Bonaparte returned victorious to Acre, and resumed the siege with a grim determination such as even he had not often felt. He had good cause. Another messenger from the Directory, traveling with comparative directness by way of Genoa, had arrived with despatches and newspapers dated as late as February. Two Austrian generals, Mack and Sachsen, had put themselves at the head of the Neapolitan army, and were about to march on Rome. An Austrian army division had already begun hostilities by entering the Grisons, thus violating the neutrality of the allied Helvetian Republic. Russia, Turkey, and Austria were in coalition: Russia would despatch troops to defend the Turkish capital and to aid in conquering Italy. Two new French armies were in the field. Moreau, the only first-rate general in France, was still under suspicion of complicity with Pichegru, and although permitted to accompany the Army of Italy as a volunteer, had been passed over in the choice of commanders. Jourdan, whose consistent democracy as a member of the Five Hundred had restored him to favor and rank, was to command the Army of the Danube; Joubert was to succeed Bonaparte in Italy. As for himself, he was left unhampered by instructions, but three alternatives had suggested themselves to the Directory—that he should either remain in Egypt and complete his colonial organization, or else press on to India and there supplant the English power, or, finally, march straight to Constantinople and attack the Russians. The tone of the despatches was one of anxiety. From earliest times Acre had been the key of Palestine; if Bonaparte should secure it, he would become the arbiter of his own destiny and of the world's. With Palestine, Egypt, and India at his feet, the tricontinental monarchy of his dreams was realizable; or else, in the same case, he could return to Paris with laurels unknown since the crusades, and put the copestone on the nearly completed structure of military domination in France and Europe. To the end of his days he imagined, or represented himself as imagining, that he would have altered the world's career by choosing the part of Oriental conqueror. We may call these notions dreams, or fancies, or visions, or what we will; they were sane conceptions in themselves, although it is not likely that England would have been conquered in the loss of India. She had been vigorous without it; she could have survived even that blow. For the moment the fall of Acre appeared to be an antecedent condition to either of the courses which were in the mind of Bonaparte.
But the siege was not prosperous. The assault and the defense during the attack in March had been alike desperate, and French valor had been futile. A fleet was now on its way from Constantinople to throw additional men and provisions into the town. At the same time Phélippeaux had constructed a new girdle of forts inside the walls, and had barricaded the streets. In the interval, however, the French had brought up some heavy guns from Jaffa, and were making preparations to renew operations. A breach was easily effected, and a few gallant fellows seized the tower which controlled the outworks and curtain; but the storming party was repulsed, and the men in the tower, though they held it for two days, were finally so reduced in numbers that they succumbed. This exasperated the French soldiers intensely. For the first two weeks of May there was scarcely a break in the succession of assaults. The fierce struggles which occurred in the breaches, on the barricades, even in the streets, to which the French once or twice penetrated, resulted in an appalling loss of life; but neither party quailed. Before long a pestilence broke out in the French camp, and the hospitals established at Jaffa and elsewhere were crowded with sick and dying.
On May seventh Kléber's division was called in for a conclusive onslaught, and in the face of a double fire from Sir Sidney Smith's cannon and the guns on the walls, both the first and second works were scaled and taken. All was in vain. Every house rained bullets from embrasures made for the purpose, and the entering columns retreated on the very threshold of their goal. Three days later a second equally desperate attempt likewise failed. In all, the siege lasted sixty-two days; the French assaulted forty times, and twenty-six sallies were made by the garrison; four thousand soldiers and four good generals from his splendid army were the sacrifice of human life which Bonaparte offered at Acre to his ambition. Finally, the squadron from Constantinople having safely arrived, news came that another was fitting out at Rhodes to retake Egypt itself. Nothing was left but to draw off, and on the seventeenth the siege was abandoned. The retreat began on the twentieth. At Jaffa Bonaparte passed through the hospital wards calling out in a loud voice: "The Turks will be here in a few hours. Whoever feels strong enough, let him rise and follow us."
As a votary at the shrine of science he believed, both then and later, in the lawfulness of suicide; and he now coldly suggested murder to his surgeon-general, hinting that an overdose of opium would end the sufferings of those plague-stricken men who would have to be abandoned. It was long believed that such a dose actually had been administered to the sixty or more who were left behind. But the conclusive evidence that the report was false is in the fact that when Sir Sidney Smith occupied Jaffa the sufferers were still alive. Napoleon to the last defended the suggestion as proper, though he falsely denied having made it himself, and untruthfully declared at St. Helena that he had delayed three days to protect the dying patients. With cynical good nature, he told the fine story of how the noble French army surgeon Desgenettes had rejected the criminal suggestion, replying that a physician's profession was to save, not to destroy, human life. The rebuke was particularly scathing because the heroic doctor, in spite of his conviction that the plague was contagious, had already inoculated himself with the disease in order to allay the panic of the terror-stricken soldiers. The army was reduced to eight thousand. After a nine days' march through the burning sands, the exhausted columns of the French reached Cairo. Such was the unparalleled vigor of the survivors that a few days' rest and proper food sufficed to recuperate their strength.
More wonderful still, they soon believed themselves to have returned with crowns of victory. Their crafty general explained that but for the terrible heats of Syria, the pest, and the expedition from Rhodes, which threatened their rear, they would have leveled the walls of Acre and destroyed Jezzar's palace, returning with standards and spoils to confirm France's dominion in the hearts and fears of the Egyptians. The volatile and sanguine soldiery, unwilling to admit defeat even to themselves, half believed this was true, and soon by an easy transition came to hold the mere suggestions as actual facts. Berthier was instructed that the native authorities at Cairo were to be so informed by an advance agent, General Boyer. The few important prisoners whose lives had been spared were to be conveyed, with due display of captured standards, to the citadel of Cairo, and there imprisoned with the public announcement "that a great number of such were coming." The litters of the wounded French officers Lannes, Duroc, Croizier, and Arrighi were to be quietly carried in on different days. In one emphatic paragraph are the instructions for Boyer: "He is to write, to say, to do everything which may secure a triumphal entry." So adroitly were truth and fiction intermingled and confused by Bonaparte and his agents, that in spite of various attempted risings the country as a whole remained quiet. Murad, however, who had fled to Nubia, and had there remained in concealment until informed of the proposed Turkish expedition, soon reappeared with the remnants of his cavalry, for the purpose of coöperating with the Sultan's forces. For weeks he came and went among the people so mysteriously that the French guards could never seize him. Bonaparte's superstition was awakened by the stealthy and uncanny movements of his enemy, and in July he gave vent to his nervous irritation in a request to one of his subordinates either to kill or worry to death the object of his dread. "Let him die one way or another, I shall be equally obliged," were his words.
CHAPTER VIII
Aboukir and the Great Desertion[9]
The Last of the Mamelukes — Aboukir — The News from Paris — An Adventurer's Decision — Preparations for Departure — His Plans Concealed — The Last Visit to Corsica — A Narrow Escape — Reception in France — Conjugal Estrangement.
1799
The Turkish army which had sailed from Rhodes numbered about twelve thousand men. The fleet which transported them appeared off Alexandria on July twentieth, and a landing was attempted. Repulsed by the forts, the ships drew off to Aboukir, where the effort was successful. The force was composed of infantry, and as nothing further could be done without cavalry, they began immediately to throw up breastworks, hoping to make a successful stand until the arrival of Murad. But this romantic personage, the last of the Mamelukes to enjoy undisputed sway, was able to come no farther than the Pyramids; the land at which he gazed from the summit of Cheops was never again to be his. Before he could reach his allies they had been overwhelmed, and before the evacuation of Egypt by its invaders he fell a victim to the plague. Mehemet Ali and the Albanians were to inherit his power. By July twenty-fourth the Turks had strongly fortified the peninsula of Aboukir with a double line of works. Not only did they hear nothing from Murad, but Ibrahim, who was expected from Syria, also failed them, and the lack of cavalry threw them on the defensive. But their presence, they hoped, would be sufficient to fan the rebellious spirit of the country, and they might maintain themselves until reinforcements should come by sea, or the belated cavalry arrive by land.