Napoleon's Pyramids (10 page)

But first he had to fight his way into the city.

N
apoleon had hoped that the mere presence of his advancing column on the beach might persuade the Alexandrians to surrender, but they hadn’t experienced European firepower yet. The Mameluke cavalry was cocky and bold. This caste of slave warriors, whose name meant “bought men,” had been organized by the famed Saladin as a personal bodyguard in the time of the Crusades. So powerful were these warriors from the Caucasus that they conquered Egypt for the Ottoman Turks. It was the Egyptian Mamelukes who had first defeated the Mongol hordes of Genghis Khan, gaining undying renown as soldiers, and they had held Egypt in the ensuing centuries, neither marrying into its population nor even deigning to learn the Egyptian language. They were a warrior elite, treating their own citizens as vassals in the ruthless way that only an ex-slave, exposed to cruelty himself, can exhibit. They galloped into battle on Arabian steeds superior to any horses the French had, hurling themselves at enemies with musket, lance, scimitar, and a sash crammed with pistols. By reputation, their courage was matched only by their arrogance.

Slavery was different in the East than the hopeless tyranny I’d seen in New Orleans and the Caribbean. To the Ottomans, slaves were the most reliable allies, given that they were stripped from their past and not part of Turkish feuding families. Some became princes, meaning the most oppressed could rise the highest. And indeed, the Mameluke slaves had become masters of Egypt. Unfortunately, their greatest enemy was their own treachery—no Mameluke sultan ever died in bed because of their endless conspiracies for power—and their weaponry was as primitive as their steeds were beautiful, for they wielded antiques. Moreover, while slaves could become masters, free men were often treated like serfs. The Egyptian population had little love for their leaders. The French saw themselves as liberators, not conquerors.

While the invasion had taken the enemy by surprise, by morning the few hundred Mamelukes of Alexandria had assembled a ragged force of their own cavalry, Bedouin raiders, and Egyptian peasants coerced into forming a human shield. Behind, on the walls of the city’s old Arab quarter, garrison musketeers and artillerymen had anxiously assembled on the ramparts. As the first French ranks approached, the enemy cannon were inexpertly fired, the shot pattering the sand well short of the European columns. The French stopped while Napoleon prepared to offer surrender terms.

No such opportunity presented itself, however, because the Mamelukes apparently took this pause as hesitation and started to drive a mass of crudely armed peasants toward us. Bonaparte, realizing the Arabs meant battle, signaled with flags for naval support. Shallow-draft corvettes and luggers began working in toward shore to bring their cannon to bear. The few light guns brought ashore in the longboats were also run forward on the sand.

I was thirsty, tired, sticky from salt and sand, and finally comprehending that I’d put myself in the middle of a war, thanks to the clumsy necklace. I was now bound to this French army for survival. Still, I felt oddly safe near Bonaparte. As he had implied, he carried an aura, not so much of invincibility as luck. Fortunately, our march had accumulated a skirt of curious Egyptian opportunists and beggars. Battles attract spectators like boys to a schoolyard fight. Shortly before dawn I’d spied a youth selling oranges, bought a bag for a silver franc, and earned favor with the general by sharing it. We stood on the beach sucking the sweet pulp, watching the moblike Egyptian army shamble toward us. Behind the peasants the Mameluke knights galloped back and forth, bright as birds in their silk robes. They waved shiny swords and shouted defiance.

“I’ve heard that you Americans boast of your accuracy with your hunting rifles,” Napoleon suddenly said, as if an idea for amusement had just occurred to him. “Do you care to demonstrate?”

Officers turned to look, even as the suggestion took me by surprise. My rifle was my pride, the maple oiled, my powder horn scraped thin to the point of translucence so I could see the fine black grains of French powder inside, and my brass polished, an affectation I’d never dare in the forests of North America where a gleam could give you away to animal or enemy. The voyageurs had rubbed theirs with green hazelnut to obscure any shine. As beautiful as my rifle was, however, some of these soldiers considered its long barrel an affectation. “I don’t feel those men are my enemy,” I said.

“They became your enemy when you stepped on this beach, monsieur.”

True enough. I began to load my gun. I should have done it some time before, given the impending battle, but I’d been striding down the beach as if on holiday, all military bands, martial camaraderie, and distant gunshots. Now I’d have to earn my place by contributing to the fight. So are we seduced and then enlisted. I measured extra powder for long range and used the ramrod to push down the linen-wrapped ball.

As the Alexandrians came on and I primed the pan, attention suddenly swung from me to a dashing Bedouin who was riding up from the ranks behind us, his black horse spraying sand, black robes rippling in the wind. Clinging behind was a French cavalry lieutenant, weaponless and looking sick. Reining up near Bonaparte’s cluster of staff, the Arab waved in salute and hurled a cloth at our feet. It opened as it fell, scattering a harvest of bloody hands and ears.

“These are men who will harass you no more, effendi,” the Bedouin said in French, his face masked by the cowl of his turban. His eyes waited for approval.

Bonaparte made a quick mental tally of the butchered appendages. “You have done well, my friend. Your master was right to recommend you.”

“I am a servant of France, effendi.” Then his eyes fastened on me and widened, as if in recognition. I was disturbed. I knew no nomads. And why did this one speak our language?

Meanwhile the lieutenant slid off the Arab’s horse and stood stricken and awkward to one side, as if not sure what to do next.

“This one I rescued from some bandits whom he chased too far in the dark,” the Arab said. This was a trophy too, we sensed, and a lesson.

“I applaud your help.” Bonaparte turned to the freed captive. “Find a weapon and rejoin your unit, soldier. You’re luckier than you deserve.”

The man’s eyes were wild. “Please, sir, I need rest. I am bleeding…”

“He’s not as lucky as you think,” the Arab said.

“No? He looks alive to me.”

“The Bedouin habit is to beat captive women…and rape captive men. Repeatedly.” There was crude laughter among the officers and a slap to the back of the unfortunate soldier, who staggered. Some of the jocularity was sympathetic, some cruel.

The general pursed his lips. “I am to pity you?”

The young man began to sob. “Please, I am so ashamed…”

“The shame was in your surrender, not your torture. Take your place in the ranks to destroy the enemy who humiliated you. That’s the way to erase embarrassment. As for the rest of you, tell this story to the rest of the army. There is no sympathy for this man! His lesson is simple: Don’t be captured at all.” He turned back to the battle.

“My pay, effendi?” The Arab waited.

“When I take the city.”

Still the Arab didn’t move.

“Don’t worry, your purse is growing heavier, Black Prince. There will be even bigger rewards when we reach Cairo.”

“If we reach it, effendi. I and my men have done all the fighting so far.”

Our general was unperturbed by this observation, accepting insolence from this desert bandit he never would from his officers. “My American ally was just about to correct that by demonstrating the accuracy of the Pennsylvania longrifle. Weren’t you, Monsieur Gage? Tell us its advantages.”

All eyes were again on me. I could hear the tramp of the Egyptian army coming closer. Feeling the reputation of my country was at stake, I held up my gun. “We all know that the problem with any firearm is that you only get one shot and then must take anywhere from twenty seconds to a full minute to reload,” I lectured. “In the forests of America, a miss means your quarry will be long gone, or an Indian will be on you with his tomahawk. So to us, the time it takes to load a longrifle is more than compensated by a fighting chance to hit something with that first shot, unlike a musket where the path of the bullet can’t be predicted.” I put the weapon to my shoulder. “Now, the long barrel is of soft iron, and that and the gun’s weight helps to dampen a discharge’s whip when the bullet leaves the muzzle. Also, unlike a musket, the inside of a rifle’s barrel is grooved, putting a spin on the bullet to improve its accuracy. The length of the barrel adds velocity, and it allows the rear sight to be set well forward, so that you can keep both it and its target in focus with the human eye.” I squinted. One Mameluke was riding ahead of his fellows, just to the rear of the peasant mob shambling in front of him. Allowing for the wind off the ocean and the bullet’s drop, I aimed high at his right shoulder. No firearm is perfect—even a rifle gripped in a vise won’t put each bullet atop each other—but my gun’s “triangle of error” was only two inches at a hundred paces. I squeezed the set trigger, its click releasing the first trigger so that the second was at hair touch, minimizing any jerk. Then I kept squeezing and fired, figuring the bullet would hit the man square in the torso. The rifle kicked, there was a haze of smoke, and then I watched the devil buck backward off his stallion. There was a murmur of appreciation, and if you don’t think there’s satisfaction in such a shot, then you don’t understand what drives men to war. Well, I was in it now. I put the stock down butt first on the sand, ripped open a paper cartridge, and began to reload.

“A good shot,” Bonaparte complimented. Musket fire was so inaccurate that if soldiers didn’t aim for the enemy’s feet, the kick of the gun could send a volley over their heads. The only way for armies to hit each other was to line up tightly and blast away from close distances.

“American?” the Arab queried. “So far from home?” The Bedouin wheeled his horse, preparing to leave. “To study our mysteries, perhaps?”

Now I remembered where I’d heard his voice! It was the same as the lantern bearer in Paris, the man who had led the gendarmes to me when I had discovered the body of Minette! “Wait! I know you!”

“I am Achmed bin Sadr, American, and you know nothing.”

And before I could say anything more, he galloped off.

U
nder shouted orders the French troops rapidly assembled into what would be their favorite formation against Mameluke cavalry, a hollow square of men. The squares were several ranks thick, each of the four sides of men facing outward so that there was no flank to turn, their bayonets forming a four-sided hedge of steel. To crisp the ranks, some officers drew lines in the sand with their sabers. Meanwhile the Egyptian army, or more accurately, its rabble, began to stream toward us with ululating cries under a hammer of drums and blare of horns.

“Menou, form another square next to the dunes,” Napoleon ordered. “Kleber, tell the rest of them to hurry.” Many of the French troops were still coming up the beach.

Now the Egyptians were running straight at us, a tide of peasants armed with staves and sickles, pushed by a line of brilliantly dressed horsemen. The commoners looked terrified. When they got within fifty meters, the first French rank fired.

The crash of gunfire made me jump, and the result was as if a giant scythe had swept a rank of wheat. The front line of peasants was shredded, scores falling dead and wounded, the rest simply collapsing in fright from a disciplined volley unlike any they’d seen before. A huge sheet of white smoke lashed out, obscuring the French square. The Mameluke cavalry stopped in confusion, the horses wary of stepping on the carpet of cowering bodies before them, and their masters cursed the underlings they’d been driving to slaughter. As the overlords slowly forced their mounts forward over their cringing subjects, the second French rank fired, and this time some of the Mameluke warriors toppled from their horses. Then a third French rank let loose, even as the first was finishing reloading, and horses screamed, plunging and writhing. After this hurricane of bullets the surviving peasantry rose as if on command and fled, pushing the horsemen back with them and making a fiasco of the first Egyptian attack. The warriors slashed at their subjects with the flat of their swords but it did nothing to stem the flight. Some peasants pounded on the gates of the city, demanding refuge, and others ran inland, disappearing into the dunes. Meanwhile the French coastal ships started firing at Alexandria, the shots exploding against the city walls like a hammering fist. The ancient ramparts began crumbling like sand.

“War is essentially engineering,” Napoleon remarked. “It is order imposed on disorder.” He stood with hands clasped behind his back and head swiveling, absorbing details like an eagle. He was unusual in being to hold in his mind’s eye a picture of the entire battlefield and to know where concentration would turn the outcome, and this is what gave him his edge. “It is discipline triumphing over irresolution. It is organization applied against chaos. Do you know, Gage, it would be remarkable if even one percent of the bullets fired actually hit their target? That’s why line, column, and square are so important.”

As much as I was taken aback by the brutality of his militarism, his coolness impressed me. Here was a modern man of scientific calculation, bloody accounting, and emotionless reasoning. In a moment of directed violence, I saw the grim engineers who would rule the future. Morality would be trumped by arithmetic. Passion would be harnessed by ideology.

“Fire!”

More and more French troops were arriving near the city walls, and a third square formed to the seaward of the first, its left side ankle-deep in seawater when the waves surged in. Between the squares some light artillery pieces were placed and loaded with grapeshot, which would sweep enemy cavalry with small iron balls.