melancholy twist of the ronde de /'amour, Desiree in 1798 took as her
husband none other than Napoleon's bitterest enemy Jean Bernadotte.
The idyll with Pauline Foures came to an abrupt end on 10 February
1799 when Napoleon left Cairo for Syria. He had received intelligence
that the Turks planned a two-pronged attack, with their so-called Army
of Rhodes being ferried across the Aegean by Napoleon's old opponent
Commodore Sir William Sidney Smith while a separate Army of
Damascus advanced on eastern Egypt via Palestine and Sinai. Napoleon's
strategy was to avoid being caught between two fires: leaving a token
force to control Egypt, he intended to march to Palestine, seize the
fortress of Acre, defeat the Damascus army and then double back to meet
the Army of Rhodes.
For the invasion of Syria he relied on 13,000 infantry, 900 cavalry and
some fifty big guns; a garrison of barely s,ooo was left in Cairo. The
march across the arid Sinai desert was gruelling, even in winter, and the
army had to slaughter many of its mules and camels to survive. Entry into
the lemon and olive groves of the Gaza plain promised better things, but
there was a disappointment in the unexpectedly strong resistance of the
fortress of El Arish. The defenders repelled several frontal attacks before
Napoleon forced a surrender on 19 February by opening a formal siege.
Together with the unintended consequences of the siege, Napoleon
calculated that the delay at El Arish had cost him eleven days - days, it
turned out, which he could ill afford and which affected the outcome of
the entire campaign.
Perhaps the frustration at El Arish was one factor in the obscene
butchery Napoleon ordered at Jaffa two weeks later. Gaza fell on 25
February, yielding 2,ooo prisoners, and by 3 March the French army was
at the gates of Jaffa. The 3,000 defenders here accepted the word of a
French officer that their lives would be spared if they surrendered. But
once in possession of the city, Napoleon ordered them all executed, plus
about 1,400 of the prisoners taken at Gaza. This mass slaughter was by
any standards a war crime, but it reached a fresh dimension of horror in
the way it was carried out. Anxious to save bullets and gunpowder,
Napoleon ordered his men to bayonet or drown the condemned
thousands. The resulting holocaust revolted hardened veterans who
thought they already knew about atrocities: there are well authenticated
reports of soldiers wading out to sea to finish off terrified women and
children who preferred to take their chances with the sharks.
This dreadful massacre was one of several incidents that haunted
Napoleon ever afterwards, not in the sense that he felt guilty - he did not
- but because he realized posterity would judge him harshly unless he