Feb. 17.
When Napoleon was engaged in this expedition, or speedily on his return, he learned that two Turkish armies had assembled, one at Rhodes, and the other in Syria, with the purpose of recovering Egypt. The daring genius, which always desired to anticipate the attempts of the enemy, determined him to march with a strong force for the occupation of Syria, and thus at once to alarm the Turks by the progress which he expected to make in that province, and to avoid being attacked in Egypt by two Turkish armies at the same time. His commencement was as successful as his enterprise was daring. A body of Mamelukes was dispersed by a night attack. The fort of El Arish, considered as one of the keys of Egypt, fell easily into his hands. Finally, at the head of about ten thousand men, he traversed the desert, so famous in biblical history, which separates Africa from Asia, and entered Palestine without much loss, but not without experiencing the privations to which the wanderers in those sandy wastes have been uniformly subjected. While the soldiers looked with fear on the howling wilderness which they saw around,[398] there was something in the extent and loneliness of the scene that corresponded with the swelling soul of Napoleon, and accommodated itself to his ideas of immense and boundless space. He was pleased with the flattery, which derived his Christian name from two Greek words, signifying the Lion of the Desert.
MASSACRE OF JAFFA.
Upon his entering the Holy Land, Buonaparte again drove before him a body of the Mamelukes, belonging to those who, after the battles of the Pyramids and of Salahieh, had retreated into Syria; and his army occupied without resistance Gaza, anciently a city of the Philistines, in which they found supplies of provisions. Jaffa, a celebrated city during the time of the Crusades, was the next object of attack. It was bravely assaulted, and fiercely defended. But the French valour and discipline prevailed—the place was carried by storm—three thousand Turks were put to the sword, and the town was abandoned to the license of the soldiery, which, by Buonaparte's own admission, never assumed a shape more frightful.[399] Such, it may be said, is the stern rule of war; and if so, most of our readers will acquiesce in the natural exclamation of the Maréchal de Montluc, "Certes, we soldiers stand in more need of the Divine mercy than other men, seeing that our profession compels us to command and to witness deeds of such cruelty." It was not, however, to the ordinary horrors attending the storm of a town, that the charge against Buonaparte is on this occasion limited. He is accused of having been guilty of an action of great injustice, as well as of especial barbarity. Concerning this we shall endeavour to state, stripped of colouring and exaggeration, first the charge, and then the reply, of Napoleon himself.
After the breach had been stormed, a large part of the garrison, estimated by Buonaparte himself at twelve hundred men, which Miot[400] raises to betwixt two and three thousand, and others exaggerate still more, remained on the defensive, and held out in the mosques, and a sort of citadel to which they had retreated, till, at length, despairing of succour, they surrendered their arms, and were in appearance admitted to quarter. Of this body, the Egyptians were carefully separated from the Turks, Maugrabins, and Arnaouts; and while the first were restored to liberty, and sent back to their country, these last were placed under a strong guard. Provisions were distributed to them, and they were permitted to go by detachments in quest of water. According to all appearance they were considered and treated as prisoners of war. This was on the 7th of March. On the 9th, two days afterwards, this body of prisoners were marched out of Jaffa, in the centre of a large square battalion, commanded by General Bon. Miot assures us, that he himself mounted his horse, accompanied the melancholy column, and witnessed the event. The Turks foresaw their fate, but used neither entreaties nor complaints to avert it. They marched on, silent and composed. Some of them, of higher rank, seemed to exhort the others to submit, like servants of the Prophet, to the decree, which, according to their belief, was written on their forehead. They were escorted to the sand-hills to the south east of Jaffa, divided there into small bodies, and put to death by musketry. The execution lasted a considerable time, and the wounded, as in the fusillades of the Revolution, were despatched with the bayonet. Their bodies were heaped together, and formed a pyramid which is still visible, consisting now of human bones as originally of bloody corpses.
The cruelty of this execution occasioned the fact itself to be doubted, though coming with strong evidence, and never denied by the French themselves. Napoleon, however, frankly admitted the truth of the statement both to Lord Ebrington and to Dr. O'Meara.[401] Well might the author of this cruelty write to the Directory, that the storming of Jaffa was marked by horrors which he had never elsewhere witnessed. Buonaparte's defence was, that the massacre was justified by the laws of war—that the head of his messenger had been cut off by the governor of Jaffa, when sent to summon him to surrender—that these Turks were a part of the garrison of El Arish, who had engaged not to serve against the French, and were found immediately afterwards defending Jaffa, in breach of the terms of their capitulation. They had incurred the doom of death, therefore, by the rules of war—Wellington, he said, would have, in his place, acted in the same manner.
To this plea the following obvious answers apply. If the Turkish governor had behaved like a barbarian, for which his country, and the religion which Napoleon meditated to embrace, might be some excuse, the French general had avenged himself by the storm and plunder of the town, with which his revenge ought, in all reason, to have been satisfied. If some of these unhappy Turks had broken their faith to Buonaparte, and were found again in the ranks which they had sworn to abandon, it could not, according to the most severe construction of the rules of war, authorise the dreadful retaliation of indiscriminate massacre upon a multitude of prisoners, without inquiring whether they had been all equally guilty. Lastly, and admitting them all to stand in the same degree of criminality, although their breach of faith might have entitled Buonaparte to refuse these men quarter while they had arms in their hands, that right was ended when the French general received their submission, and when they had given up the mean of defence, on condition of safety for life at least.[402]
This bloody deed must always remain a deep stain on the character of Napoleon. Yet we do not view it as the indulgence of an innate love of cruelty; for nothing in Buonaparte's history shows the existence of that vice, and there are many things which intimate his disposition to have been naturally humane. But he was ambitious, aimed at immense and gigantic undertakings, and easily learned to overlook the waste of human life, which the execution of his projects necessarily involved. He seems to have argued, not on the character of the action, but solely on the effect which it was to produce upon his own combinations. His army was small; it was his business to strike terror into his numerous enemies, and the measure to be adopted seemed capable of making a deep impression on all who should hear of it. Besides, these men, if dismissed, would immediately rejoin his enemies. He had experienced their courage, and to disarm them would have been almost an unavailing precaution, where their national weapon, the sabre, was so easily attained. To detain them prisoners would have required a stronger force than Napoleon could afford, would have added difficulty and delay to the movement of his troops, and tended to exhaust his supplies. That sort of necessity, therefore, which men fancy to themselves when they are unwilling to forego a favourite object for the sake of obeying a moral precept—that necessity which might be more properly termed a temptation difficult to be resisted—that necessity which has been called the tyrant's plea, was the cause of the massacre at Jaffa, and must remain its sole apology.
It might almost seem that Heaven set its vindictive brand upon this deed of butchery; for about the time it was committed the plague broke out in the army. Buonaparte, with a moral courage deserving as much praise as his late cruelty deserved reprobation, went into the hospitals in person, and while exposing himself, without hesitation, to the infection, diminished the terror of the disease in the opinion of the soldiers generally, and even of the patients themselves, who were thus enabled to keep up their spirits, and gained by doing so the fairest chance of recovery.[403]
SAINT JEAN D'ACRE