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

92 NAPOLEON’S EGYPTDesvernois thought that the French infantry was presented with a dilemma.If all of them just fired into the mêlée, they would hit the French amid their attackers.He said that the Dragoons therefore executed a rolling fire that sent theMamluks fleeing. While the combination of infantry and light artillery was indeedoften deadly to the slave soldiers, al-Jabarti gives another reason why theyleft the field at that point. Word reached Ibrahim Bey that the Bedouin, seeingthe French and the Ottoman Egyptians busy with one another, had decided toplunder his treasure themselves. He and his men therefore disengaged, foundthe Bedouin, and chased them away from his property, killing a number ofthem. Then he and his party, including the Ottoman governor, Ebu BekirPasha, departed toward El Arish, the gateway into the Sinai.The commander in chief concluded with evident satisfaction, “Ibrahim Beyin that moment headed out into the Syrian desert; he had been wounded incombat.” Desvernois surveyed the battlefield. A hundred slave soldiers lay deadon the ground, but, he admitted, “Our losses were similar.” Detroye minimizedFrench casualties, writing that thirteen Frenchman had been killed outright andthirty-eight wounded, thirteen of them mortally. Three French officers hadbeen cut down (Desvernois said “grievously murdered”). Detroye admitted,“Almost all of us were tagged.” Bonaparte made one last attempt to turn hisnemesis, sending a letter translated by the Orientalist Jean Michel Venture deParadis to him by courier on 12 August: “The superiority of the forces that Icommand cannot be contested. You are on the verge of leaving Egypt and beingobliged to cross the desert. You can find in my generosity fortune and wellbeing,of which fate is about to deprive you. Let me know, in reply, your intentions.The viceroy of the Sultan is with you. Send him to me bearing yourresponse. I readily accept him as a mediator.” 9 Gen. Augustin Belliard laterwrote that Ibrahim had been in communication, through the Bedouin intelligencenetwork, with the Egyptian coast and knew what Bonaparte had not yetlearned, that the French fleet had been attacked by the British navy. Since thebey was, as a result, not sure which way the wind would blow, he declined to respondto the commander in chief’s offer. 10 Bonaparte was said to be puzzled bythis silence, since Murad Bey in the south had been willing to correspond, atleast, with the French officers pursuing him.Bonaparte left the division of Reynier at Salahiya to guard this approach toEgypt and ordered a fort constructed. The evolutionary biologist GeoffroySaint-Hilaire revealed in a letter to his father a month later that, in fact, theFrench turned the town’s main mosque into their fort. Detroye said he learnedthe lesson that one could not attack the Egyptian cavalry only with cavalry. The