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11
a.m., says Bourrienne, Perrée informed him that,
unless the land forces came to his immediate assistance, the situation
was hopeless. Already several ships had been boarded by the Mamaliyk,
Bourrienne
continues. "Their crews were being massacred with barbaric ferocity,
and the captors displayed their heads to us holding them by their hair".
(1) It was a bad moment for Citizen Berthollet,
the eminent chemist. Preferring a quick death by drowning to being massacred,
he had filled his pockets with weights and was prepared to jump overboard
if necessary; but seeing that the other civilians had joined the soldiers
in the fight, he soon also took part in the firing. Monge, who once
had supervised the cannon foundries of all France, made himself useful
by helping to reload the guns. At last, Le Cerf scored a
hit on the
Mamluwkiy flagship, which carried some ammunition. There
was, says
Niquwlah al-Turkiyy
(Nicholas the Turk),
"a moment of intense terror: the explosion made the men fly up in the air
like birds".(2)
This sight, according to another Arabic source, made the French burst out
in hysterical laughter and caused a panic among the Muslims, both on land
and on water. The Mamluwkiy cavalry was just about to charge the
oncoming French a second time when the explosion occurred; instead of charging,
they and their followers began a headlong flight. The French occupied Shubrah
al-Khiyt without further resistance. The land troops
had suffered no losses; Perrée , who was promoted to Rear-Admiral,
reported to Brueys: "Twenty of my men were wounded, and several
killed. I lost my sword and a little bit of my left arm". (3)
Considering that over 1,00 rounds of artillery were fired by the
two flotillas, the toll was not excessive.
Bonaparte
had proved to his army that there was no cause to fear the Mamaliyk,
but he had let the Mamaliyk escape. As he told Bourrienne
when he saw him ten days later at Giyzah) his failure to cut off
the Mamaliyk' retreat was to be blamed entirely on the necessity
of coming to the relief of the flotilla "you, Monge, Berthollet,
and the rest".(4)Bourrienne
could not help replying that surely this was the least thing the General
could have done for his civilians, after taking their horses away and setting
them up for targets on the ships.
According
to
Niquwlah al-Turkiyy (Nicholas the Turk), "the French divisions
were advancing like an impetuous river, like a torrent unleashed" (5)
This impression was not shared by the French themselves, as they continued
their march in the afternoon of July 13, after about three hours'
rest from the battle, in pursuit of the Mamaliyk The victory had
cheered them but briefly, and demoralization soon set in again. To make
a short cut, the army left the banks of the Nile. The terrain, entirely
dried up, was cut by deep crevasses. Limping along with twisted ankles,
the soldiers began to regret the soft dust of the desert. "The day
after the combat at Shubra al-Khiyt,",
says
Vertray,
our
aching feet became as creviced as the ground they trod on.(6)
On July
14 at daybreak,
Bonaparte caught up with the two vanguard divisions-
Desaix's
and Reynier's-while they were halting for a distribution of rations.
Indignant at the delay, he brushed aside Desaix's explanations with
ill humor and ordered the march to be resumed instantly. Most eyewitness
accounts bear out Sergeant Francois's description of the following
four days of the march: "Men were dying, suffocated by the heat.
It felt like passing in front of a very hot oven. Several soldiers committed
suicide."(7)
The hardships
of the artillery men and their horses were even more grueling; every few
hundred yards, there were dried-up irrigation canals obstructing the progress
of the gun carriages. The wheels and axles broke with despairing regularity
and had to be repaired on the spot. The banks of the larger canals had
to be leveled to make passage possible.
Discipline,
briefly regained during the day of battle, seemed to be disintegrating
completely. "The army as a whole is discontented', "Brigadier
General Belliard noted in his diary. "The officers carelessly
allow their soldiers to fan out through the various villages on their route
and to take away whatever they can find.
(8)According to Sergeant François,
a village which refused to supply the goods requisitioned by the French
was put to the sword and burned down:
900
men, women, and children were massacred or burned to death, `in order to
teach a lesson to a half-savage and barbarous people".(9)
such scenes were frequent. Colonel Laugier describes one in his
diary: "On 26 Messidor July 14], we arrived at the village of Nakhlah,
which Bon's and Vial's divisions were ; in the process of looting. The
cries of the men, the weeping of the women, made a horrible noise.
The women climbed to the roofs of their houses and, every time they saw
a Frenchman on horseback, called to him and signified their distress by
waving back and forth a kind of shawl they held in both hands, ending up
with a lugubrious distressing cry. "
(10)
At
al-Wardan,
where the entire French army was assembled on
July 18, the troops
were given two days of rest. The march continued with much the same hardships,
on the 20th. Most of the commanders had by then resigned themselves
to letting their troops go about marauding, he since the supply service
had virtually broken down. The officers, being unable to maraud,
watched their men somewhat enviously as they it roasted their stolen pigeons,
chickens, and sheep. Ramrods would serve as spits. Their appetites sated,
the French soldiers would bed themselves down as best they could on straw
or on heaps of small branches, forgetting s the heat of the day in the
dampness of the night. Horses, donkeys, camels, soldiers, officers, everything
is mingled.
(11)
Such was
the condition of the French Army of the East that "impetuous river"',
that "torrent unleashed" when it arrived in the evening of July
20 at Umm-Dinar, a village near the point where the Nile
branches
out to form the Delta, about eighteen miles north of Cairo.
It was there that Bonaparte received intelligence of the disposition
of the Mamluwkiy forces in defense of the capital.
Murad
Bey was awaiting the French on the left bank of the
Nile, opposite
Bulaq,
at the village of Imbaba, which he had fortified.
Ibrahim Bey with the rest of the
Mamaliyk and
the militia was encamped at Bulaq, to head off the French
in case they should arrive on the right bank. On the Nile itself,
the Mamlukiy flotilla was awaiting the French.
This news
delighted Bonaparte: if Murad Bey had chosen to await
him on the right bank, the difficulties the French would have experienced
in crossing the Nile would have given him a decided advantage; as
it was, Bonaparte had him exactly where he wanted him. At two
o'clock in the morning of
July 21, the army was ordered to march
on Imbaba and to engage the Mamaliyk
in decisive battle. It reached its destination at 2 p.m., during
the worst heat of the day. About one mile from the French, the Mamaliyk
battle
line was drawn up; behind it loomed the Great Pyramids, their huge
and mysterious masses clearly visible at ten miles' distance; to
the left, the French could see the glittering skyline of the domes and
minarets of Cairo.
(The story continues)
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