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

THE FESTIVAL OF THE REPUBLIC163small traders, but no great merchants.” The city’s harbor was located on theeastern branch of the Nile, a few miles inland from the Mediterranean. One officerobserved that it was only forty-eight hours from Damietta to Gaza in OttomanSyria by sea.Gerbaud confided in his diary on 12 September, “Fears raised by 3,000skiffs assembled on Manzala Lake, a short distance from here.” Tubar hadarmed the fishermen around Lake Manzala and equipped their boats as a fleet.Millet recalled that toward the middle of September he and his unit were sentup the Manzala Canal from Mansura. “After several days of traveling up thecanal,” he recalled, “ . . . we were assaulted by Arabs and by the inhabitants ofmany villages who had assembled to pounce on us. The canal along which wetraveled was very narrow. The boats almost touched the two banks.” 3 He describedhis unit as arriving in front of a big village, not twenty feet away. “Thelast thing we were thinking was of being attacked, when all of a sudden we saw acrowd of peasants and Arabs about to throw themselves at us.” The assailantsprepared to jump into the French skiffs.Unprepared and sweltering in the heat, the French had to grab up theirarms. Millet characterized their attackers as being “men as well as women,”armed with lances, pistols, and swords. The French only had 150 men. Theybegan firing their muskets, scaring off the Egyptians, “who departed morequickly even than they had arrived.” He said that the French now pursued thepeasants, “always keeping up continual fire, which caused them great losses,both in killed and in wounded.” Millet’s unit suffered five dead and a dozenwounded. “The battle finished, we crossed the canal and entered the village,where we wrought a terrible carnage on all those who had withdrawn to it.”After they had ransacked the hamlet, they set fire “to all four corners of it.”They then went back to a village where they had left an agent and much booty(“contributions”), but found that the agent had been killed and their skifflooted. They burned that village, too. Then they returned to Mansura, havingrun smack into a major uprising.Tubar loaded crowds of fierce Bedouin warriors from Daqahliya and Sharqiyaprovinces into boats to support his lake people and villagers, and asquadron of 150 skiffs set out for Matariya, a town near the middle of the westerncoast of the lake. They then made for Damietta, toward which a swift windcarried them, allowing them to land at a village only half a league away. On 14September, Gerbaud wrote, “Certitude of the perfidy of the headmen ofShu’ara, Manzala, etc.” Around midnight, the Bedouins crowded off the skiffs,armed with muskets, lances, and picks, and managed to surprise the sleeping