Napoleon: A Biography

could plead compelling necessity. He and his supporters have mounted
several lines of defence, some specious, some with a certain ad hoc force,
but none convincing. The argument that his aides were not authorized to
accept a Turkish surrender is casuistry. Not much better is the tu quoque
proposition: that the defenders of Jaffa had killed a French herald who
approached under a flag of truce, and that in Acre the ferocious Turkish
commander Djezzar Pasha had announced he would behead any French
prisoners. If Napoleon had come to Egypt to civilize, as he claimed, this
rejoinder was not really open to him. More compelling is the defence that
he had barely enough food to feed his own army, would therefore have to
release the prisoners to fend for themselves and would thus risk having
Acre reinforced by men to whom a word of honour meant nothing. It is
known that he was particularly enraged to find that most of the Gaza
prisoners who had been released on parole had simply gone on to fight at
Jaffa.
Perhaps Napoleon genuinely thought that military ends justified any
means. Perhaps he was supremely ruthless and wanted to give his
enemies convincing proof of his awesome qualities; the issue, in a word,
was credibility. Or perhaps he considered that Arabs and Turks were
lesser breeds without the law and that atrocities visited on them did not
thereby legitimate war crimes when two European nations were locked in
combat. The issue of atrocities in the Napoleonic wars is a complex one,
but it must be conceded that Napoleon was the first one to set foot down
that gruesome road. On the other hand, it is true that the Turks
habitually used massacre to cow their enemies, that they recognized no
rules of war and that, as in Spain later, the British made no attempt
whatever to dissuade their hosts and allies from frightful atrocities against
French prisoners.
As if the massacre was a sin crying to heaven for vengeance and heaven
had answered, the French army was immediately struck by plague
and had to stay a week at Jaffa. Morale plummeted, and Napoleon
decided he had to assert his role as thaumaturge and inspired leader. He
followed one of the darkest episodes in his lif e by one of the most
courageous by visiting the hospital where his plague-stricken men lay
dying (I I March). Fearlessly he touched the expiring men and helped to
carry out a corpse. Always Shavian in his attitude to illness and doctors,
he assured his petrified officers that willpower was everything and that
the right mental attitude could overcome plague. This is one of the great
moments in Napoleonic iconography, Gros's painting Napoleon visiting
the plague victims of Jaffa portrays the leader as a Christ-like figure. But
the effect on morale of his courage was real enough at the time. By the