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

THE FERMENT OF THE MIND57consistently cut off their communications with the units behind them and withAlexandria. The peasants in the villages along the way mostly disappeared, withtheir livestock, though they occasionally offered resistance. The soldiers, hungryand desperate, often pillaged the small villages they came upon, despite theirofficers’ efforts to prevent it. The fastidious Captain Moiret, who had once almostbecome a priest, says that the officers, as gentlemen, did not feel it right topartake of stolen chickens, and that they therefore suffered more than theirmen, being restricted in their diet to small portions of beans. Many memoiriststalked of eating nothing but watermelons. Another officer recalled, “We madewar on pigeons.” 18 Bonaparte himself bivouacked among his miserable troops,dining with his fellow officers on lentils. All were exhausted and perpetuallyhungry and thirsty as they marched up the Nile Valley in the full heat of mid-July, harassed by an alarmed and often brutalized local population.Bonaparte in his memoirs remarked that the troops were very nearly in amutinous mood and that “the evil was in the ferment of the mind.” He said thata rumor grew up that there was no splendid capital city, Grand Cairo, only anassemblage of adobe huts such as they had seen at Damanhur, where it was “impossibleto live.” He remembered that in the evening the soldiers talked politicsand cursed the Directory for “transporting” them. They blamed the scientistsand artists who so minutely examined the Egyptian antiquities they found alongthe way for having thought up the harebrained scheme of coming to Egypt, andcontinually ribbed them, even coming to employ the word “savant” or “scientist”to refer to their donkeys.Pelleport recalled that on 15 July, one of the divisions, suffocating in a particularlystrong desert wind, went beyond merely complaining and actually refusedto obey orders. Bonaparte was alerted and rode up to that division,ordering them to form an infantry square. He placed himself in the middle andaddressed them, thusly: “Courage on the field of battle is insufficient to make agood soldier. It requires, as well, the courage to face fatigue and privation. SupposeI had the intention of journeying to Asia after the conquest of Egypt? Tomarch in the traces of Alexander, I would need to have his soldiers.” 19 The division,Pelleport said, resumed its march without another word.Behind the resentments of the troops lay real misery. “One saw many soldiers,”Moiret says, “fall dead of hunger and fatigue, and many others blew outtheir brains from despair. . . . A pair of brothers embraced one another and threwthemselves into the Nile.” On the seventeenth, the soldiers’ precious sleep wasinterrupted by an Ottoman-Egyptian raid, which they easily repulsed. They thenresumed the scalding march toward the capital. Each man had a ration of only