some of Bonaparte's generals, notably Dommartin, worried that victory at
Acre would lead Napoleon to march on Persia and India, actively
conspired to prevent its fall. Furious at the blow to his prestige,
Napoleon set his propaganda machine to work to mask the defeat by
dwelling on the glorious victory at Mount Tabor. But his fury found
expression in the public humiliation and foul-mouthed abuse of the 69th
Regiment which had failed in the final assault; he announced that until
such time as the regiment retrieved its laurels he refused to acknowledge
its existence.
Napoleon now prepared for a hazardous retreat, anxious lest the
emboldened enemy dog his footsteps across the desert - exactly what
happened in fact. A particular problem was the 2,300 men wounded or on
the sick list. If he tried to take them with him, his already seriously
depleted army would not be able to march fast enough to elude pursuers
and the result might well be a form of death by a thousand cuts, with
daily attacks on the rearguard gradually nibbling away at the strength of
his effectives. On the other hand, if the sick and wounded were left
behind, they would be beheaded and otherwise mutilated by the Turks.
To his chief of medical staff Dr Desgenettes Napoleon suggested a
simple solution: euthanasia of the worst cases by opium. Desgenettes
refused but, to sugar the pill, experimented by giving thirty plague
stricken victims laudanum, in some cases with beneficial effects.
Reluctantly, the troops man-hauled the rest of them back to Jaffa, while
Napoleon covered the operation by continuing to bombard Acre until 20
May, using up all the siege-gun ammunition thereby. He then spiked the
big guns, leaving himself with just forty pieces of field artillery.
In Jaffa, where the French paused four days, a final decision about the
fate of the sick and wounded could no longer be postponed, especially
since the occupants of the hospital where Napoleon had visited the plague
victims on I I March simply swelled the throng of non-combatants. After
desperate attempts to evacuate all military hospitals had proved
unavailing, a three-fold strategy was adopted: on all the hopeless cases
mercy killing was used; those who were on the mend but could not yet be
moved were left to the mercy of the Turks; walking wounded and
convalescent were mounted on horses and mules. For the euthanasia
Napoleon has of course been much criticized, but this was a different case
from the massacre of the Turks, and it is difficult to see what realistic
option he had, especially since the incoming Turks did behave to the
abandoned Frenchmen in line with the worst possible predictions.
It was a gloomy and demoralized French army that trekked back to
Gaza (reached on 30 May). But the real nightmare came next, in the
marcin
(Marcin)
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