The commander-in-chief boarded a Maltese galley about 4 p.m. A fleet of small craft collected about the galley, which had to anchor half a mile offshore, in the darkness. About 1 a.m., impatient to reach land, Bonaparte jumped into a launch, with Brueys holding him by the hand to steady him. Accompanied by Generals Berthier, Caffarelli, and Dommartin, he reached shore some distance away from al-Murabit. By this time, Kléber, Menou, and Bon had succeeded in landing close to 5,000 men; Desaix, to Bonaparte's annoyance, was still bobbing on the waves with his division; Reynier had landed a few hundred men. After ordering a watch to be placed to guard the beachhead, Bonaparte slept for about an hour, while the drenched troops continued to make their way to shore.

At three in the morning, under a bright moon, Bonaparte passed in review what troops there were. He then gave orders for the divisions of Kléber, Menou, and Bon to begin their march on Alexandria, leaving Reynier's and Desaix's men behind as a guard.

Neither food rations nor personal belongings, nor a single piece of artillery, nor a single horse had reached shore as yet. There was no drinking water, and none was to be found all the way to Alexandria. Few of the men had had anything to eat in the first twenty-four hours from the landing. On empty stomachs, after five or six weeks of a grueling crossing, carrying nothing but their weapons and the clothes they wore, sick and exhausted by the night's exertions, the troops began their march, at dawn, through a desert, to take a fortified city by assault. "Confidentially", says Lieutenant Thurman in a letter to his family,,"I can assure you that it was thirst which inspired our soldiers in the capture of Alexandria. At the point the army had reached, we had no choice between finding water and perishing.(1) Still, there were some who preferred even this to their ordeals aboard ship. "All my wishes", says Lieutenant Vertray, "looked forward to the moment when I would recover the appetite I had left behind at Gozo.(2)

There was, of course, no road; there is one now-the road from Alexandria to 
al-`Alamayn, through the Libyan Desert. The troops had not marched for long when the sun rose and beat down on them. What wells or cisterns they found on their way were dry or had been filled in by the Bedouins. The heat and thirst soon became intolerable; still the men marched on there was no choice. At their head was Bonaparte himself, on foot. At his side walked Caffarelli, stumping through the sand on his wooden leg; Dumas, commander of the cavalry, without a horse; and Dommartin, commander of the artillery, without a gun.

By eight in the morning, the French columns reached the outer fortifications of Alexandria. The wind had stopped. Some, like Lieutenant Vertray, fell to the ground, prostrated by the heat, when their columns were ordered to halt. Fortunately for Vertray, there was a well near the spot where he fell; not all were so lucky.

General Bonaparte, after surveying the fortifications from the pedestal of Pompey's Pillar, which was to be his headquarters for several days, ordered his troops to attack without a rest. He then sat down and idly lashed away at a mound of potsherds with his riding whip. He too was thirsty, but no one could find water for him. An officer who had managed to carry some oranges all the way from Malta to Pompey's Pillar offered them to him. The General ate them greedily.

The preceding evening, Muhammad Kuraiym had sent the following dispatch to Murad Bey, in Cairo: "My lord, the fleet which has just appeared is immense. One can see neither its beginning nor its end. For the love of God and of His Prophet, send us fighting men".(3) Even if he had known the wretched and perilous condition of the French army, there was little he could do. According to Nicholas the Turk, the defenders of Alexandria had but one barrel of gunpowder for their artillery. As for cavalry, aside from the useless Bedouins, there was no more than a score of Mamaliyk. As terrified of the French as the French were of the dangers and hardships facing them, Kuraiym sent no less than thirteen messengers to Cairo in the course of the night. It was, to use an expression dear to Nicholas, a night of horror such as will make the hair of an infant at its mother's breast turn white in an instant'.(4)

Nicholas's fellow chronicler `Abd al-Rahman al-Gabartiy asserts that, when day broke, "the French surrounded the city like a swarm of locusts",(5)

The French were even thirstier than the Alexandrians were terrified; by 11 a.m., the city was in their hands.
 

(The story continues)

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