Murat was sent forward with a thousand infantry, one light piece of artillery, and a detachment of dragoons, at two o'clock in the morning. He had orders to march until he came to the Jordan, where he was to take possession of Jacob's Bridge, to prevent the retreat of the Turkish army. He had more than thirty miles to make.
Bonaparte started at three in the morning, taking every man with him who was not absolutely needed to keep the enemy within their walls. He bivouacked on the heights of Safarie at daybreak, and distributed bread, water and brandy to his men. He had been forced to take the longest road, because his artillery and wagons could not follow him along the banks of the Kishon. He took up his march again at nine o'clock in the morning, and at ten he reached the foot of Mount Tabor.
There, about nine miles away, on the vast plain of Esdrelon, he saw Kléber's division, scarcely twenty-five hundred strong, face to face with the entire body of the enemy's army, which enveloped it on all sides, and where it looked like a black patch surrounded by a wall of fire.
It was being attacked by more than twenty thousand cavalry, which twisted now like an avalanche, now like a whirlwind. Never had these men, who had seen so many things, been confronted with such a horde of cavalry, charging and galloping around them. And yet each soldier, standing foot to foot with his neighbor, preserved the terrible calmness which could alone insure his safety, received the Turks at the end of his rifle, and fired only when he was sure of his man; stabbing the horses with his bayonet when they came too near, but reserving his bullets for their riders.
Each man had received fifty cartridges, but at eleven in the morning they were obliged to make a fresh distribution of fifty more. They had fired a hundred thousand bullets; they had made a breastwork of dead horses and men around themselves; and this horrible heap, this bleeding wall, sheltered them like a rampart.
This was what Bonaparte and his men saw when they rounded Mount Tabor. At this sight enthusiastic shouts rang down the line: "To the enemy! To the enemy!"
But Bonaparte shouted, "Halt!" He made them take a quarter of an hour's rest. He knew that Kléber could hold out for hours yet if necessary, and he wished the day's work to be well done. Then he formed his six thousand men into two squares of three thousand men each, and distributed them in such wise as to inclose the whole savage horde of cavalry and infantry in a triangle of steel and fire.
The combatants were in such deadly earnest that—like the Romans and Carthaginians, who, during the battle of Trasimene did not feel the earthquake which overthrew twenty-two cities—neither the Turks nor the French perceived the advance of the two armed bodies, in whose trains thunder was rolling, as yet mute, but with its glistening weapons flashing in the sunlight, forerunners of the storm which was about to burst.
Suddenly they heard a single cannon-shot. This was the signal agreed upon to warn Kléber of Bonaparte's approach. The three squares were now not more than three miles apart, and their combined fire was about to be directed upon a struggling mass of twenty-five thousand men. The fire burst forth from all three sides at once.
The Mamelukes and Janissaries, in short all the cavalry, turned this way and that, not knowing how to escape from the furnace, while the ten thousand infantry, ignorant of all the art and science of war, broke their ranks and hurled themselves upon all three lines of fire.