so that a captain of engineers named Ayme had to find his way through Jaffa’s cellars to take the enemy from behind with the bayonet. With that, angry French soldiers began fanning into Jaffa’s alleys.
Meanwhile, General Bon on the northern side of town had turned his diversionary attack into a full-fledged assault that broke in from that direction. With French troops swarming, the defenders’ morale collapsed and the Ottoman levies began to surrender. French fury at 1 1 6
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the foolish emissary beheadings hadn’t been slaked, however, and killing and looting first went unchecked, then turned into mob frenzy.
Prisoners were shot and bayoneted. Homes were ransacked. As the bloody afternoon gave way to concealing night, whooping soldiers staggered through the streets heavy with plunder. They fired muskets into windows and waved sabers wet with blood. The looters refused to even stop to help their own wounded. Officers who tried to stop the massacre were threatened and shoved aside. Women’s veils were ripped from their faces, their clothes following. Any husband or brother who tried to defend them was shot down, the women raped in sight of the bodies. No mosque, church, or synagogue was respected, and Muslim, Christian, and Jew alike died in the flames.
Children lay screaming on the corpses of their parents. Daughters pleaded for mercy while being violated on top of dying mothers.
Prisoners were hurled from walls. Flames trapped the elderly, the sick, and the insane in the rooms where they hid. Blood ran down the gutters like rainwater. In one monstrous night, the fear and frustration of nearly a year’s bitter campaigning was taken out on a single helpless city. An army of the rational, from the capital of reason, had gone insane.
Bonaparte knew better than to try to stem this release; the same anarchy had reigned in a thousand sackings before, from Troy to the Crusader pillages of Constantinople and Jerusalem. “One should never forbid what one lacks the power to prevent,” he remarked. By dawn the men’s emotion had been spent and the exhausted soldiers sprawled like their victims, stunned by what they’d done, but satiated as well, like satyrs after a debauch. A hungry, demonic anger had been fed.
In the aftermath, Bonaparte was left with more than three thousand sullen, hungry, terrified Ottoman prisoners.
Napoleon did not shrink from hard decisions. For all his admiration of poets and artists, he was at heart an artilleryman and an engineer.
He was invading Syria and Palestine, a land with two and a half million people, with thirteen thousand French soldiers and two thousand Egyptian auxiliaries. Even as Jaffa fell, some of his men were displayt h e
r o s e t t a k e y
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ing symptoms of plague. His fantastic goal was to march to India like Alexander before him, heading an army of recruited Orientals, carving out an empire in the East. Yet Horatio Nelson had destroyed his fleet and cut him off from reinforcements, Sidney Smith was helping organize the defense of Acre, and Bonaparte needed to frighten the Butcher into capitulation. He dared not free his prisoners, and he couldn’t feed or guard them.
So he decided to execute them.
It was a monstrous decision in a controversial career, made more so by the fact that I was one of the prisoners he decided to execute. I wasn’t even to have the dignity and fame of being paraded before assembled regiments as a noteworthy spy; instead I was herded by Najac into the mass of milling Moroccans and Sudanese and Albanians as if I were one more Ottoman levy. The poor men were still uncertain of what was happening, since they’d surrendered on the assumption their lives would be spared. Was Bonaparte marching them to boats bound for Constantinople? Were they being sent as slave labor to Egypt? Were they merely to be camped outside the city’s smoking walls until the French moved on? But no, it was none of these, and the grim ranks of grenadiers and fusiliers, muskets at parade rest, soon began to ignite rumor and panic. French cavalry were stationed at either end of the beach to prevent escape. Against the orange groves were the infantry, and at our back was the sea.
“They are going to kill us!” some began to cry.
“Allah will protect us,” others promised.
“As he protected Jaffa?”
“Look, I haven’t found the Grail yet,” I whispered to Najac, “but it exists—it’s a book—and if you’ll kill me, you’ll never find it either. It’s not too late for partnership . . .”
He pressed the point of his saber into my back.
“This is a crime, what you’re about to do!” I hissed. “The world will not forget!”
“Nonsense. There are no crimes in war.” I described the ensuing scene at the beginning of this story. One of the remarkable things about readying to be executed is how the senses 1 1 8
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sharpen. I could sense the fabric layers of the air as if I had butterfly wings, I could pick out the scents of sea, blood, and oranges, I could feel every grain of sand under my now bootless feet and hear every click and creak of weapons being readied, harness being twitched by impatient horses, the hum of insects, the cries of birds. How unwilling I was to die! Men pleaded and sobbed in a dozen languages. Prayers were a hum.
“At least I drowned your damned snakes,” I remarked.
“You will feel the ball go into your body as I did,” Najac replied.
“Then another, and another. I hope it takes you time to bleed away, because the lead hurts very much. It flattens and tears. I would have preferred the snakes, but this is almost as good.” He strode away as the muskets leveled.
“Fire!”
¤
