Napoleon in Egypt (52 page)

But there were setbacks too. Egypt had long suffered from regular outbreaks of bubonic plague, although in a far less virulent form than the great plague epidemics which had swept Europe. Even so, the Egyptian version was highly contagious and largely fatal, causing considerable concern to the physician-in-chief General Desgenettes and his surgeon-in-chief General Larrey. In an attempt to regulate the spread of the disease, quarantine stations were set up at the Mediterranean ports, as well as at Cairo. All cases amongst the Egyptian population now had to be reported to the French medical authorities at once, on pain of serious punishment.

The plague appeared to strike on a seasonal basis, usually appearing at the onset of winter, and despite all the French army’s precautions the last month of 1798 saw the usual outbreak in Alexandria, with another minor outbreak at Damietta. Inevitably, it was not long before the contagion spread to the French garrisons in these cities. It was not yet known that bubonic plague was spread by fleas from infected rats, but in the opinion of Desgenettes and his colleagues lack of contact with the diseased, as well as increased hygiene, were probably the best preventative measures. Napoleon sent orders to General Marchmont in Alexandria:

Put the battalion of the 85th out on the coast at Marabout, you can easily provision them by sea. . . . As for the unfortunate half-brigade of Light Infantry, make them strip off until they are completely naked, then make them take a good bath in the sea, so that they can rub themselves down from head to foot, and make them thoroughly wash out their uniforms. And watch out that they keep themselves clean. They are to have no more parades, no more mounting guard outside the camp. Make them dig a large ditch filled with quicklime where they can throw in the dead.
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Despite such preventative measures Private Millet, who was based at Damietta, caught the disease. He described its effect in his memoirs: “This sickness begins with a hot fever, and is followed by a severe headache accompanied by a bubo or gland, the size of an egg, which appears in the groin or another joint in one of the limbs. When that breaks out, the patient is as good as lost to the land of the living. If he lasts four days, there’s real hope for him, but that rarely happens.”
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Millet’s son remembered the tale his father had told him about falling ill with the plague in Egypt: “The doctors discussed in his presence whether it was worth piercing his bubo before it suppurated; but believing my father was a fatal case they decided not to attempt this operation on him. When they had gone, Millet took out his pocket knife and used it to make the incision on himself which the doctors had not dared to make.”
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As a result, he survived to tell the tale.

Others were not so lucky. By early February 1799 some 200 French soldiers had died of the plague. Not unnaturally, an atmosphere of fear prevailed in the wards, amongst medical staff as well as patients. When some staff began refusing to treat plague patients, Napoleon issued an order that all personnel who avoided treating soldiers suffering from “contagious illness” were to be arrested, brought before a military tribunal, and dealt with under the articles concerning those who had fled in the face of the enemy. Indicatively, he refers only to “contagious illness”: owing to the fear induced by the very mention of bubonic plague, this term was strictly avoided in all bulletins. Word was put out that this was not the plague, only a lesser fever which produced similar buboes. When a surgeon called Boyer refused to treat such patients, Napoleon was furious and decided to make an example of him, issuing the following order on January 8, 1799:

Citizen Boyer, surgeon attached to the hospital at Alexandria, has been so cowardly as to refuse to treat the wounded who have been in contact with sick people supposed to have caught a contagious disease. He is unworthy of being a French citizen. He will be dressed in women’s clothing and paraded through the streets of Alexandria on a donkey, with a placard hung around his neck proclaiming “Unworthy to be a French citizen, he is afraid to die.” After that he will be kept in prison and sent back to France on the first boat.
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In the event, Boyer proved innocent of this dereliction of duty. Nonetheless news spread of his intended punishment, which at least one woman recognized as nothing less than an insult to womanhood. Desgenettes recalled in his memoirs how Madame Tempié, the twenty-seven-year-old wife of a frigate captain,
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“a woman of some beauty, stylish dress and forceful character, took great offense at the petticoats Boyer had been sentenced to wear as a sign of cowardice, and passionately declared that she would fight against Napoleon in a duel, if he would allow it, and that she would show him, pistol in hand, that she was not afraid, even of him.”
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Napoleon chose to ignore this challenge. His limited leisure time was already devoted to the passionate attentions of another woman—his new mistress, Pauline Fourès.

Although by early 1799 Napoleon’s rule extended over most of Egypt, the external situation remained far from clear. Even after reading the sultan’s
firman
, which had played such a significant part in the Cairo uprising, Napoleon had clung to the belief that war against the Porte was not inevitable; he even felt that the threat closer at hand from Djezzar in Acre could still be avoided. Although he knew that Djezzar was harboring Ibrahim Bey, and he had received credible intelligence reports that he was assembling an army of 60,000 men, Napoleon had still been willing to write to him, “I do not wish to make war with you if you are not my enemy, but it is time that you explained yourself.”
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He had felt instinctively that it was Djezzar who was the aggressor, not the Porte, an opinion that had been confirmed when news reached him that Djezzar had simply beheaded the most recent French messenger. Djezzar was evidently a loose cannon, with no knowledge of diplomacy as it was practiced by a civilized government such as the Porte. (Napoleon had been unaware that the French representative in Constantinople had been flung into the dungeons.) Even when Napoleon had learned that Britain and Russia had signed a treaty with the Porte, forming an alliance against France, he had not seen this as final. Beauchamp had been dispatched to Constantinople with an appeasing note, whilst Napoleon had placed his faith in Talleyrand already being there, and rescuing the situation. But since then a decisive incident had taken place. Napoleon recalled in his memoirs how in January 1799, whilst on his way back from his brief expedition to Suez:

at four in the afternoon [Napoleon and his armed escort] reached the wells of Saba-Byat in the middle of the desert. The heat was extreme, there was hardly any water at the wells and what little there was tasted brackish. Whilst sharing out this foul water amongst themselves, they noticed a warrior approaching on a camel; only when he came closer did he notice the French troops at the well, and tried to make off, but too late. He was found to be a messenger taking dispatches from Ibrahim Bey and Djezzar to the Mamelukes in Upper Egypt. He brought news that hostilities had begun on the Syrian frontier and that the army of Djezzar had entered Egyptian territory, that his advance guard had already occupied the oasis of El Arish and that they were reinforcing the fort.
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Napoleon knew that he now had no alternative but to confront Djezzar’s forces. On his way back to Cairo he reached his decision: instead of resisting Djezzar’s intrusions into Egypt, he would mount a full-scale campaign into Syria which would eliminate him once and for all.

Even before setting out for Suez, Napoleon had taken the precaution of securing Egypt’s northeastern border by dispatching General Lagrange to establish a strong frontier post at Katia (Qatiya), on the coastal caravan route from Syria. This was sixty miles from the distant outpost of El-Arish, which was itself some thirty miles from what was generally regarded as the desert border with Syria.

On January 17 Lagrange had reported that Katia was fully fortified, and Napoleon decided that this should be the rendezvous for all the units being assembled for his “Syrian campaign.” A measure of the scale and seriousness of this campaign can be judged from the sheer size of this force, which seems to have consisted of more than half the active units he had in Lower Egypt, leaving less than 10,000 men to guard Cairo, Alexandria and the entire delta region. Napoleon’s force for his Syrian campaign consisted of four infantry divisions, comprising in all nearly 10,000 men, commanded by the finest field generals remaining at his disposal, namely Kléber, Bon, Lannes and Reynier. Accompanying these were another 3,000 soldiers, including 1,400 artillery, 800 cavalry, and almost 100 men of the newly formed camel corps, the celebrated “
régiment des dromadaires.
”

Camels were also to be used for the transporting of supplies across the difficult terrain, but it was soon realized that the heavy siege artillery which would be needed for breaking down the walls of Acre, Djezzar’s stronghold some hundred miles up the coast to the north, could not be transported across such terrain. Instead this was loaded onto a flotilla at Damietta, whence it would be shipped up the coast as required.

In the midst of these preparations, Napoleon received some important news. As he noted on February 5, “A trading ship out of Ragusa [Dubrovnik] carrying a cargo of wine has arrived at Alexandria bringing letters for me from Genoa and Ancona; this is the first news to arrive here from Europe for eight months.”
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In a dispatch to Kléber, he outlined the contents of these letters. First, just two courier ships from Egypt had managed to get through to France carrying news of the Egyptian expedition, “
La Marguerite
, sent after the taking of Alexandria, and
La Petite-Cesalpine
, sent from Rosetta a month after the naval battle at Aboukir.” Concerning France’s relations with Turkey, “Descorches [the new French ambassador] is on his way to Constantinople. [Meanwhile] at the beginning of November the Turkish ambassador in France was going about his business as usual.” With regard to the British naval blockade: the allied Spanish fleet of twenty-one ships which might have been able to relieve the blockade was itself under blockade by a British squadron in its home port. As for the situation in France: “Measures have been taken to recruit for the army: it appears that all young men of eighteen are being requisitioned into the forces as conscripts. Internal affairs remain in absolutely the same state as when we departed. . . . [At the same time] the European nations are arming on all sides; yet at the moment they are doing no more than watch each other.”

However, the Ragusan ship had also been carrying a French merchant called Hamelin, who was immediately sent to Cairo, where Napoleon questioned him closely. It quickly became apparent that the comparatively reassuring picture Napoleon had received in his dispatches from France was now out of date. The situation had taken a serious turn: war had broken out in Italy, and the Neapolitans had taken Rome from the French; the Porte had formally declared war on France, and formed an alliance with Russia; and an outbreak of hostilities across Europe appeared likely in the near future, with the probability that a powerful alliance would line up against France.

Napoleon could no longer pretend, even to himself, that the Porte could be won over to the French cause. In fact, he had already been made aware of some measures they had taken: as early as mid-November it had been intimated to Lieutenant Guibert at his meeting off Alexandria with the aged Turkish naval commander Hassan Bey that the Turks were assembling a fleet at Rhodes, while news reaching Cairo from Djezzar had suggested that forces were gathering in Syria prior to an invasion. These could no longer be regarded as separate and uncertain pieces of intelligence: Ottoman forces appeared to be planning a two-pronged attack.

What exactly Napoleon made of this latest news from Hamelin is uncertain. The indications are highly contradictory, yet these conflicts seem to have echoed those taking place in Napoleon’s mind. According to his secretary Bourrienne, “The day before he left [on the Syrian campaign] he said that if in the course of March he received positive news of France being at war with a European coalition, he would return.”
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On the other hand, this news of international events seems to have woken Napoleon’s latent megalomania. In his memoirs he described his aims for the campaign, and it is worth quoting from these truly astonishing plans at some length:

Napoleon resolved to take the offensive, to lead his forces across the desert, to defeat the army of Syria . . . to seize all the stores and all necessary equipment from El Arish, Gaza, Jaffa and Acre, to arm the Christians of Syria, to recruit the Druze and the Maronite Christians of Lebanon,
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and then to take stock of the situation. He hoped that on hearing the news that Acre had fallen to the French, the Mamelukes and the Egyptian Arabs . . . would join forces with him; that by June he would be master of Damascus and Aleppo, and that his advanced guard would be at Mount Taurus [i.e., having penetrated well into southeastern Turkey]. By now he would have under his immediate command 26,000 French, 6,000 Mamelukes and Arab cavalry from Egypt, 18,000 Druze, Maronites and other Syrian troops; that Desaix would be in Egypt ready to reinforce him, leading 20,000 men, of whom 10,000 would be French and 10,000 recruited black slaves under French officers and NCOs. In this situation Napoleon would be in a position to dictate to the Porte, to force them to make peace, and oblige them to consent to his march on India. If fortune favored these projects, he could still arrive at the Indus by March 1800 with more than 40,000 men.
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