The War of Wars (43 page)

Nelson himself suffered nausea and splitting headaches from his new wound, and was also plagued again by malaria. He increasingly felt himself to be a child of destiny, writing that ‘Almighty God has made me the happy instrument in destroying the enemy’s fleet’. His mood was understandable. After his career had once more teetered with his failure to find the French fleet, its destruction had conferred greatness beyond any expectation. He had served God, the King and his country to the very summit of duty and glory. Moreover he felt himself increasingly under divine protection, for he always sensed he was close to the next world. He had nearly died in the Indies of disease; he had nearly died in Nicaragua of illness; in Cape St Vincent he had risked his life in open combat; he had nearly been killed in Tenerife; now again he had escaped death by the narrowest of margins.

Yet as so often with this strange, attractive, romantic, severe, duty-driven genius of a naval commander, pride came before a fall, hubris was followed by nemesis. Sailing to Naples to have his crippled flagship refitted, he was greeted by the kind of welcome only the Neapolitans
can give. When the
Vanguard
arrived on 22 September, it was surrounded by a flotilla of boats and music. Nelson was lodged in the splendid palazzo of Sir William and Lady Hamilton, who bathed his wounds in ass’s milk. On his fortieth birthday, some 1,700 people were invited to a ball, eighty of them supping with the Hamiltons. The Sultan of the Ottoman empire sent him an aigrette, a superbly embossed if bizarre clockwork jewel.

Hamilton persuaded Nelson that he had an even greater role to play: to help expel the French, who he suggested were seeking to annex Naples, from Italy. Nelson agreed with him and Queen Maria Carolina that unless the King took action he would be deposed by the French. In November the King was persuaded to send a force northwards under the Austrian General Mack, while Troubridge was despatched to help the Duke of Tuscany in Leghorn to outflank the French rear. A week later Ferdinand was in Rome taking up residence in the Farnese Palace.

The triumph was shortlived. A week later a formidable French army marched on Rome, taking 10,000 Neapolitans prisoner and most of the rest hastily abandoned their baggage. On the King’s return, the Queen became fearful of a French-inspired uprising by Jacobins and recalled the fate of her sister, Marie Antoinette. Nelson summoned Troubridge’s squadrons from Leghorn and agreed to carry the royal family and their court to the safety of Palermo in Sicily. This infuriated the Neapolitan naval commander, Count Caracciolo.

Emma Hamilton is said to have led the royal family through a secret passage from the royal palace to the harbour. The
Vanguard
was piled high with royal Neapolitan treasures – around £2½ million worth (£500 million in today’s currency). Bad weather kept the ship in harbour for a day in deadly peril of discovery, and the passage across to Sicily was, according to Nelson, the worst weather he had ever experienced. The royal family were in the depths of despair and their youngest child, Prince Albert, died on the voyage in Emma Hamilton’s arms.

The royal family was however greeted with rapture in Palermo, and Ferdinand was soon engaged in his favourite pastime, hunting. Meanwhile the French took Naples and proclaimed it a republic on
Christmas Eve. It was a small compensation for the loss of their fleet at the Battle of the Nile. What exactly the victor of that battle – whose job it was to harass the French throughout the Mediterranean – was doing as an aide to this corrupt Bourbon court was a question that increasingly exercised the minds of his British superiors.

Napoleon, his boats now literally burnt behind him by his enemy, had no alternative but to press on with his surreal adventure into Egypt. For all his triumphalism, it was soon apparent that he controlled only three cities – Cairo, Alexandria and Rosetta – and was confronted by the sullen hostility of the population. At El Mansura, for example, a local French garrison was massacred by the inhabitants. The only survivor, Private Mourchon, gave this vivid description:

General Vial, when passing through El Mansura, left a detachment of 120 men . . . The day after General Vial left with his battalion, three soldiers of the garrison were assassinated by the inhabitants, one being stoned while standing guard duty, another while bringing soup to a sentry, the third while returning from his post . . .

From then on, we barricaded ourselves in the house we used for a barracks . . . [About two days later] at approximately 8 am, the barracks was surrounded by a large number of Moslems, carrying various weapons. One of them tried to set the house on fire . . . but was killed by one of our dragoons: they then tried to tear the house down. In short, the fighting . . . lasted until 4 pm. We then marched out of the house, in which we had lost eight men . . . As we marched through the streets to leave the town, we were shot at continuously from the windows; we returned the fire as best we could. When we reached the open country, the same individuals pursued us and kept firing. Some of them ran to nearby villages to look for reinforcements.

. . . During the retreat, a bullet traversed my left thigh . . . At daybreak, there were twenty-five or thirty of us left, and we were still pursued by the enemy . . . Having run out of cartridges, we defended ourselves with steel. The wounded, of whom there were ten, preferred drowning themselves to falling into the enemy’s hands. When only fifteen of us were left, a multitude of infuriated peasants threw themselves upon us, stripped us of our clothes, and massacred us, my comrades and me, with clubs; I threw myself into the Nile all naked with the intention of drowning myself, but since I can swim, instinct proved the stronger and I reached the opposite shore . . . I began to walk without any fixed purpose.

I saw seven Moslem horsemen approaching and threw myself into the Nile again. Having noticed that two of them were beckoning to me, I returned on shore; one of them fired at me pointblank, but his carbine jammed; the other said something to the effect that I should be spared and handed me over to two armed peasants . . . who tied my hands and led me to a village along a thorny path on which I suffered much, being barefoot and wounded. At the village, the inhabitants unbound me, took care of me, fed me, and showed me much kindness. I remained thus . . . until today, when the villagers came . . . to tell me that a barge loaded with French soldiers was passing by . . . I cannot omit mentioning that the person who took care of me most was a child about eight years old who secretly brought me boiled eggs and bread.

Outside Rosetta, General Menou’s party was set upon by armed peasants, and the painter Joly was murdered. Most of the passengers of a French ship that reached Marabut were massacred by Bedouins.

Napoleon’s response to the loss of his entire fleet and the precariousness of his grip upon Egypt was entirely characteristic: he pushed ahead with his make-believe attempt to turn the country into a colony and persuade the inhabitants of his benevolence. Meanwhile he continued with his military effort to subdue the rest of the country: for Napoleon, attack was always the best form of defence.

Napoleon attempted at first to woo the tribal chiefs, with limited
success; his efforts at making friends with his defeated enemy, Murad Bey, were rebuffed, as were his peace feelers to the governor of Acre, Ahmad Pasha, known as Djezzar (the Butcher), the Pasha of Damascus and the Bey of Tripoli. Unknown to him, Talleyrand had broken his promise to go to Constantinople and seek the Turkish government’s consent to the takeover of Egypt. Instead Talleyrand informed the luckless French envoy there of France’s intervention in Egypt in brutally frank terms:

All trade in the Mediterranean must . . . pass into French hands. This is the secret wish of the Directory, and, moreover, it will be the inevitable result of our position in that sea . . . Egypt, a country France always has desired, belongs of necessity to the Republic. Fortunately the consistently insolent and atrocious attitude of the beys toward us and the Porte’s powerlessness to give us satisfaction have allowed us to introduce ourselves into Egypt and to fix ourselves there without exposing ourselves to the charges of lawlessness and ambition . . . The Directory is determined to maintain itself in Egypt by all possible means.

Following the news of the Battle of the Nile, the Turks steeled themselves to declare war on France, locking up the unfortunate envoy in a notorious dungeon, the Seven Towers. By thus swooping on Ottoman Egypt, the French had antagonized the Russians, who regarded themselves as the natural predators of the Ottoman empire, and set themselves up in rivalry for its carcass. The result was foreseeable: the Russians and the Turks, traditional enemies, now became allies against the French. The people of Malta also rose up against the French, who were confined to the towns there.

Napoleon blithely refused to believe the Turks had issued a firman that the Egyptians should rise up against the French. He seemed to believe that the Turks should welcome the French for seizing one of their provinces. Instead he issued detailed orders for purifying water and setting up windmills and water mills. He even on one occasion dressed up in a turban and kaftan – until his appalled staff officers talked him out of it.

Meanwhile he encouraged his scientists and scholars in the ‘Institute’ to pursue researches into Egypt. If there was to be one positive aspect of France’s Egyptian experience, it was the extraordinary work of the French Egyptologists, scientists, scholars and experts on that ill-fated expedition. A detailed map of Egypt was drawn up by his cartographers. Napoleon’s Egyptologists were transfixed when Captain Bouchard discovered the ‘Rosetta stone’, which proved much later to be the key to the ancient hieroglyphic Egyptian language. Napoleon meanwhile even offered to convert to Islam, provided he and his men were permitted to drink and were not subject to circumcision.

General Kléber, a more experienced general who was to succeed him in his command of Egypt, was bitterly critical of his methods:

Never a fixed plan. Everything goes by fits and starts. Each day’s business is transacted according to the needs of the day. He claims to believe in fate. He is incapable of organizing or administering anything; and yet, since he wants to do everything, he organizes and administers. Hence, chaos and waste everywhere. Hence our want of everything, and poverty in the midst of plenty. Is he loved? How could he be? He loves nobody. But he thinks he can make up for this by promotions and by gifts.

Many of Napoleon’s edicts were deeply unpopular – in particular the taxes to pay for his army. He also took measures to regulate, for sanitary reasons, the slaughter of lambs, which often took place in the streets of Cairo. This incensed many people, as did his removal of the gates separating the many parts of the city and the imposition of a tax on property. Ordinary Egyptians were shocked by the way Frenchwomen refused to wear veils and disported themselves in public: they were afraid that Egyptian women would be similarly corrupted.

Finally, on 21 October, the explosion occurred. Nicholas the Turk, the main Islamic chronicler of the French occupation, wrote:

One fine day some sheikh or other of El Azhar started to run through the streets, shouting, ‘Let all those who believe that there is but one God take themselves to the Mosque El Azhar! For today is
the day to fight the Infidel.’ Now, although most of the population was informed [of what was about to happen], the French were living in utter unconcern. In an instant, the city was boiling over, and news of it came to General Dupuy [the commandant of Cairo]. He was a very hard man. He leapt to his feet. ‘What is going on?’ – ‘An uprising of the beggars of the city, who are gathered in the quarters of Khan Khalili and Nahhasin.’ He left instantly, followed by only five horsemen . . . He rode to Khan Khalili and saw the populace and some workingmen erecting barricades. A Janissary suddenly appeared from around a street corner and hit him over the back with a police stick. The general fell from his horse. His men carried him off . . . but he died on the way.

The mob ran wild, attacking the French quarter and sacking the house of General Cafarelli which contained many of the most cherished French scientific instruments.

Napoleon, in a towering rage, ordered artillery to be directed at the El Azhar mosque, the centre of the insurrection, and then sent three infantry battalions and 300 horse to attack it, under General Dumas. They forced their way through the narrow, chaotic streets. An Egyptian chronicler, El-Djabarti, wrote: ‘They entered the Mosque El Azhar with their horses and they tied them to the
kiblah
. They broke the lamps, the candles, and the desks of the students; they looted everything they could find in the closets; they threw on the ground the books and the Koran and trampled upon them with their boots. They urinated and spat in the mosque; they drank wine in it, and they broke the bottles and scattered the pieces in all the corners. They stripped everybody inside the mosque and took their clothes away.’

By the end of the following day, the insurrection was over, leaving some 3,000 Egyptians killed and 300 French dead. All those found carrying arms were executed, as were the members of the council of rebel leaders. ‘Every night,’ Napoleon boasted, ‘we have about thirty heads chopped off.’ It was a crowning display of ruthlessness, although he took no reprisals against ordinary people. Napoleon issued another megalomaniac pro-Islamic proclamation:

Sherifs, ulemas, preachers in the mosques, be sure to tell the people that those who, with a light heart, take sides against us shall find no refuge in either this world or the next. Is there a man so blind as not to see that destiny itself guides all my operations? . . . Let the people know that, from the creation of the world, it is written that after destroying the enemies of Islam and beating down the cross, I was to come from the confines of the Occident to accomplish my appointed task. Show the people that in more than twenty passages of the holy Koran what has happened has been foretold and what shall happen has been explained . . . If I chose, I could call each of you to account for the most hidden feelings of his heart, for I know everything, even what you have told to no one. But the day will come when all men shall see beyond all doubt that I am guided by orders from above and that all human efforts avail nought against me. Blessed are they who, in good faith, are the first to choose my side!