full disembarkation (this was completed only on 3 July) but pressed on to
the outskirts of Alexandria. On 2 July Menou seized the Triangular Fort
outside the city while KU:ber and Bon took the Pompey and Rosetta
gates. From 8 a.m. to noon a fierce battle raged as the French, spurred on
by thirst, gradually broke down the Arab defences at a cost of three
hundred casualties. Napoleon spent the morning sitting on a pile of
ancient potsherds as he watched the unfolding battle, occasionally flicking
at the shards with his whip.
Alexandria was not sacked, for Napoleon gave strict instructions that
Islam was to be respected and there was to be no looting. This had the
effect of making his men's morale plummet still farther. Matters reached
crisis point on the subsequent march. Leaving Kleber in Alexandria with
a garrison, Napoleon marched south with the main army on 7 July, with
Desaix well ahead as a prohing vanguard. Desaix's men experienced a 72-
hour nightmare when confronted by the desert, the filth and squalor of
the villages, and the hostility of the Bedouin. Encountering wells
deliberately fouled by the Arabs, mirages and suffering from ophthalmia,
the army was on the point of disintegration and many men went mad. On
ro July Desaix's vanguard reached the Nile, where his men, desperate
with thirst, threw themselves into the river; many died here through
overindulgence in slaking their thirst. It became very clear that Napoleon
had timed his invasion for the very worst part of the year. The refusal to
take account of seasons or the weather was always to be his Achilles' heel
as a military commander.
Napoleon's main army of 25,000 also went through the slough of
despond during almost a fortnight of desert marches, when water
shortages and hostile Bedouin were daily features, exacerbated by
dysentery, scorpions, snakes and swarms of black flies. The French
commissariat had been incompetent, water flasks had been left behind,
and terrible scenes were the result. When one division halted in the
desert beside two wells, thirty soldiers were trampled to death in the rush
for water, while others, finding the well drunk dry, turned their guns on
themselves. One eye-witness wrote: 'Our soldiers were dying in the sand
from lack of water and food; the intense heat forced them to abandon
their booty; and many others, tired of suffering, simply blew their brains
out.' Fran<;ois Bernoyer, chief of supplies to the Army, wrote to his wife:
'I have tried to find out what our government expected when it sent an
army to invade the Sultan's territory without declaring war and without
any valid reason for a declaration. Use your intelligence, I was told.
Bonaparte, by reason of his genius and victories won with an invincible
army, was too powerful in France. He was both an embarrassment and an
marcin
(Marcin)
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