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

118 NAPOLEON’S EGYPTfrom villages recently pillaged by the French or the Bedouin.” On 23August,Captain Thurman described his return by skiff from Cairo to Rahmaniya duringwhich he and his companions constantly met with sandbars made invisible bythe rising floodwater: “In these trips on the Nile, our skiffs would often runaground. The Bedouin and peasants would profit from it to fire at us, to whichwe responded while the sailors were occupied with getting us back afloat. Wehad many men killed or wounded.”At the mouth of the Nile, Niello Sargy complained, it was “almost impossibleto escape British cruisers.” Gen. Auguste Marmont explained why this situationwas intolerable: “During this time, the army had great need of warmunitions, which were stored at Alexandria. Alexandria had need of the wheatstored at Rosetta and on the Nile.” The great river’s distributaries in the Deltahad moved over time, leaving Alexandria high and dry and without a naturalsource of sweet water, which had to be brought from the interior. It was necessaryto discourage peasants from drawing off too much water from the canalthat brought it to Alexandria, which in turn required military control of theDelta hinterland.Niello Sargy’s destination was Damanhur. There Gen. Félix Dumuy hadfaced a rebellion in mid-July, as a result of which he was forced to withdraw toAlexandria. In mid-August, Kléber, garrisoned at Alexandria, came up withtroops to repress the Bedouin and retake Damanhur. On 18 August, Bonapartewrote to General Marmont that if the expedition to subdue Damanhur failed,the general was to take two columns and clear all enemy troops from theprovince, and then punish the inhabitants of the city for the way they behavedwith General Dumuy. 23 In fact, Kléber had brought the town of 4,000 backunder French control, and Niello Sargy found “everything in order.” Kléberhad come to suspect that the old governor of Buhayra, Sayyid Muhammad Kurayyim,was implicated in the Damanhur revolt behind the scenes, and was havinghis staff tip hostile Bedouin to French troop movements. The uprightAlsatian carefully built a case against the governor, convinced Bonaparte of it,and on 15 August had him arrested as a “traitor to the French Republic” (not asobriquet he could have imagined earlier in life). 24Niello Sargy lamented that despite some encouraging news on the securityfront, the French at that point faced penury. The Alexandria customs on importsand exports had come to 50,000 écus (300,000 francs) a month and Bonapartehad counted on being able to appropriate that income. It had fallen tonothing since the British blockade began. They had no choice but to begin tryingto realize money from the bullion they had taken from Malta, which had