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

38 NAPOLEON’S EGYPTFrench taste in fashion accessories, it seems, had preceded them. Since Rosettawas a cosmopolitan port, it is not impossible that Christians and expatriateswelcomed the conquerors, whereas many Muslims with strong ties to the beysfled. Each national historiography remembers what it pleases about the ambiguousevents. No one disagrees that most of the soldiers threw themselvesdown in exhaustion once they arrived in the city. They ravenously devouredthe refreshments that wealthy city had to offer—water, raisins, dates, and even,as Moiret observed, “some bad wine” peddled “by local Jews.” The cavalrymanPierre Millet described Rosetta, then a city of 15,000 or so that had profitedfrom the decline and neglect of Alexandria under Ibrahim and Murad: “Thiscity is one league from the sea, on the western outlet of the Nile. It was in thiscity that we saw for the first time that famous river, which is so much spoken ofin history. Rosetta is surrounded by gardens full of all sorts of fruit trees, suchas date palms and lemon, orange, fig, and apricot trees, as well as otherspecies.” 20 The city was embellished by big square caravanserais that served aswarehouses and around which shops proliferated. Its prominent guilds includedfishermen, ironsmiths and bronzesmiths, water carriers, butchers,dyers, tailors, sellers of sorbets, and great import-export merchants. Its workshopsproduced olive oil, salted fish, textiles, and hookahs. It also had a shipyard.Moiret’s division departed from the city at midnight, provisioned withhardtack, and since they were following the Nile, they had access from then onto fresh water. By 11 July the division rendezvoused at Rahmaniya with theother two columns of the army.The quartermaster, Bernoyer, accompanied one of the western columnssouth and suffered much more horribly than Moiret’s division, as did all thesoldiers in those two columns. “We were annihilated,” he wrote, “but we hadto march over this immense plain of arid sand, in a climate far hotter thanour own, without the benefit of a single shadow so that we might recover abit and might be sheltered from the heat of the burning sun. In that overwhelmingsituation, we could not quench the thirst that was devouring us.Very quickly, our canteens were emptied, without any hope of refilling themvery often.” Bernoyer was lucky to have a canteen at all. The troops, lackingthem, suffered appallingly. They were “crushed” by thirst and fatigue, throatsparched, and sweating hot vapor. The halts at night were short, since Bonaparte,accompanying his men on horseback, wished to profit from the bettermarching conditions by starlight, to get out of the arid region as soon as possible,and to reach Cairo before Nelson returned. A Sergeant François recountedhow on 4 July his unit discovered wells at a village on the way to