Defenders of Bonaparte’s reputation either dismissed the story entirely or brought the number down to a handful of the dying. A careful reading of the evidence suggests that a potion was administered by Boyer on Bonaparte’s orders to about twenty-five men, some of whom vomited and survived.16
Before leaving Jaffa, Bonaparte ordered all carriages and carts, and horses not pulling field guns, including his own, to be used for the evacuation of the sick and wounded. He gave detailed instructions as to the separation of the sick from the wounded and how they were to be transported. When his groom suggested he keep at least one horse for himself, Bonaparte struck him with his riding crop in fury. He showed his exasperation and dealt out harsh reprimands. He had vented his anger on the 69th Demi-Brigade when it fell back during one of the assaults on Acre, accusing the men of cowardice and having nothing between their legs, and suggested he would put them in skirts instead of breeches when they got home. In the interim he made them march with their muskets butt-end up.17
The march from Jaffa to Cairo was the worst part of the retreat, and despite Bonaparte’s orders the sick and wounded were dumped by those whose horses had been requisitioned to transport them, and left to die or be decapitated by preying Bedouin. At the same time there were acts of self-sacrifice, and some did slow down to help the walking wounded keep up with the columns.18
The Syrian campaign had been an unmitigated disaster. Bonaparte had lost at least 3,000 men, and by some estimates as much as one-third of the force he had set out with had been put out of action. Even those who had never criticised a decision of his expressed the opinion that he should not have embarked on the campaign. At the same time, the episode had demonstrated one thing – that Bonaparte, a man of twenty-nine in charge of an undisciplined army in many cases little better than a rabble, led by unruly generals many of whom resented or even hated him, with no superior authority to support him, was able, in the face of defeat, plague, adverse conditions and lack of supplies, to pull that force together and maintain authority over it. The Syrian campaign had tested his mettle, and shown that he was up to the challenge.19
Ever aware of the power of appearances, he prepared his return to Cairo carefully. His uniform officer was put to work, replacements were despatched from every available store, and the remnants of the Syrian expedition were kitted out with the greatest possible panache. Bonaparte entered Cairo at their head through a victory arch with bands playing, marching over streets strewn with palm fronds. Having crossed the city from end to end the columns made their way around it and marched through once again, an operation lasting for five hours designed to confuse anyone who might have been trying to count how many men he had lost.20
Back in Cairo, Bonaparte carried on as though nothing had changed, and continued to send optimistic reports to the Directory (many of which never got through, as they were intercepted by the Royal Navy). On 19 June he not only expounded on the advantages of Egypt as a colony for France, but also devoted much ink to criticising the way the French navy was organised. He was building a couple of corvettes at Suez, and was shocked when a French vessel was blown up by a single shot from a British ship as a result of negligence. The French navy would never be of any use, he argued, while the practices brought in during the Revolution survived and until the captain was given absolute authority.21
He was confident that he could make up his losses in men by the purchase of a couple of thousand black slaves who could be incorporated into his units. He nevertheless pressed the Directory to send more men, and particularly arms. From his despatches and correspondence it is clear that he found the challenge of running his own fief exhilarating. He had begun to treat the army as his legion, distributing sabres of honour not in the name of the Republic, but his own. He courted the natives, prefacing every statement with the words: ‘There is no other god than God, and Mahomet is his Prophet!’22
He also attended meetings of the Institute, which had been carrying on its work throughout this time, but at a session on 4 July he ran into trouble when he blamed the lack of success in Syria on the plague and the inability of the physicians to find a cure. He argued that by treating it as a contagious disease, they had undermined morale, and that for the general good it would be better to declare it to be non-contagious. Desgenettes insisted that scientific integrity demanded the truth be told. Bonaparte denounced him and his kind as fastidious theorists, to which the doctor responded by accusing him of despotic leadership and lack of foresight, and laid the blame for all the carnage and death during the Syrian campaign at his door.23
On 15 July at the pyramids, where he was encamped, Bonaparte received news that a Turkish fleet had appeared off Aboukir. He quickly gathered a force of some 10,000 men and marched north. The Turks disembarked between 10,000 and 15,000 men and entrenched on the narrow peninsula with the fortress of Aboukir at their back.
On 24 July Bonaparte pitched his tents about seven kilometres from Aboukir. It would not have taken him long to assess what had to be done once he had seen the Turkish positions. Yet that night when everyone else was asleep Michel Rigo, a young painter who had been allowed to bed down in the same tent as Bonaparte and his staff, saw the general get up in the middle of the night and go over to a table on which maps were spread. He observed him pore over them, measuring distances with a compass, pace up and down, return to the table to study the maps again, belabouring the table with a small knife, and then step into the opening of the tent and stare for a long time into the distance.24
At dawn two divisions, under Lannes and Destaing, attacked the enemy line, while Murat’s cavalry broke through at its extremity and swept into its rear. The Turks had nowhere to retreat to, and most ran into the sea in an effort to reach their ships. Those that did not drown were taken prisoner. Within the space of an hour some 3,000 had been put out of action. Bonaparte then attacked the fortress. The initial assault was repulsed and the defenders rushed out to decapitate the wounded, whereupon the French surged forward and drove the entire Turkish army into the sea. The final toll was 10,000–12,000 Ottoman dead, mostly drowned, to 250 French dead and about a thousand wounded. ‘It is one of the finest battles I have seen,’ Bonaparte wrote to General Dugua.25
He had been at the forefront, directing the troops under a hail of bullets which killed several around him. When one of his aides was struck by a cannonball, ‘then, the whole of this army which only yesterday was insulting him during its long and painful march, and seemed for some time to have drifted away from him, uttered a cry of horror’, recalled one sergeant. ‘Everyone trembled for the life of this man who had become so precious to us, while, only a few moments earlier, he had been universally cursed.’ The sergeant’s feelings that day were by no means isolated. ‘The army had to believe, like him, in fate,’ wrote another soldier, ‘for it seemed as though he had it written on his forehead that cannonballs and grapeshot must respect his person.’ Even the obstreperous Kléber was impressed. After the battle he embraced Bonaparte, with the words, ‘General, you are as great as the world!’26
The great man spent the next ten days at Alexandria before returning to Cairo. He had much to ponder. The victory of Aboukir ensured that the Ottomans would not be menacing Egypt in a hurry, so he was safe to continue organising his colony. But developments in Europe raised alarming questions. Although he had been cut off from France since the destruction of the fleet, he was kept informed, by small French naval vessels which got through and by neutral shipping, which brought news and even despatches. The British ships of Sydney Smith’s squadron blockading the Egyptian coast also regularly communicated with the French on shore, passing them copies of English newspapers.
French gains in Italy had been almost wiped out, and the situation on the Rhine was precarious. It looked as though the coalition might succeed in invading France and toppling the Republic. Bonaparte could hold Egypt and await better days, but if there were to be a Bourbon restoration in France, his future would be bleak. The Republic was in peril, and it must be saved, both because he genuinely believed in it, albeit better governed, and because he had committed to it to such an extent that he would never have a future under any other system.
He had never meant to spend long in Egypt, and had been considering a return to France for some months. There is evidence to suggest that he colluded with Sydney Smith to make this possible, the Englishman seeing in it a chance to get him out of the way, which he supposed would make the French left behind more likely to capitulate. Either way, Bonaparte had already made arrangements for a couple of frigates and two smaller craft to be made ready.27
He was back in Cairo on 11 August. Two days later he attended the feast of the Prophet, giving every appearance of intending to continue governing the colony. On being informed that Sydney Smith’s squadron had sailed for Cyprus to take on supplies, he and those he had selected to go with him made their final preparations. Officially, he was going to sail down the Nile on a tour of inspection. On the evening of 17 August he called on Bellilotte to say goodbye. He had meant to take her with him, but changed his plans and she was to follow (when she did, she was captured by the British and did not return to France until after Bonaparte had taken power; he never saw her again, but would find her a husband and buy her a château).28
He sailed down the Nile to Menouf, where he took a parade of the 32nd Demi-Brigade. ‘Don’t look so sad,’ he said to them. ‘Before long we will all be drinking wine in France.’ Sergeant Vigo-Roussillon thought he looked preoccupied and anxious, while Lannes, Murat and others in his suite were beaming. The next day he was off, supposedly to inspect various French positions, and on 22 August he turned off his planned route and made for the coast at a point to the west of Alexandria.29
Two frigates, the Muiron and the Carrère, rode at anchor a short distance from the shore, along with two xebecs (small three-masted vessels), the Revanche and the Fortune. At midnight Bonaparte and his party embarked, jostling each other regardless of rank to pile into the longboats in their anxiety not to be left behind.30
The four vessels, under the command of Rear-Admiral Honoré Ganteaume, weighed anchor in the early hours. On Bonaparte’s orders they hugged the coast, sometimes sailing only at night. He was terrified of being captured by the British, and preferred the option of putting ashore anywhere and taking his chances. ‘Suppose I were taken by the English,’ he said to Monge. ‘I would be locked up in a hulk and in the eyes of France I would be nothing but a common deserter, a general who had left his post without authorisation.’ He had charges laid in the hold, and made Monge promise to blow up the ship if it were boarded by the British.31
The winds did not favour them so close inshore, and it took a full month to pass Malta, where they would veer north and make a dash for France. The company included Berthier, Bonaparte’s aides Marmont and Lavalette, Lannes, Murat, Bonaparte’s secretary Bourrienne, and several of the savants, including Monge, Berthollet and the art expert Vivant Denon. Bonaparte’s entourage also included a nineteen-year-old Mameluke named Roustam Raza, taken into slavery in the Caucasus as a boy of seven and presented to Bonaparte as a gift by Sheikh El-Bekri.
Although he railed at the incompetence and corruption of the Directory, Bonaparte did not discuss any political plans he may have been nurturing, and according to Vivant Denon he behaved like a passenger on a cruise, discussing scientific topics, playing cards (cheating shamelessly) and bantering with his friends. He avoided chess, at which he was surprisingly bad. In the evenings he entertained his companions with ghost stories, ‘a genre of story-telling in which he was highly skilled’, according to Lavalette.32
The longueurs of the crossing induced in Bonaparte reflection on the past as well as the future, and one evening in conversation with Monge he broached the subject of his paternity. He referred to the gossip surrounding the relationship between his mother and Marbeuf, saying that he would like to know for certain who his father was. The dates suggested it was indeed Carlo Maria Buonaparte, but he wondered where, in that case, he had got his military inclination and talents from. The uncertainty intrigued more than it nagged him, and he appeared even to derive a slight sense of superiority from it, as it placed him outside the common run.33
As they sailed north, past Lampedusa, Pantelleria and the west of Sicily, the danger from hostile ships became greater. Bonaparte ordered Ganteaume to hug the west coast of Sardinia, as he believed that in the worst case he could go ashore there and get away. They were low on water, and had to put in to Ajaccio on 30 September to tank up.
Bonaparte went ashore and revisited his home. Letizia had used the indemnity obtained from the French government as a good Republican patriot whose property had been sacked to enlarge and redecorate the family home to unprecedented grandeur. His sister Élisa’s husband Bacciochi was now commander of the citadel and a personage in the town. Joseph and Fesch had been buying land around Ajaccio, and Bonaparte could take his companions to stay at Les Milleli in comfort.34
Before leaving Corsica on the evening of 6 October he bought a longboat and hired a dozen strong oarsmen, to enable him to make a run for the coast in the event of an encounter with the Royal Navy. They did spot several British ships as they neared the French coast on the evening of 8 October, and Bonaparte ordered a change of course. They spent the night in a state of anxiety, fearing that they might have been spotted, but in the late morning of 9 October they sailed into the bay of Saint Raphael unhindered.
As soon as news got about that it was the commander of the Army of the Orient who had arrived, the cannon of the local fort fired a salute and people climbed into boats to row out to greet him, ignoring the rules on quarantine which required all ships arriving from foreign lands to lay up for forty days before anyone could land or come aboard. Since the rules had been broken, Bonaparte went ashore and, extricating himself from the enthusiastic attentions of the locals, by six that evening he was on the road to Paris.