The War of Wars (41 page)

Napoleon meanwhile received intelligence that Murad Bey, the Emir al-Hadj, leader of the annual pilgrimage to Mecca and virtual ruler of Cairo, was assembling an army. Murad Bey was a huge, pale-skinned man sporting a shaggy golden beard. He had married the enormously wealthy widow of a former ruler of Egypt, Napiss, and ruled through the distribution of spoils and his own mixture of cruelty and courage. He lived in a huge palace at Giza with an enormous harem.

Napoleon ordered the army to march overnight on 12 July and instructed it to observe the strictest discipline as the only means of defeating the enemy. The following morning the French saw the Mameluke cavalry drawn up in formation westwards from the Nile, barring their path. Desvernois recalled:

In the background, the desert under the blue sky; before us, the beautiful Arabian horses, richly harnessed, snorting, neighing, prancing gracefully and lightly under their martial riders, who are covered with dazzling arms, inlaid with gold and precious stones. Their costumes are brilliantly colourful; their turbans are surmounted by aigret feathers, and some wear gilded helmets. They are armed with sabres, lances, maces, spears, rifles, battle axes, and daggers, and each has three pairs of pistols . . . This spectacle produced a vivid impression on our soldiers by its novelty and richness. From that moment on, their thoughts were set on booty.

The Mamelukes had trained their horses to perfection to canter and stop at a moment’s notice. They carried carbines which, once fired,
would be slid under their shoulders; they then fired their pistols. They threw javelins and for hand-to-hand fighting wielded scimitars which could split a man’s head in half. They were large, handsome Caucasians. They attacked magnificently, but found themselves faced by French infantry squares which sent forth deafening, disciplined volleys of shot as they approached. The French drove the Mameluke horsemen off with no losses of their own.

On the Nile itself, two rival flotillas exchanged 1,500 rounds of artillery in a fierce firefight and the seven Mameluke Greek-manned gunboats were winning until four French gunboats succeeded in blowing up the Mameluke flagship. The victorious French troops now resumed their march towards Cairo, looting mud villages and slaughtering their inhabitants as they went. In one village alone, 900 men, women and children are believed to have perished. The officers could do nothing: the men were crazed with thirst, weariness and bloodlust.

On 21 July the French found that the main Mameluke army was drawn up waiting for them in front of Cairo, with the Great Pyramids in the distance. Napoleon ordered his men to draw up into the familiar squares and declared theatrically: ‘Soldiers, forty centuries look down on you!’ The Battle of the Pyramids has been described as one of Napoleon’s greatest victories. It was hardly that, although the Mamelukes did have the advantage of fighting on their own chosen terrain.

The French had overwhelming superiority of firepower and numbers – some 25,000 men compared to 6,000 Mameluke cavalry and perhaps 15,000 infantry. (Napoleon himself wildly exaggerated the Mameluke numbers at 78,000 men, which exceeded the total known to be in all of Egypt.) The Mameluke warrior style was, as before, no match for modern French tactics and arms. Lieutenant Vertray described the scene:

General Reynier gave the order, ‘Form your ranks’ and, in an instant, we had formed our square, ten men deep, to absorb the shock. This manoeuvre was executed with truly extraordinary precision and sang-froid . . . The soldiers fired with such coolness
that not a single cartridge was wasted, waiting until the very instant when the horsemen were about to break our square. The number of corpses surrounding our square soon was considerable, and the clothes of the dead and wounded Mamelukes were burning like tinder . . . The blazing wads of our muskets penetrated at the same time as our bullets through their rich uniforms, which were embroidered with gold and silver and floated as lightly as gauze. Nevertheless the Mamelukes fought bravely and hopelessly with unbelievable ferocity for an hour.

Meanwhile French artillery was shelling the Mameluke infantry with howitzers in their rear. Seeing this, Murad Bey ordered a retreat towards the Pyramids. Their defensive fortifications were then taken amidst much carnage, the defenders fleeing to the Nile, where hundreds were drowned. It was a biblical scene. Another force of Mamelukes on the east bank of the Nile managed to reach Cairo and gather up some of their possessions before fleeing into the Sinai desert. Around 1,200 had been killed against French losses of 250 dead and seventy wounded.

It had been little short of a massacre, and only the Mamelukes’ extraordinary courage had preserved their honour and inflicted significant losses on the French. Napoleon had seized his chance with characteristically brutal efficiency. It was certainly no great feat of arms, simply a typical colonial victory of superior European weaponry.

That night some 300 Mameluke sailing vessels, set alight by their own owners to stop them falling into French hands, lent the desert a vivid glow, while French soldiers frantically tried to put the flames out from the riverbank to salvage the valuables aboard. Desvernois found on one cavalryman he had killed on land rich booty – a ‘canary-yellow turban made of cashmere . . . more than five hundred gold pieces sewn into his skull cap . . . a magnificent sabre, its sheath and pommel inlaid with gold; its handle was a rhinoceros horn, and the blade was black Damascus steel.’

On 22 July Napoleon entered Cairo, contemptuously remarking that the 300,000 inhabitants were ‘the world’s ugliest rabble’. He was not alone in being unimpressed. Major Detroye commented viciously:

Once you enter Cairo, what do you find? Narrow, unpaved, and dirty streets, dark houses that are falling to pieces, public buildings that look like dungeons, shops that look like stables, an atmosphere redolent of dust and garbage, blind men, half-blind men, bearded men, people dressed in rags, pressed together in the streets or squatting, smoking their pipes, like monkeys at the entrance of their cave; a few women of the people . . . hideous, disgusting, hiding their fleshless faces under stinking rags and displaying their pendulous breasts through their torn gowns; yellow, skinny children covered with suppuration, devoured by flies; an unbearable stench, due to the dirt in the houses, the dust in the air, and the smell of food being fried in bad oil in the unventilated bazaars.

When you have finished sight-seeing, you return to your house. No comfort, not a single convenience. Flies, mosquitoes, a thousand insects are waiting to take possession of you during the night. Bathed in sweat, exhausted, you spend the hours devoted to rest itching and breaking out in boils. You rise in the morning, unutterably sick, bleary-eyed, queasy in the stomach, with a bad taste in your mouth, your body covered with pimples, or rather ulcers. Another day begins, the exact copy of the preceding one.

Napoleon occupied a superb, well-equipped palace but was keenly aware of the need to provide for his force of colonialists. He sent off a letter to France demanding: ‘a troupe of actors; a troupe of ballerinas; at least three or four puppeteers, for the common people; about a hundred French-women; the wives of all those serving in this country; twenty surgeons, thirty pharmacists, ten physicians; foundry workers; liqueur manufacturers and distillers; about fifty gardeners and their families, and seeds of every variety of vegetable; . . . 300,000 reels of blue and scarlet cloth; soap and oil.’ Nothing ever arrived, for soon he was to be entirely cut off from the mother country. Napoleon could have little inkling that he was about to experience the greatest disaster of his life so far, and the third most humiliating experience of his entire career.

At first it seemed that Horatio Nelson was the one who had been made to look a fool: his roller-coaster career appeared about to plunge again as it became apparent that the French fleet had completely eluded him at the beginning of July – hence his condition of manic nervous exhaustion. Would his triumph at St Vincent and bravery at Tenerife outweigh the blow to his reputation as the man who let the French fleet slip through his fingers?

The British press, fickle as ever, was beginning to turn.
The Times
commented that it was extraordinary that a fleet of 200 vessels should have eluded Nelson for so long. The
Morning Chronicle
said that a more experienced commander should have been chosen, perhaps St Vincent himself. The
Herald
agreed: ‘Perhaps it may not be amiss to employ the gallantry of Admiral Nelson under the good fortune of others, until his turn comes around.’

Nelson himself, after his frenzied chase, now lapsed into inexplicable inertia while his ships were revictualled at Syracuse. It was surely his duty to resume the chase as quickly as possible, to find out whether the French fleet had indeed gone west or remained in the eastern Mediterranean rather than dawdle for three weeks at anchor. His newly acquired golden touch seemed to have faded. Nelson did not leave Syracuse until 23 July to resume his search, travelling eastwards again, directly towards the Peloponnese. Five days later he at last heard reliable news that the French fleet was at Alexandria and sailed south.

Just over three days later, at a quarter to three on the fateful afternoon of 1 August, a lookout from the masthead of the
Zealous
shouted that he had spotted a huge line of topmasts against the sky. Captain Howard signalled the news to Nelson in his flagship, the
Vanguard
. Instantly he threw off his depression. He summoned his officers to dinner and declared that the following morning he would either be in the House of Lords or Westminster Abbey.

He ordered his captains to proceed under full sail with a favourable following wind to attack the French fleet. He later recalled:

When I saw them [the French ships] I could not help popping my head every now and then out of the window (although I had a damned toothache) and once, as I was observing their position, I heard two seamen, quartered at a gun near me, talking, and one said to the other, ‘Damn them, look at them. There they are, Jack, if we don’t beat them, they will beat us.’ I knew what stuff I had under me so I went into the attack with a few ships only, perfectly sure that the others would follow me, although it was nearly dark and they might have had every cause for not doing it, yet they all in the course of two hours found a hole to poke in at.

Nelson had long discussed with his captains the tactics they should follow if they found the French fleet at anchor and therefore unable to flee: to attack if possible on both sides and engage only half the enemy line first, so as to bring overwhelming firepower to bear against each ship. It was a variation on Admiral Howe’s tactics on the Glorious First of June, to attack when least expected, engage only part of the enemy, cut that part off and attack. The old dignified tactic of drawing up a parallel line-of-battle and engaging the enemy ship by ship was for Nelson as outdated as the frontal engagement in land war was for Napoleon. Nelson’s second brilliant improvisation was simply that of going on the attack as soon as the French fleet had been spotted, even though this would inevitably mean fighting most of the battle at night. What followed was one of the most overwhelming and decisive naval victories in history, and also one of the bloodiest, with immediate and huge repercussions for the war as a whole.

There is a case for saying Napoleon was not primarily responsible for the impending debacle. Once the Directory had made up their minds to send the expedition to Egypt, it was inevitable that French ships and transports would be exposed to the possibility of sea attack by the British. This was surely a risk inherent in the whole project, and nothing Napoleon could have done would have entirely guaranteed its safety. But he also explicitly failed to give the French Admiral Brueys orders to sail for the safe port of Corfu. Instead he asked the admiral to decide which of two anchorages was safer – the port of Alexandria or Aboukir Bay to the east. Brueys was reluctant to be trapped in Alexandria harbour which could be blockaded and whose entrance was hard to navigate, and preferred Aboukir Bay, where he had a good anchorage and room to manoeuvre.

Admiral Brueys had had three weeks at Aboukir Bay to prepare his fleet for an attack. He had planned to link his ships together by cables and to keep them inshore so that the enemy could not slip between them and the coastline. He also intended to keep them close enough to the battery of mortars he had installed on Aboukir Island to make it suicidal for any ship to run the gauntlet between his fleet and the shore. Aboukir Island was a small outcrop just off Fort Aboukir, at the point of the crescent-shaped bay that ended with the mouth of the Nile. Both the island and the shore were protected by shoals and waters deemed too shallow for men of war to pass.

However Brueys had neglected to put the cables in place; nor had he bunched his ships close together, but spread them out over more than a mile; and in order to give them space to swing at anchor – traditionally about 200 yards was allowed between ship and anchor – had allowed for a narrow channel of deep water on the shore side of the ships. Worse, the ships’ guns were all trained out to sea; most of the ones on the shore side were not even in place and the presence of stores there made it difficult to reposition them quickly.

Many of the crewmen, perhaps a third, were ashore, digging wells and gathering provisions when the British fleet was sighted. For this at least Brueys cannot be faulted: he promptly signalled for them to return aboard, but only a fraction did. Brueys, a cautious man, expected the British attack to be mounted the following day, when Nelson’s fleet
had had time to rest and get into position and Brueys could make his own dispositions at leisure.

The French comforted themselves in the knowledge that they enjoyed considerable superiority (Brueys underestimated the size of the British fleet). They had a 120-gun flagship,
L’Orient
, three 80-gun ships of the line, nine 74-gunners, four frigates and several gunboats. The British had twelve 74-gun ships of the line and a 50-gunner. The French disposed of some 200 more guns than the British. There were some 11,200 sailors aboard the French ships compared to 7,400 British.