The War of Wars (45 page)

A few months later he met Pauline Foure, a twenty-year-old French girl with striking long black hair, nicknamed Ballilote. Her husband was immediately given leave from the French army but was intercepted by the British and was returned, by way of making mischief, to Egypt. She was dubbed Cleopatra and became Napoleon’s official consort, riding with him in his carriage, although his stepson by Josephine, Eugène de Beauharnais, understandably refused to attend on her. Napoleon was angered by her failure to produce a child – to which she allegedly retorted, ‘It is not my fault’.

It soon became apparent that the Turks were preparing for action against the French army of occupation in Egypt. This was to consist of a double offensive: Djezzar at Acre was preparing a huge army to march by land; and the Turkish ‘army of Rhodes’ was to be ferried across the Aegean by the British maverick commander Sir Sidney Smith, who had been given command of a flotilla in the eastern Mediterranean – much to Nelson’s irritation. Napoleon, his power base and army in Egypt shrinking by the day, decided to pre-empt the land attack by assembling an army of 13,000 infantry and about 800 cavalry equipped with fifty guns. Only 5,000 French soldiers would be left in Cairo.

Napoleon was not in fact headed just for what today is called Syria, but for modern Israel and Palestine, the classical Holy Land. Syria was a region of the Turkish empire divided into five pashaliks – Aleppo, Damascus, Tripoli, Acre and Jerusalem. Napoleon was still apparently dreaming of a far-flung empire, despite his setbacks in Egypt, and sent a message to Tippoo Sahib, the great enemy of the British in India, hoping that ‘the Mamelukes and the Arabs of Egypt . . . would join his forces; that by June he would be master of Aleppo and Damascus, with his outposts in the Taurus Mountains and having under his immediate command 26,000 French troops, 6,000 Mamelukes and Arabic horsemen from Egypt, 18,000 Druses, Maronites, and other Syrian troops; and that Desaix would be in Egypt, ready to assist him with 20,000 men, 10,000 of them Frenchmen and 10,000 Negroes with French cadres. In these circumstances, he would have been in a position to force the Porte to make peace and to secure its consent to his march on
India. If fortune favoured his projects, he could reach the Indus by March 1800 with 40,000 men, despite the loss of his fleet.’ Unfortunately for him, Tippoo was soon to be killed in the British assault at Seringapatam.

Napoleon’s immediate aims were more practical: to pre-empt an Anglo-Turkish attack; to force the Turks to the negotiating table; and to deprive Smith’s naval squadron of its supply bases in Syria. While these aims seemed practical, in fact Napoleon had grossly underestimated the difficulties in his path. Believing always that advancing French troops were irresistible, he seemed to regard this as a merely punitive raid, without realizing the colossal difficulties of the terrain he was to cross and the hostility of the populations there.

Napoleon sent General Lagrange on ahead to establish a fort at Katia, and then on to the town of El Arish where Djezzar was concentrating his forward troops. At the last moment it was decided to send the artillery by sea, because of the difficulties involved in crossing the desert. The march across Sinai, even in winter, was certainly a huge ordeal: the desert was empty and arid, while the cold and the rain penetrated the inadequate French clothing (based on the supposition that the desert was always hot), and food was soon in short supply, many mules and camels being slaughtered for food.

When General Reynier, in the vanguard, reached El Arish he found it was defended by 1,200 infantry and some 600 horsemen who had been sent to reinforce the 1,500 garrison. Reynier first massacred the inhabitants of the village, then attacked the Turkish encampment at night, bayoneting the sleeping soldiers: some 500 were killed and 900 taken prisoner, for a French loss of three. The French then besieged the fortress, and were astonished to lose some 400 men on the first day, as the defenders fired back undaunted. A breach was at last made in the wall and the following day its 800 remaining defenders surrendered. The French were delighted to find plenty of food – but dismayed to find a roomful of victims of the plague.

The French marched on to Gaza across even more arid desert and there they found more supplies. They moved on to Jaffa, a town with a wall and a citadel on top of a hill. On 7 March their attack began. Within a few hours the town itself had been taken and the troops went
on a rampage over the next several hours, killing anyone they found, some 2,000 altogether, men, women and children – ‘anyone with a human face’, as a French witness remarked. Napoleon and his officers did nothing to stop the slaughter.

There were still some 2,500 Turkish soldiers in the citadel. Napoleon sent two aides to parley with them. They offered to surrender provided they were spared – an assurance the aides readily gave. The Turks filed out and gave up their arms. There followed one of the most cold-blooded atrocities ever committed by Europeans in a modern war, a forerunner of Nazi atrocities in the Second World War. It was personally ordered by Napoleon. Peyrusse, the army paymaster, recounts the chilling deed:

That, in a city taken by storm, the infuriated troops should loot, burn, and kill whatever comes their way, is something demanded by the laws of war, and humanity covers these horrors with a veil. But that, two or three days after the attack, when passions have calmed down, one should order, in cold-blooded savagery, the murder of 3,000 men who have surrendered to us in good faith! Posterity no doubt will pass judgment on this atrocity, and those who ordered it will find their place among the butchers of humanity.

About 3,000 men put down their arms and were instantly led to our camp. By order of the commander-in-chief, the Egyptians, Moroccans, and Turks were separated.

The next morning, all the Moroccans were taken to the seashore, and two battalions began to shoot them down. Their only hope of saving their lives was to throw themselves into the sea; they did not hesitate, and all tried to escape by swimming. They were shot at leisure, and in an instant, the sea was red with blood and covered with corpses. A few were lucky enough to reach some rocks. Soldiers were ordered to follow them in boats and to finish them off . . . Once this execution was over, we fondly hoped that it would not be repeated and that the other prisoners would be spared.

Our hopes were soon disappointed, when, the next day, 1,200 Turkish artillerymen, who for two days had been kept without food in front of General Bonaparte’s tent, were taken to be executed.
The soldiers had been carefully instructed not to waste ammunition, and they were ferocious enough to stab them with their bayonets. Among the victims, we found many children who, in the act of death, had clung to their fathers. This example will teach our enemies that they cannot count on French good faith, and sooner or later, the blood of these 3,000 victims will be upon us.

Major Detroye coolly kept a tally of the killings – 2,000 during the attack, then 800 massacred on 8 March, 600 on 9 March and 1,041 on 10 March – to yield a grand total of 4,441. On 9 March, in a surely conscious act of hypocrisy, Napoleon issued a proclamation to the people of Palestine: ‘Remain quietly at your homes . . . I guarantee everybody’s safety and protection . . . Religion especially shall be protected and respected . . . for it is from God that all good things come: it is He who gives victory.’

Why was this act of bestiality carried out by Napoleon, a ruthless man certainly, but not one who usually indulged in slaughter for its own sake? None of the justifications ring true. He said he could not spare men to take the prisoners back to Egypt, that he could not guard them or feed them and that if he released them they would merely have departed to reinforce Djezzar at his stronghold at Acre, just as, he claimed, 900 of the garrison at El Arish had made for Jaffa. (The true figure could not have been more than 450.)

Yet a couple of hundred Frenchmen could have guarded the disarmed Turks and the French now had plentiful food and supplies – seized from the garrison at Jaffa. If they had reinforced Djezzar, they would have had to be armed and fed by the Turks; it seems more likely that most would have deserted. The likeliest explanation was that Napoleon wanted to make a grisly example for Djezzar’s benefit – he himself had an awesome reputation for cruelty – if he failed to abandon his garrison and flee before Napoleon.

Napoleon was in a sense showing that he could be as cruel as Djezzar or the Turks, known for massacring whole villages to subdue the population. He may also have had a white man’s contempt for the lives of another race. If so, whatever had happened to Napoleon’s civilizing mission in the Middle East? In a career which throughout was marred
by the inflicting of colossal bloodshed and suffering, Napoleon’s cold-blooded murder of the 4,000-plus in Jaffa ranks as one of his worst and least defensible atrocities.

For a European, the occasion was unpardonable and a violation of the normal practices of war: however much suffering had been inflicted already during the French revolutionary wars, the cold-blooded massacre of thousands of prisoners by the regular French army was unprecedented. Napoleon had, in the English phrase, ‘gone native’. He had succumbed to the barbaric practices of the people he was fighting against in the name of civilization. Just as his commanders in Upper Egypt, knowing the fate that would befall them if they were captured, thought nothing of putting whole villages to the sword, burning them down and raping the women, Napoleon had similarly acquired a cheap and contemptuous view of human life.

All of Napoleon’s worst defects were to surface during this extraordinary expedition across the Holy Land: his utter conviction in his own invincibility – that a few thousand disciplined Frenchmen under his command were all that were required to make the rotten façade of Ottoman rule collapse, just as Mameluke rule had crumbled before him; his restless impatience and improvisation, which made him embark on an expedition with virtually no preparation and no knowledge of the terrain, climate or enemy that he would encounter; his belief that he could rout his enemies merely through aggression; his psychopathic contempt for his troops, whom he could sacrifice without the slightest compunction and whose sole purpose was to serve for his own greater glory; his utter indifference to the loss of human life; and his ruthlessness as a general, which time and again wrongfooted his enemies – for he refused to play by any known rules. Tactics considered contrary to the rule of war, or simply unlikely to succeed, were Napoleon’s secret weapon. No one would expect him to resort to them.

As so many commented at the time, it seemed that the massacre at Jaffa had at last incurred divine wrath. No doubt infected by the sick at El Arish, Napoleon’s troops suddenly started going down with the plague. One patient described the illness: ‘This illness begins with a hot fever, followed by a severe headache and the formation of a bubo or
gland, in the groin or in any other joint, about the size of an egg. Once the bubo appears, the patient may be reckoned as dead. If he survives four days, there is considerable hope for him, but this rarely happens.’ Some thirty men were dying a day – only one in twelve of those infected surviving. Soon some 300 soldiers had the plague.

Napoleon then showed another side of his extraordinary nature: his almost inhuman lack of fear. He went to visit his dying soldiers in the makeshift hospital at Jaffa. One of his doctors described the visit:

On March 11, 1799, General Bonaparte, followed by his general staff, felt it incumbent upon himself to visit the hospital . . . The General walked through the hospital and its annex, spoke to almost all the soldiers who were conscious enough to hear him, and, for one hour and a half, with the greatest calm, busied himself with the details of the administration. While in a very small and crowded ward, he helped to lift, or rather to carry, the hideous corpse of a soldier whose torn uniform was soiled by the spontaneous bursting of an enormous abscessed bubo.

Napoleon did not catch the disease and his visit did much to reassure his soldiers, as well as to convince them of his quasi-supernatural powers. This was not a visit of compassion: it was simply a morale-boosting expedient to try and reassure his men on the eve of yet another gruelling march up the coast of the eastern Mediterranean.

Napoleon was now about to face his most formidable Middle Eastern enemy. Djezzar came from Moslem Bosnia and had become a Mameluke servant to Pasha Ahmed, then ruler of Egypt, who had employed him as an assassin against rival beys. After quarrelling with his patron, he had set himself up as Pasha of Acre where, according to a French victor, ‘he had immured alive a great number of Greek Christians when he rebuilt the walls of Beirut, to defend it from the invasion of the Russians. The heads of these miserable victims, which the Butcher had left out, in order to enjoy their tortures, are still to be seen.’ Napoleon was counting on the support of the Druzes and Christians, who had suffered badly under Djezzar’s rule.

Djezzar’s stronghold was the ancient crusader castle of Acre, built on a promontory which jutted out to sea, only a quarter of it vulnerable to assault from the land. Although the walls seemed to be crumbling, they were immensely thick and reinforced by several towers, including one dominant one and a castle just within. Djezzar possessed some 250 guns and there were some 10,000 civilians within the small fortified town’s walls.

Djezzar had initially considered the stronghold to be indefensible, and favoured withdrawing. But he had been reinforced by two remarkable men – Sir Sidney Smith and Louis-Edmond le Picard de Phélipaux. Smith was an adventurer who had fought with the Swedes against the Russian navy and then had appeared in Toulon when that port was briefly in the hands of the English, being put in charge of burning the French fleet, which he did only half successfully.
In 1796 he had been captured by the French after leading a series of raids against French shipping and imprisoned in the dreaded Temple prison in Paris under the shadow of the guillotine.