Napoleon in Egypt (49 page)

Under Desaix, the behavior of the French soldiers towards the local population was also more philanthropic. Adjudicating over disputes in the region under his command, Desaix was already gaining the reputation which would lead to him being known by the Egyptians as Sultan El-Adel (The Just Sultan). The invading French army in Upper Egypt was beginning to attract support, especially amongst the Orthodox Greek and Coptic minorities, which were numerous in the south. These were useful allies, as the Copts had been employed by the Mamelukes to gather the
miry
, and knew precisely how much tax was due from each individual. Desaix’s most notable new ally was the Copt leader Moallam Jacob, formerly the chief tax collector for the whole of Upper Egypt. His network of contacts throughout the region was to prove invaluable, both for intelligence purposes and in preparing for the arrival of French troops.

As Murad Bey journeyed south, he would order the immediate collection of the
miry
, to support his campaign, no matter whether the crops had been gathered in yet or not. This may have deprived Desaix of much-needed financial support, but it also turned some of the local Egyptians into French allies, even if the majority of the population remained hostile. Moallam Jacob’s spies would inform him of who might prove favorable to the advancing French, and from now on he seldom left Desaix’s side, even advising him on the terrain and which were the best military tactics to adopt. Not for nothing did the French soon become known amongst the local Egyptians as “Moallam Jacob’s army.”

Not until January 19 did the flotilla finally make it to Girga, arriving with due pomp: a military band playing on the deck of one of the
chebeks
, as the soldiers on the riverbank cheered it in. Two days later, Desaix and his division, accompanied by the flotilla, set off south towards Samhud, sixteen miles upstream, where Moallam Jacob’s spies had informed him that Murad Bey’s forces were massed, ready to repulse the French.

Yet why had Murad Bey chosen once again to stand and fight? After the Battle of Sediman, his Mameluke beys and their cavalry, along with their supporting Bedouin, had simply scattered in all directions, some dispersing into the Libyan desert, others fleeing south along the Nile. Over half the beys had fled as far as Edfu, which was 120 miles south of Girga.

At this point Murad Bey had appealed to his great adversary Hassan Bey, the ruler of Esna province, south of Girga, to forget their differences and become his ally. Responding to this plea for Mameluke solidarity, Hassan Bey had joined forces with Murad Bey, bringing with him his entire cavalry. At the same time, Murad Bey had sent couriers across the eastern desert to the port of Kosseir, where they had crossed the Red Sea to Jeddah and Yanbo, bearing an appeal for Muslim warriors to join the fight against the infidels. He had even dispatched some of his beys south to Nubia, to bring black slaves to fight at his side. As a result, he now had an assembled force of 3,000 infantrymen, as well as 11,000 cavalry, consisting of 2,000 Mamelukes, 7,000 Arabs, and 2,000 “Meccans” from across the Red Sea. Meanwhile, Desaix was moving south with a force of just 3,000 infantry and 1,000 cavalry, but he remained confident: this was just the confrontation he had been waiting for.

On January 22 the two armies faced each other across the flat plain beside the Nile at Samhud. Desaix adopted the usual French tactics, forming his men into two infantry squares; but this time he had his cavalry, which was drawn up in three lines between them, with one line facing protectively to the rear. The Mamelukes too adopted their usual tactics, confident that this time their huge numerical superiority would win the day. Stretched out in a long glittering line, the array of Mameluke and Arab cavalry surged forward towards the French line, finally breaking into bloodcurdling shrieks as they charged towards the tight squares. Denon, who found himself in the middle of one of these squares, poetically evoked the scene: “The Mamelukes wheeled around us, their resplendent arms shining as they maneuvered their horses. They deployed all the splendor of the Orient, but our northern severity presented a harsh aspect which was no less imposing. The contrast was striking: it was iron defying gold—the plain glittered, the spectacle was superb.”
²⁸

Once again the French squares held in the face of the determined Mameluke charge, and held again as they wheeled and charged once more, in search of weak points in the French ranks. To the Mamelukes, this was not fighting at all, and they soon rode off dispirited, leaving the “Meccan” cavalry, who had no experience of the French squares, to continue with their brave but futile charges. The Battle of Samhud was soon over, with seventy Arabs and thirty Mamelukes killed, many more wounded, and just one French guardsman killed. However, the French fighting was not without its valor. Captain Desvernois of the cavalry, who was amongst the advance platoon placed in front of the squares, recalled his youthful heroism in his memoirs: “I received 18 wounds of no importance, but the enemy then singled me out. A saber blow slashed the tendons of my right forearm, forcing me to grab my saber in my left. My position became perilous: I was disarmed, defense less, in the midst of the fighting. I cried out to Savary to come to my aid. . . . He replied ‘Look after yourself as best you can!’”
²⁹
Exasperated, Desvernois made for his own lines. “Covered in blood, as too was my horse, I made it into the interior of General Friant’s battle square. I had fourteen saber slashes through the gauntlet of my right arm, five through the left, with my index and middle fingers lightly wounded. My right arm, cut to the bone, which was itself broken, hung inert. Finally I had a severe bruise to the forehead: a blow which I had received from the shaft of a charging lance . . . my helmet had saved my life.”

There is no mention of young Captain Desvernois’ cry for help in Savary’s own memoirs, which only recall how his cavalry under General Davout set off in pursuit of the fleeing Mamelukes, “but it was unable to engage the enemy, no matter how far it pursued them into the desert. In revenge, they [returned and] cut to pieces the unfortunate fanatics from Mecca.”
³⁰
Desaix, in his official report to Napoleon on the Battle of Samhud, describes how his entire division “came out of it virtually unscathed,”
³¹
though he does mention Captain Desvernois, who seems on closer medical inspection to have suffered only “his wrist sliced by a dagger, without any permanent damage.”

Another extraordinary soldier’s tale, though this time true, emerges from Savary’s memoirs, in which he tells of a Mameluke who deserted to the French after the battle: “He was a Hungarian,
^*
a former noncommissioned officer in the Wenschal regiment of the Austrian hussars, who had been taken prisoner in the war against the Turks in 1783 or 1784.” He told the French that “even the officers of the Hungarian and Croat commandos who had been taken prisoner in the same war, had been taken off to Constantinople, then shipped to Egypt, where they were made Mamelukes. This did not displease them and they made no effort to return to their country, even though they had a consul in Egypt; yet it is fair to say that if their beys had even suspected them of entertaining such thoughts they would have had their heads cut off at once.”
³²

Once again, Murad Bey and most of his Mamelukes had lived to fight another day. Although Desaix now had a substantial cavalry force at his disposal, he had been unable to prevent their flight. All he could do was pursue Murad Bey and his Mamelukes even further into Upper Egypt, with the aim of either catching them and eliminating them once and for all, or driving them from Egypt into the wastes of the Nubian desert.

XIX

Into the Unknown

As Desaix and his division marched further south along the Nile, they entered a world which few Europeans had penetrated. Soon they began coming across the fabulous remains of ancient Egypt: ruined cities, along with palaces and temples that had been no more than the chimera of travelers’ tales. The legendary remains of a forgotten pre-history of Western civilization now became reality before the eyes of the amazed French soldiers. But Desaix was pressing south so fast in his pursuit of Murad Bey that there was no opportunity for sightseeing. To Denon’s immense frustration, he had little time for sketching. “We were constantly advancing,”
¹
he complained, while Savary and others confirm that they only spent one night at each stop, and sometimes even marched through the night. Fortunately for Denon, both Desaix and his second-in-command Belliard took a sympathetic interest in what he was doing. As Denon recalled, “I found in General Desaix a scholar, curious for knowledge, a friend of the arts. I was obliged to him for all he allowed me to do despite the circumstances. . . . In General Belliard I found a kindred spirit, friendship and unfailing care.”
²
Such protection was all too necessary. Denon recalled “that we were surrounded with Arabs and Mamelukes, and that, in all probability, I should be made prisoner, robbed, and very likely killed, if I had thought to venture only a hundred paces from the column.”
³
Yet as one officer noticed, he did not always take heed of these dangers:

One day while the flotilla was traveling upriver, he saw some ruins and said he must do a drawing of them. Obliging his companions to set him down, he hurried out into the plain, ensconced himself in the sand, and began drawing. Just as he was finishing, a bullet whizzed past his piece of paper, and he looked up to see an Arab who, having missed his target the first time, was in the process of reloading. He snatched up his own gun, shot the Arab through the heart, shut his portfolio, and went back to the boat. In the evening when he was showing his drawings to the staff, General Desaix said: “Your horizon isn’t straight.” To which Denon replied: “Ah, that’s the fault of that Arab. He fired too soon.”

Ruins were not the only objects of interest the French encountered as they made their way south towards the tropics, leaving the cultivated green strip of the Nile valley to cut across the desert when there was a bend in the river. Denon describes one such occasion: “At last we entered the desert; where we saw not far away a wild beast that from its size and form we judged might be a hyena. We made after it, but our galloping horses were only able to follow it, without gaining on it.”
⁴
Both officers and men now began to feel that they were approaching the limits of the known world. Everything was slowly changing before their eyes: as they crossed the desert, the distant Nile would ripple and then appear to evaporate in the heat haze; clusters of huts would suddenly appear and then disappear on the far shore of the mirage lakes which shimmered out in the desert. Even what was real appeared unreal. Denon recorded how they began coming across “date palms much larger than we had ever seen, gigantic tamarisks, villages stretching well over a mile along the bank of the river.”
⁵

Thirty miles upstream, Desaix’s division reached Dendara (ancient Tentyra), where they came across a huge stone temple lying half buried in the sand with a number of makeshift Arab huts perched on its still intact roof. According to Denon: “Without any orders either having been given or received, every officer, every soldier left the road and rushed to Tentyra. Spontaneously, the whole army remained there for the rest of the day.”
⁶
The ruins of the temple were unlike anything Denon had known from ancient Greece or Rome:

The Egyptians have borrowed nothing from others, they have added no foreign ornaments. . . . Order and simplicity have been their principles, and they have raised these to the sublime. . . . In the ruins of Tentyra the Egyptians appeared to me as giants. . . . We should refrain from thinking, as we are in the habit of doing in our derogatory fashion, that Egyptian architecture marks the birth of this art; on the contrary, we should regard it as the highest standard against which we measure this art.
^*
7

Inside, the walls were inscribed with mysterious figures and indecipherable hieroglyphs, and in the ceiling of one of the inner rooms the French discovered a magnificent circular depiction of the zodiac.

Denon at once set to work sketching: “Pencil in hand, I passed from object to object, drawn from one by interest in the next, constantly enthralled, constantly distracted; my eyes, my hand, my mind were inadequate to the task of ordering and setting down all that overwhelmed me.”
⁸
Hours later the sun was setting, the soldiers had marched off, but Denon remained sketching, lost to the world, with Belliard standing protectively at his side. In the rapidly growing dusk they remounted their horses and galloped on after the marching columns, which were already more than two miles down the road. Denon recalled how that evening he encountered a soldier called Latournie, “an officer of great courage, intellect and refined taste, who sought me out and told me: ‘During my time in Egypt, I have constantly felt overwhelmed by this country, reduced to a state of melancholy and illness. Tentyra has cured me of all that. What I have seen today has been worth all my previous misery. No matter what happens to me from now on in the expedition, I shall be eternally grateful for my memories of this day, which will remain with me for the rest of my life.’”
⁹

Their next experience was not quite so inspiring, as Savary recalled:

The banks of the Nile began to be very dangerous, particularly at night, because of the enormous crocodiles which left the river to come and eat their fill of whatever they could find on the mud-banks. We often saw them, but we suffered no accidents. These animals, although monstrous, are very timid; the least sound makes them take flight, especially when they are away from the water, which they only leave at night.
¹⁰