On January 25, 1799 he did write to Britain’s foremost enemy in India, Tipu Sahib, announcing his imminent ‘arrival on the shores of the Red Sea with a numerous and invincible army, animated with the desire of delivering you from the iron yoke of England’. A British cruiser intercepted the letter, and Tipu was killed in the capture of his capital, Seringapatam, by the young and highly impressive British Lieutenant-General Sir Arthur Wellesley that May. Napoleon’s intention was probably simply to spread disinformation, as he knew his letters were falling into enemy hands.
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As the troops marched out of Cairo they sang the stirring 1794 revolutionary anthem ‘Le Chant du Départ’, which thereafter became a Bonapartist anthem. At a council of war the only general openly to oppose the invasion was General Joseph Lagrange, who pointed out that Acre was 300 miles away through hostile desert and past several well-defended cities which, if captured, would require garrisoning by detachments from the relatively small force that Napoleon proposed to take. He suggested that it would be better to await an attack inside Egypt, forcing the enemy to cross the Sinai instead of taking the battle onto their terrain. Yet with the amphibious assault expected in June, Napoleon felt he didn’t have the luxury of time; he needed to cross the desert, defeat Jezzar and then re-cross it before it became impassable in the summer.
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His use of a dromedary camel corps, fast-firing drill by alternating ranks, and pieux (hooked stakes for swiftly erected palisades) were to be retained by French colonial armies up to the Great War.
‘We have crossed seventy leagues [over 170 miles] of desert which is exceedingly fatiguing,’ he wrote to Desaix on the journey; ‘we had brackish water and often none at all. We ate dogs, donkeys and camels.’ Later they also ate monkeys.
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‘I constantly read Genesis when visiting the places it describes and was amazed beyond measure that they were still exactly as Moses had described them.’
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These men and their senior agas (officers) swore on the Koran ‘that neither they nor their troops will ever serve in Jezzar’s army and they will not return to Syria for a year, counting from this day’.10 Napoleon therefore agreed to allow them to keep their weapons and go back home, although he broke his agreement with the Mamluk contingent by disarming them. Before the second half of the twentieth century, and especially in the Middle East, the rules of war were simple, harsh and essentially unchanging; to give one’s word and then break it was generally recognized as a capital offence.
On February 25, Napoleon chased the Mamluks out of Gaza City, capturing large amounts of ammunition, six cannon and 200,000 rations of biscuit. ‘The lemon trees, the olive groves, the ruggedness of the terrain look exactly like the countryside of the Languedoc,’ he told Desaix, ‘it is like being near Béziers.’
On March 1 he learned from the Capuchin monks at Ramleh that the El-Arish garrison had passed through on its way to Jaffa 10 miles away, ‘saying they did not intend to abide by the articles of capitulation, which we had been the first to break when we disarmed them’.
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‘Bonaparte approached, with a few others, to within a hundred yards,’ recalled Doguereau of Jaffa’s city walls. ‘As we turned back, we were observed. One of the cannonballs fired at us by the enemy fell very close to the commanding general, who was showered with earth.’
On March 6 the defenders made a sortie, which allowed Doguereau to notice how heterogeneous the Ottoman army was: ‘There were Maghrebians, Albanians, Kurds, Anatolians, Caramaneniens, Damascenes, Alepese and Negroes from Takrour [Senegal],’ he wrote. ‘They were hurled back.’
At dawn on the next day, Napoleon wrote the governor of Jaffa a polite letter calling on him to surrender, saying that his ‘heart is moved by the evil that will fall upon the whole city if it subjects itself to this assault’. The governor stupidly replied by displaying the head of Napoleon’s messenger on the walls, so Napoleon ordered the walls to be breached and by 5 p.m. thousands of thirsty and angry Frenchmen were inside. ‘The sights were terrible,’ wrote one savant, ‘the sound of shots, shrieks of women and fathers, piles of bodies, a daughter being raped on the cadaver of her mother, the smell of blood, the groans of the wounded, the shouts of victors quarrelling about loot.’ The French finally rested, ‘sated by blood and gold, on top of a heap of dead’.
Reporting to the Directory, Napoleon admitted that ‘twenty-four hours was handed over to pillage and all the horrors of war, which never appeared to me so hideous’.16 He added, wholly prematurely, that as a result of the victories of El-Arish, Gaza and Jaffa, ‘The Republican army is master of Palestine.’ Sixty Frenchmen had been killed and 150 wounded at Jaffa; the numbers of enemy soldiers and civilians killed are unknown.*
Napoleon’s treatment of the prisoners captured at Jaffa, of whom some, though not all, were men who had given their word at El-Arish and then broken it, was extremely harsh. On March 9 and 10, thousands of them were taken to the beach about a mile south of Jaffa by men of Bon’s division and massacred in cold blood.
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Louis-André Peyrusse, a senior quartermaster, described to his mother what happened next:
About three thousand men deposited their arms and were led right away to the camp by order of the general-in-chief. They split up the Egyptians, Mahgrebians and the Turks. The Mahgrebians were all led the next day to the seaside and two battalions started to shoot them. They had no other recourse to save themselves but to throw themselves in the sea. They could shoot them there and in a moment the sea was dyed with blood and covered with corpses. A few had the chance to save themselves on rocks; they sent soldiers in boats to finish them off. We left a detachment on the seaside and our perfidy attracted a few of them who were mercilessly massacred … We were recommended not to use powder and we had the ferocity to kill them with bayonets … This example will teach our enemies not to trust the French, and sooner or later the blood of these three thousand victims will revisit us.
He was right; when El-Aft on the banks of the Nile was abandoned by the French in May 1801, the Turks beheaded every Frenchman unable to flee, and when the British present remonstrated, they ‘answered by indignant exclamations of “Jaffa! Jaffa!”
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‘Well, I had a right … They killed my messenger, cut off his head, and put it on a pike … there were not provisions enough for French and Turks — one of them must go to the wall. I did not hesitate.’
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In an all-too-rare example of poetic justice in history, the French caught the plague off Jaffa’s inhabitants whom they had raped and pillaged. With a mortality rate of 92 per cent for sufferers, the appearance of its buboes on the body was akin to a death sentence. Captain Charles François, a veteran of Kléber’s division, noted in his journal that after the sack of Jaffa ‘soldiers who had the plague were right away covered with buboes in the groin, in the armpits and on the neck. In less than twenty-four hours the body became black as well as the teeth and a burning fever killed anyone who was affected by this terrible disease.’
Of all the various types of plague infecting the Middle East at the time, this, la peste, was one of the worst, and Napoleon ordered the Armenian Monastery hospital on the seafront of Old Jaffa — where it still is today — to be turned into a quarantine station. On March 11 Napoleon visited it along with Desgenettes, and there according to Jean-Pierre Daure, an officer in the pay commissariat, he ‘picked up and carried a plague victim who was lying across a doorway. This action scared us a lot because the sick man’s clothes were covered with foam and disgusting evacuations of abscessed buboes.’
Napoleon spoke to the sick, comforted them and raised their morale; the incident was immortalized in 1804 in Antoine-Jean Gros’ painting Bonaparte Visiting the Plague House at Jaffa. Napoleon said, ‘As general-in-chief he found it a necessary part of his duty to endeavour to give them confidence and reanimate them, by visiting frequently, himself, the plague hospital, and talking to, and cheering, the different patients in it. He said he caught the disorder himself, but recovered again quickly.’
Napoleon believed la peste to be susceptible to willpower, telling someone years later that ‘Those who kept up their spirits, and did not give way to the idea that they must die … generally recovered; but those who desponded almost invariably fell a sacrifice to the disorder.’
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Defending the port were about 4,000 Afghans, Albanians and Moors, Jezzar’s efficient Jewish chief-of-staff, Haim Farhi — who had lost a nose, ear and eye to his master over the years — and now Commodore Smith with two hundred Royal Navy seamen and marines, and the talented Phélippeaux.
They added sloping glacis defences, reinforcing the bases of the walls at an angle, and constructed ramps to get cannon up onto the walls (which had been impossible at Jaffa as the walls were too weak). Some of these defences can still be seen today, along with some naval cannon positioned by Smith.
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Three days later, Napoleon was forced to watch in horror from the cliffs above Haifa as his flotilla of nine vessels under Commodore Pierre-Jean Standelet, carrying his entire siege artillery and equipment, rounded the Mount Carmel promontory straight into the clutches of Tigre and Theseus. Six ships were captured and only three escaped to Toulon. Most of Napoleon’s heaviest weaponry was then taken into Acre and turned against him. In an equally unmistakable signal that the course of events was turning, Jezzar reverted to form and beheaded the messenger sent with peace terms.
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Although his headquarters were on the Turon hillside 1,500 yards from Acre — coincidentally the place Richard the Lionheart had chosen for the same job in 1191 — some of his siege lines had to go through a mosquito-infested swamp, which soon caused malaria outbreaks.
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At one point he ran so low on ammunition that he had to pay soldiers to pick up cannonballs fired from the city and from Royal Navy vessels; they received between a half-franc and a franc each, depending on the calibre.
The French weren’t the only ones being incentivized; one of the explanations for the large number of Turkish sorties (twenty-six) was that Jezzar was paying a high bounty for French heads.
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On March 28 a cannonball buried itself three paces from Napoleon, between his two aides-de-camp, Eugène and Antoine Merlin, the son of the new Director, Philippe Merlin de Douai.
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After the battle, Napoleon slept at the convent in nearby Nazareth, where he was shown the supposed bedchamber of the Virgin Mary. When the prior also pointed out a broken black marble pillar and told his staff, ‘in the gravest manner possible’, that it had been split by the Angel Gabriel when he ‘came to announce to the Virgin her glorious and holy destination’, some of the officers burst out laughing, but as one of them recorded, ‘General Bonaparte, looking severely at us, made us resume our gravity.’
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The officer corps was thus at the forefront of the action, a key aspect of their service that won them their soldiers’ affection and respect. In one bombardment from Acre, Berthier’s aide-de-camp was killed standing near Napoleon, and Napoleon was himself knocked over by ‘the effect of the commotion of the air’ as a cannonball passed close by.
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He was also convinced that Sir Sidney Smith was ‘a kind of lunatic’, because the British commodore had challenged Napoleon to single combat under the walls of the city. (Napoleon replied that he didn’t see Smith as his equal, and ‘would not come forth to a duel unless the English could fetch Marlborough from his grave’.)
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Easily Smith’s finest piece of psychological warfare, however, was neither disinformation nor misinformation, but simply supplying Napoleon with true information. Under a flag of truce, he sent over several editions of recent British and European newspapers, from which Napoleon was able to piece together the series of disasters that had recently overtaken French arms. Napoleon had been actively trying to obtain newspapers since January; now he could read of Jourdan’s defeats in Germany at the battles of Ostrach and Stockach in March and Schérer’s at the battle of Magnano in Italy in April — only Genoa was left to France in Italy. Napoleon’s brainchild, the Cisalpine Republic, had collapsed and there were renewed risings in the Vendée. The newspapers made him realize, as he explained later, that ‘it was impossible to expect reinforcements from France in its then state, without which nothing further could be done’.
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He later summed up his glorious aspirations, claiming: ‘I would found a religion, I saw myself marching to Asia, mounted on an elephant, a turban on my head, and in my hand a new Koran that I would have composed to suit my needs.’
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Later, he would tell Lucien, ‘I missed my destiny at Acre.’
Whether because he was angry at this, or to deter Jezzar from following him closely, Napoleon employed scorched-earth tactics on the way back to Egypt, laying waste to the Holy Land. Similar tactics were later to be used against Masséna by Wellington in his retreat to Lisbon in 1810, and of course by the Russians in 1812. He had to leave fifteen badly wounded men behind in the hospital at Mount Carmel in the care of the monks; all of them were massacred when the Turks arrived, and the monks were driven from the monastery they had occupied for centuries.
On the retreat to Jaffa, harried in the rear by Arab tribesmen from Lebanon and Nablus, Napoleon ordered some of his cavalry to dismount so that their horses could be used for the sick and wounded. An equerry asked him which one he wanted reserved for himself, upon which Napoleon hit him with his riding crop, shouting: ‘Didn’t you hear the order? Everyone on foot!’54 It made for good theatre (unless you were the equerry). Lavalette said it was the first time he had ever seen him strike a man.
‘Nothing could have been more horrible than the sights brought before our eyes in the port of Jaffa throughout our stay there,’ recalled Doguereau. ‘The dead and dying were everywhere, begging passers-by for treatment or, fearful of being abandoned, praying to be taken on board ship … There were plague victims in every corner, lying in tents and on the cobblestones, and the hospitals were filled with them. We left many of them behind when we left. I was assured that steps had been taken to prevent them falling alive into the hands of the Turks.’ The ‘steps’ taken were laudanum (opium) overdoses, administered in food by a Turkish apothecary after Desgenettes protested that euthanasia contravened his Hippocratic Oath. From the French eyewitness accounts there seem to have been around fifty men who died in this way.
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He sent Marmont, whom he assumed would soon be besieged in Alexandria, a list of tips, such as ‘only sleep in the day’, ‘sound the reveille well before dawn’, ‘make sure no officer undresses at night’, and to keep a large number of dogs tied up outside the city walls to warn against stealth attacks.
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‘If it had been a European army,’ said Doguereau, ‘we should have taken three thousand prisoners; here there were three thousand corpses.’
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Napoleon also took with him a young — between fifteen and nineteen, accounts differ — Georgian-born, Mamluk-dressed slave boy called Roustam Raza, who had been a present from Sheikh El-Bekri in Cairo. Roustam became Napoleon’s bodyguard, sleeping on a mattress outside his door every night for the next fifteen years, armed with a dagger.
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Kléber wrote a devastating report to the Directory denouncing Napoleon’s conduct of the campaign from its inception, describing the dysentery and ophthalmia and the army’s dearth of weapons, powder, ammunition and clothing. But although this document was captured by the Royal Navy it wasn’t published in time to damage Napoleon politically — yet another example of the luck that he was starting to mistake for Fate.
With renewed fighting against Austria and her allies looming, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), Napoleon needed to replenish the near-empty Treasury:
