robes, so that wounded horsemen writhed on the ground in agony or
burnt to death just yards away from the intact squares. The repulsed
cavalrymen fled back to the entrenched camp, causing confusion and
chaos just when the Mameluke infantry were already being hard pressed
by Desaix and Reynier.
Taking advantage of the confusion, the two divisions on the French
left under Bon and Menou also advanced on the camp. To make matters
worse, many of the terrified and disoriented Mamelukes fled the wrong
way, thus finding themselves cut off between the victorious squares of the
French centre and the left and right who were attacking the ca mp. Total
panic ensued, with thousands of Egyptian infantrymen rushing into the
Nile, where they were drowned. French victory was complete but then
and since triumphalists have exaggerated the achievement. It is true that
in two hours the Mamelukes had lost 1o,ooo dead as against just twenty
nine Frenchmen killed and 260 wounded, but Murad Bey escaped from
the field with 2,500 horse intact and a majority of the infantry did manage
to find boats and reach the other side of the Nile. The Battle of the
Pyramids then, though a great triumph, was scarcely what one historian
has called it, 'a massacre as complete as Kitchener's victory at Omdurman
a century later'.
The great significance of the battle was the way it transformed the
morale of the French army. It was not just the victory itself that sent
spirits soaring but the realization that in Egypt there were treasures to be
looted as great if not greater than those the army had plundered in Italy.
The Mamelukes had gone into battle in traditional style, bedizened with
jewellery and precious stones and thousands of bloated corpses bearing
these valuable trinkets were rotting in the Nile. In addition, in despair at
their unexpected defeat the Mamelukes had tried to burn sixty treasure
ships in the Nile, but most of the hoard was intact. The victorious troops
spent a week fishing out the dead Mamelukes and extracting their prizes.
There were to be grumblings and murmurings in the army again during
the harsh year in Egypt, but never again did the problem of morale reach
such crisis proportions as it had during the first three weeks of July 1798.
Napoleon acted quickly to occupy Cairo before the dazed Egyptians
could recover from the shock of defeat. On 24 July he entered the city,
declared that the Mameluke era had come to an end and put the
administration of Cairo in the hands of a committee of nine sheikhs or
pashas, with a French commissioner as adviser. He reiterated and
repromulgated all the manifestoes he had had published in Alexandria, in
which he declared he came to Egypt as the friend of Islam, advancing as
proof his campaigns against the Pope and his destruction of the Knights
marcin
(Marcin)
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