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

THE FALL OF THE DELTA AND THE ARABIAN JIHAD243way to neutralize the deadliest menace to his enterprise, the second GrandCoalition.Bonaparte led his force of 10,000 men against Cezzar Pasha, who was makingpreparations to invade French Egypt, in early February. His army took theMediterranean city of El Arish, the gateway to the Sinai Peninsula and to OttomanSyria, on 20 February, after a weeklong siege. Five days later he hadGaza. In early March the French besieged Jaffa, and brought dishonor onFrench arms by the massacre they conducted there when it fell to them on the 8March. Even worse was the execution, ordered by Bonaparte, of several thousandunarmed Ottoman prisoners of war. By 18 March the French were beforethe fortress of Acre.Bonaparte had not been able to bring heavy artillery overland. He attemptedto ship some big field pieces from Damietta, but his transport vesselswere captured by the British and they never arrived. With only light artillery,Bonaparte was never able to punch a hole in the walls of the Crusader fortresswhere Cezzar and his troops were ensconced. Bonaparte struck again and again.Stubborn, inattentive to the cost in the lives of his troops, desperate because heknew that the success of his entire campaign in the Orient hung in the balance,the commander in chief threw his men at the fortress no less than thirteentimes, and they were beaten back every time by the newly reformed, Westerndrilledarmy of Cezzar, who enjoyed naval backing from the British. Several ofthe officers we met above, including the engineer, Captain Horace Say, and thepeg-legged General Caffarelli, died fighting in Syria.By late May, Bonaparte had reluctantly accepted defeat at Acre. His forcessimply could not take the fortress, and without it could not hope to take Syria.He returned to Cairo, his troop strength much depleted by battles and plague,but he put out propaganda about the campaign having been a glorious success.He and his bedraggled soldiers did a victory lap around the Egyptian capital,and he issued another of his Muslim decrees as the great Sultan, promising tobuild a huge mosque in honor of his triumph.In late July, the British navy landed an Ottoman expeditionary force of15,000 men at Abuqir, near Alexandria. General Murat’s cavalry fought it off,but at the cost of several hundred French lives. The Abuqir campaign clearlypointed toward the future, in which the French, boxed up in Egypt, would facerepeated attempts to dislodge them by joint British and Ottoman forces, andwould suffer from steady attrition. The Army of the Orient had already lost