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

THE MOST BEAUTIFUL NILE THAT HAS EVER BEEN117such as bread. “One day,” he wrote, “many cavalrymen and musketeers” went toa nearby village “to look for something to live on.” They appear to have stolenfrom the villagers some local stores of wheat, and they began milling them intoflour there on the spot with hand mills.Suddenly, around forty Bedouin appeared, who, “knowing that these soldiershad no defensive weaponry with them, entered the village and cut off theheads of these unfortunate soldiers, who totaled around twenty, among whomonly two escaped, who, as it happened, hid themselves—one in an oven and theother in a clay water jar.” It became known at camp that the Bedouin were atthat village, but the general in charge out at Giza, Millet contended, thoughtthat the soldiers who had gone there were armed and did not send reinforcements.A fatal misunderstanding had arisen, he said, and he knew whom toblame. “Since there are always men who do more than they are commanded, avillain of an adjutant major” had forbidden “any soldier to leave camp with hisarms, which was the cause of the misfortune of those ill-fated soldiers.”Even in Sharqiya, which Bonaparte had just subdued, the garrison left behindat Bilbeis faced further revolts. Sergeant François wrote that on 19 August,the headman of al-Qurayn came to warn his chief of battalion that some 1,500to 1,800 men, both Bedouin and peasants, had gathered in his jurisdiction.“These forces were to attack us, since they knew that we were few in number(458 men).” 21 That night, “these brigands irrupted into all the points of ourbivouac; but well entrenched behind earthen walls, we killed thirty-three oftheir men.” The French continued to build their fort at Bilbeis, employing mudbricks, and were able to buy meat and poultry from the surrounding villages, aswell as “puff pastry flat cakes, which are very good, and clean enough. For theTurks are generally dirty. But we did not look at them very closely; we consideredthat we could one day become Muslims and more miserable than they.”For the servicemen and noncommissioned officers, the only prospect worsethan perishing amid a hostile population was the threat that long-term survivalcould come only through assimilation and going native.The provinces to the west of Bilbeis were even more dangerous to theFrench. Niello Sargy recalled of August 1798, “One could not even travel onthe Nile without being obliged to battle Bedouin and Arabs, who were joined bythe inhabitants of riverine villages. Ships descending on Rosetta and Damiettawere increasingly attacked.” 22 The engineer Villiers du Terrage admitted thatsome of the trouble derived from French rapaciousness, saying that he had tohave an armed escort when traveling down from Rahmaniya to Cairo in mid-August “because we foresaw that we might take some fire, coming ordinarily