‘A good shot,’ Bonaparte complimented. Musket fire was so inaccurate that if soldiers didn’t aim for the enemy’s feet, the kick of the gun could send a volley over their heads. The only way for armies to hit each other was to line up tightly and blast away from close distances.
‘American?’ the Arab queried. ‘So far from home?’ The Bedouin wheeled his horse, preparing to leave. ‘To study our mysteries, perhaps?’
Now I remembered where I’d heard his voice! It was the same as the lantern bearer in Paris, the man who had led the gendarmes to me when I had discovered the body of Minette! ‘Wait! I know you!’
‘I am Achmed bin Sadr, American, and you know nothing.’
And before I could say anything more, he galloped off.
Under shouted orders the French troops rapidly assembled into what would be their favourite formation against Mameluke cavalry, a hollow square of men. The squares were several ranks thick, each of the four sides of men facing outward so that there was no flank to turn, their bayonets forming a four-sided hedge of steel. To crisp the ranks, some officers drew lines in the sand with their sabres. Meanwhile the Egyptian army, or more accurately, its rabble, began to stream toward us with ululating cries under a hammer of drums and blare of horns.
‘Menou, form another square next to the dunes,’ Napoleon ordered. ‘Kleber, tell the rest of them to hurry.’ Many of the French troops were still coming up the beach.
Now the Egyptians were running straight at us, a tide of peasants armed with staves and sickles, pushed by a line of brilliantly dressed horsemen. The commoners looked terrified. When they got within fifty metres, the first French rank fired.
The crash of gunfire made me jump, and the result was as if a giant scythe had swept a rank of wheat. The front line of peasants was shredded, scores falling dead and wounded, the rest simply collapsing in fright from a disciplined volley unlike any they’d seen before. A huge sheet of white smoke lashed out, obscuring the French square. The Mameluke cavalry stopped in confusion, the horses wary of stepping on the carpet of cowering bodies before them, and their masters cursed the underlings they’d been driving to slaughter. As the overlords slowly forced their mounts forward over their cringing subjects, the second French rank fired, and this time some of the Mameluke warriors toppled from their horses. Then a third French rank let loose, even as the first was finishing reloading, and horses screamed, plunging and writhing. After this hurricane of bullets the surviving peasantry rose as if on command and fled, pushing the horsemen back with them and making a fiasco of the first Egyptian attack. The warriors slashed at their subjects with the flat of their swords but it did nothing to stem the flight. Some peasants pounded on the gates of the city, demanding refuge, and others ran inland, disappearing into the dunes. Meanwhile the French coastal ships started firing at Alexandria, the shots exploding against the city walls like a hammering fist. The ancient ramparts began crumbling like sand.
‘War is essentially engineering,’ Napoleon remarked. ‘It is order imposed on disorder.’ He stood with hands clasped behind his back and head swivelling, absorbing details like an eagle. He was unusual in being able to hold in his mind’s eye a picture of the entire battlefield and to know where concentration would turn the outcome, and this is what gave him his edge. ‘It is discipline triumphing over irresolution. It is organisation applied against chaos. Do you know, Gage, it would be remarkable if even one percent of the bullets fired actually hit their target? That’s why line, column, and square are so important.’
As much as I was taken aback by the brutality of his militarism, his coolness impressed me. Here was a modern man of scientific calculation, bloody accounting, and emotionless reasoning. In a moment of directed violence, I saw the grim engineers who would rule the future. Morality would be trumped by arithmetic. Passion would be harnessed by ideology.
‘Fire!’
More and more French troops were arriving near the city walls, and a third square formed to the seaward of the first, its left side ankle-deep in seawater when the waves surged in. Between the squares some light artillery pieces were placed and loaded with grapeshot, which would sweep enemy cavalry with small iron balls.
The Mamelukes, now unencumbered by their own peasantry, attacked again. Their cavalry charged at full tilt, thundering down the beach in a spray of sand and water, the men shouting war cries, silken robes billowing like sails, feathers and plumes bobbing on fantastic turbans. Their speed made no difference. The French fired again and the Mameluke front rank went down, horses screaming and hooves churning. Some of the horsemen just behind collided with their stricken comrades and somersaulted as well; others managed to dodge or jump them. Yet no sooner would their cavalry form a newly coherent front than the French would fire again, a ripple of flame, bits of wadding spitting out like confetti. This advance too would be torn. The bravest of the survivors came on anyway, hurtling over the corpses of their comrades, only to be met with swathes of grapeshot or balls from the field cannon. It was simple slaughter, as mechanical as Bonaparte implied, and even though I’d been in scrapes during my fur-trapping days, the ferocity of this massed violence shocked me. The sound was cacophonous, the fired metal shrieking through the air, and the human body contained more blood than I’d thought possible. Great plumes of it sometimes geysered when a body was severed with round shot. A few horsemen stumbled all the way to the French lines, probing with lance or raising their swords, but they couldn’t get their mounts to close with the hedge of bayonets. Then the command would ring out in French, another volley would be fired, and they’d go down too, riddled with balls.
What was left of the ruling caste finally broke and galloped for the desert.
‘Now!’ Napoleon roared. ‘To the wall, before their leaders regroup!’ Bugles sounded and, with a cheer, a thousand troops formed column and trotted forward. They had no ladders or siege artillery but had little need for them. Under the naval bombardment the walls of the old city were coming apart like rotted cheese. Some of the houses beyond were already in flames. The French approached within musket range and a brisk fire broke out on both sides, the defenders showing more courage in the face of this furious onslaught than I’d have expected. Bullets whined like hornets and a few of the Europeans at last fell over, barely balancing the carnage left in their wake.
Napoleon followed, I by his side, the pair of us stepping past still or groaning bodies of the enemy, great dark stains in the sand beneath. I was surprised to see that many of the Mameluke slain had much fairer skin than their subjects, their bared heads revealing red or even blond hair.
‘White slaves from the Caucasus,’ the gigantic Dumas growled. ‘They’ll couple with the Egyptians, it is said, but won’t have pups by them. They also lay with each other, and prefer their own sex and race to any kind of contamination. Fresh boys eight years old are bought every year from their home mountains, creamy pink, to continue the caste. Rape is their initiation, and cruelty their school. By the time they’re full-grown they’re grim as wolves and contemptuous of anyone who’s not a Mameluke. Their only loyalty is to their bey, or chief. They also recruit the occasional exceptional black or Arab, but most view darkness with contempt.’
I looked at the general’s own racially mixed skin. ‘I suspect you’ll not allow Egypt to sustain that prejudice, General.’
He kicked at a dead body. ‘ Oui. It’s the colour of the heart that matters.’
We stayed just out of range at the base of a mammoth solitary pillar that jutted up outside the city walls. It was seventy-five feet high, thick as a man is tall, and named for the old Roman general, Pompey. We were on the rubble of several civilisations, I saw: an old Egyptian obelisk overthrown to help make the pillar’s base. The column’s pink granite was pitted and warm to the touch. Bonaparte, hoarse from shouting orders, stood on the rubble in the pillar’s meagre shade. ‘This is hot work.’ Indeed, the sun had climbed surprisingly high. How much time had gone by?
‘Here, take a fruit.’
He glanced at me with appreciation and I thought perhaps this small gesture seeded friendship. Only later was I to learn that Napoleon valued anyone who could do him a service, was indifferent to those of no use, and implacable toward his enemies. But now he sucked greedily like a child, seemingly enjoying my company while showing his command of the tableau before us. ‘No, no, not that way,’ he’d occasionally call. ‘Yes, that gate over there, that’s the one to force!’
It was Generals Kleber and Jacques Francois Menou who were at the forefront of the attack. The officers fought like madmen, as if they believed themselves invulnerable to bullets. I was equally impressed by the suicidal courage of the defenders, who knew they had no chance. But Bonaparte was the grand choreographer, directing his dance as if the soldiers were toys. His mind was already beyond the immediate fight. He glanced up at the pillar, crowned by a Corinthian capital that supported nothing. ‘Great glory has always been acquired in the Orient,’ he
