Napoleon's Egypt: Invading The Middle East - Reenactor.ru

5THE FLIGHT OF IBRAHIM BEYLeclerc’s scouts initially spotted a hundred emirs leading Bedouin andpeasant irregulars, but the number of Ibrahim’s cavalrymen abruptlyswelled to a thousand. Around 10 A.M., Captain Malus reported, thebulk of the Bedouin cavalry rode out of the Abu Za’bal date palm orchards, followedby “an immense anthill of peasants.” Only about a sixth of the villagerswere armed with muskets, the rest presumably having only staves. “They spreadout around us and enveloped us, ambushing us in the cultivated countryside.”The inhabitants of other villages now joined them. The Egyptian forces “triedto charge us at several points at once,” he wrote, but the French were at firstable to keep them at a healthy distance with cannon fire. A junior cavalry officer,Lt. Desvernois recalled that “as at the Battle of the Pyramids, their cadavers litteredthe ground.” 1 The attackers kept coming, however, and forced the Frenchguards to redeploy. “We only had six hundred infantrymen dispersed along animmense tract.” Leclerc, Malus said, began to sense the consequences should hetoo pigheadedly attempt to defend the village.The people of al-Khanqa themselves rose up against their new colonialmasters, killing the sentinels within and assassinating the French bakers andbutchers. (Peasants living close to the edge of starvation knew how to hurt theFrench peasant soldiers.) Leclerc decided to regroup and make a stand at an enclosureto the east of the village. Malus maintained in his report that at that verymoment the enemy suddenly began to retreat. While reporting such a thingmight have made his sad story slightly more palatable to General Caffarelli, it isnot plausible, and Desvernois remembered no such stroke of good luck. On thecontrary, he said that Leclerc’s forces ran low on ammunition and had to withdraw.The French regained their camp outside the village at 4:00 P.M., themorale of the troops broken. They loudly voiced their anxieties, Malus wrote,