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

226 NAPOLEON’S EGYPTthe population provoked constant turmoil. Bonaparte instructed his officers tocollect the winter miri, an Ottoman tax on agricultural land. The rice crop wascoming in. Gerbaud recalled late that fall, “The countryside appeared more beautifulthan ever. Season of harvesting the rice. Rice is a plant that lives in the water.It is sown in May. It is cut when it is still very green, and one immediately husks itwith the help of a machine with circular iron blades that one walks over the top ofit with the aid of donkeys or cows.” 7The commander in chief also sought to collect in kind on horses and somekinds of livestock. In late November, Gen. Louis-Nicholas Davout led threehundred French cavalrymen in an attack on a Bedouin tribe in the Delta, aimedat confiscating their large herd of camels. Bonaparte needed the camels as packanimals for further campaigns and may already have begun planning a camelcorps cavalry unit. Davout was supported by ships commanded by CaptainUmar, a Mamluk who had gone over to Bonaparte. The French carefully surroundedthe tribesmen on land, while Umar’s skiffs cut off any hope of retreatacross the river. “Despite their pleas and curses, we took from them at least1,500 camels, a large number of sheep, and thirty water buffalos. This tribe hadalready on numerous occasions refused to pay the miri tax and always had fled atthe approach of infantry detachments. . . .” 8 When the Bedouin realized that thecavalry force had cut off their retreat, they submitted, giving up their livestock.“Only the women cried and pulled out their hair, cursing us with an incrediblevolubility.” A French cavalryman praised the supporting role of the Egyptiansailors, saying that the Muslims were “very good soldiers” and “impervious tofatigue.” He called Umar “extremely intelligent” and a fine leader of the unit hehad raised. They were, he said, precious auxiliaries to the French army and “detestthe Arabs, at whose hands they have often suffered.” The adjectives employedby French officers to describe Muslim troops and officers serving thebeys tended to be rather more negative. The cavalryman said that the Egyptianunits that Bonaparte had created were lightening the load of the French army.Bonaparte clearly wanted more young recruits.Gerbaud recalled in December that an order from the commander in chiefhad arrived “which instructs that the generals in command of the provinces grabchildren of from twelve to sixteen years from the villages that engage in revolt”and send them to him until he determined their destination. “If the village meritsburning, one should always seize the children.” 9 Bonaparte appears to havebeen running an orphanage–cum–military training center at the Citadel, seekingto expand the small child-Mamluk cavalry unit he had established the previousAugust with Egyptian peasant recruits. Egyptian peasants had not been