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

THE FALL OF THE DELTA AND THE ARABIAN JIHAD233troops likely drew the parallel because they felt themselves mired in Egypt likethe ancient Hebrews and oppressed by a commander who was just as singlemindedas Moses’ royal nemesis.The conquest of Egypt had all along been conceived by the French consulCharles Magallon, and probably by Bonaparte himself, as the first step toward aFrench attack on British India and the French recovery of its Indian possessions.Deprive Britain of India, the thinking went, and you reduce it from a maritimeempire to a small island off the coast of Europe, ripe for the plucking. It madeno sense to take 32,000 soldiers to Egypt (4,000 had been left in Malta), sinceconquering and holding that country simply did not need so huge a force. Theinitial plan had been for Bonaparte to intrigue with Indian potentates such asTipu Sultan of Mysore, who was still resisting a British onslaught in the south,and to transport 20,000 men to India from the Red Sea. Late that fall an ambassadorfrom Mysore arrived at Suez and came to Cairo to see Bonaparte. He saidhe had been robbed of his papers at Jidda, but he “assured him that Tipu Sahibwas making great preparations and that he was counting a great deal on the arrivalof the French. He wanted relations with Bonaparte.” 22The conviction, often met with in officers’ memoirs, that the Indian leg ofthe expedition had become impossible reflected the commander in chief’s determinationnot to risk a mutiny by openly and prematurely broaching yet anotherarduous Oriental campaign. Lavalette maintained, “The political goal of the expeditionhad encountered a great obstacle in the loss of the fleet. It was nolonger possible to think, even in the future, of taking the army to India, sincethe superiority of the British on all the seas had become incontestable.” 23 Bonapartehad not entirely given up on an attack on India. Desvernois recalled howthe Corsican, on his return from the exploratory expedition to the Red Sea, noticedthe speed and agility of camels. 24 His aides-de-camp had learned to ridecamels at a gallop. Bonaparte raced them on his horse but could not catch them.Desvernois said that Bonaparte became convinced that an army mounted onswift camels, a beast that could be acquired in large numbers in Egypt, couldeasily reach India. The invasion force would have probably gone to Syria andalong the Tigris to Baghdad, turned east and gone up to Kermanshah in Iran,transited the Iranian plateau, entered Afghanistan, and then crossed through theKhyber pass down into North India.This route resembled that of Alexander the Great in antiquity and had beenfollowed more recently by the Iranian Nadir Shah in the 1730s and 1740s. Hebriefly put together a nomad-driven world empire that stretched from Baghdadto Delhi. Bonaparte’s was a desperate and unlikely plan but not an impossible