Foures arrived in Alexandria and insisted on pressing on for Cairo, despite the exhortations of Marmont,

the commandant on the coast, that he should remain there pending further orders. Marmont foresaw a
damaging scandal but was uncertain on his ground and weakly let the lieutenant proceed. When he
reached Cairo a week later he was at once informed by his messmates that Pauline was openly living
with Bonaparte. He burst into the palace, found her in the bath and whipped her severely, drawing
blood. Hearing the outcry, her servants rushed in and threw the husband out. Napoleon then ordered a
military court to dismiss Foures the service for conduct unbecoming, and urged Pauline to divorce him
and she agreed; her husband had destroyed the last vestiges of her affection for him by his brutality.
Thereafter Pauline was seen everywhere on Napoleon's arm. The troops called her 'Cleopatra', which
accurately suggested that her hold on the leader was wholly sexual. As usual in such cases, the affair
began to peter out once the first flames of passion were dowsed. In the end Napoleon grew tired of her
and did not take her back to France with him in August 1 799. She became General Kleber's mistress,
which irrationally annoyed the dog-in-the-manger Bonaparte, but was soon discontented and yearned
to return to France. Grudgingly Kleber allowed her to depart for Rosetta and the north coast where,
while waiting to take ship to France, she succumbed to the predatory Junot, always a man with an eye
to the main chance where women were concerned. In Marseilles she was detained for some time in a
quarantine hospital and when she eventually reached Paris Napoleon had her pensioned off and married
to Comte Henri de Rauchoup. Napoleon always had a sentimental streak when it came to his former
mistresses. Josephine meanwhile was matching infidelity with infidelity. According to Barras, when she
received a false report that her husband had been killed in Egypt, she burst out laughing, jumped for joy
and told Barras how glad she was that 'that cruel egoist' was dead. She even contemplated divorcing her
absent husband and marrying Hippolyte Charles. It was said that Louis Gohier, the new president of the
Directory, encouraged her in this ambition, hoping that he in turn could become her lover, but both
Charles and Barras cautioned against the idea. In yet another 189 melancholy twist of the ronde
de /'amour, Desiree in 1 798 took as her husband none other than Napoleon's bitterest enemy Jean
Bernadotte. The idyll with Pauline Foures came to an abrupt end on 10 February 1 799 when Napoleon
left Cairo for Syria. He had received intelligence that the Turks planned a two-pronged attack, with their
so-called Army of Rhodes being ferried across the Aegean by Napoleon's old opponent Commodore Sir
William Sidney Smith while a separate Army of Damascus advanced on eastern Egypt via Palestine and
Sinai. Napoleon's strategy was to avoid being caught between two fires: leaving a token force to control
Egypt, he intended to march to Palestine, seize the fortress of Acre, defeat the Damascus army and then
double back to meet the Army of Rhodes. For the invasion of Syria he relied on 1 3,000 infantry, 900
cavalry and some fifty big guns; a garrison of barely s,ooo was left in Cairo. The march across the arid
Sinai desert was gruelling, even in winter, and the army had to slaughter many of its mules and camels
to survive. Entry into the lemon and olive groves of the Gaza plain promised better things, but there was
a disappointment in the unexpectedly strong resistance of the fortress of El Arish. The defenders
repelled several frontal attacks before Napoleon forced a surrender on 19 February by opening a formal
siege. Together with the unintended consequences of the siege, Napoleon calculated that the delay at El
Arish had cost him eleven days - days, it turned out, which he could ill afford and which affected the
outcome of the entire campaign. Perhaps the frustration at El Arish was one factor in the obscene
butchery Napoleon ordered at Jaffa two weeks later. Gaza fell on 25 February, yielding 2,ooo prisoners,
and by 3 March the French army was at the gates of Jaffa. The 3,000 defenders here accepted the word
of a French officer that their lives would be spared if they surrendered. But once in possession of the
city, Napoleon ordered them all executed, plus about 1 ,400 of the prisoners taken at Gaza. This mass
slaughter was by any standards a war crime, but it reached a fresh dimension of horror in the way it was
carried out. Anxious to save bullets and gunpowder, Napoleon ordered his men to bayonet or drown the
condemned thousands. The resulting holocaust revolted hardened veterans who thought they already
knew about atrocities: there are well authenticated reports of soldiers wading out to sea to finish off
terrified women and children who preferred to take their chances with the sharks. This dreadful
massacre was one of several incidents that haunted Napoleon ever afterwards, not in the sense that he
felt guilty - he did not - but because he realized posterity would judge him harshly unless he 190 could
plead compelling necessity. He and his supporters have mounted several lines of defence, some
specious, some with a certain ad hoc force, but none convincing. The argument that his aides were not
authorized to accept a Turkish surrender is casuistry. Not much better is the tu quoque proposition: that
the defenders of Jaffa had killed a French herald who approached under a flag of truce, and that in Acre
the ferocious Turkish commander Djezzar Pasha had announced he would behead any French prisoners.
If Napoleon had come to Egypt to civilize, as he claimed, this rejoinder was not really open to him. More
compelling is the defence that he had barely enough food to feed his own army, would therefore have
to release the prisoners to fend for themselves and would thus risk having Acre reinforced by men to
whom a word of honour meant nothing. It is known that he was particularly enraged to find that most of
the Gaza prisoners who had been released on parole had simply gone on to fight at Jaffa. Perhaps
Napoleon genuinely thought that military ends justified any means. Perhaps he was supremely ruthless
and wanted to give his enemies convincing proof of his awesome qualities; the issue, in a word, was
credibility. Or perhaps he considered that Arabs and Turks were lesser breeds without the law and that
atrocities visited on them did not thereby legitimate war crimes when two European nations were
locked in combat. The issue of atrocities in the Napoleonic wars is a complex one, but it must be
conceded that Napoleon was the first one to set foot down that gruesome road. On the other hand, it is
true that the Turks habitually used massacre to cow their enemies, that they recognized no rules of war
and that, as in Spain later, the British made no attempt whatever to dissuade their hosts and allies from
frightful atrocities against French prisoners. As if the massacre was a sin crying to heaven for vengeance
and heaven had answered, the French army was immediately struck by plague and had to stay a week at
Jaffa. Morale plummeted, and Napoleon decided he had to assert his role as thaumaturge and inspired
leader. He followed one of the darkest episodes in his life by one of the most courageous by visiting the
hospital where his plague-stricken men lay dying (I I March). Fearlessly he touched the expiring men and
helped to carry out a corpse. Always Shavian in his attitude to illness and doctors, he assured his
petrified officers that willpower was everything and that the right mental attitude could overcome
plague. This is one of the great moments in Napoleonic iconography, Gros's painting Napoleon visiting
the plague victims of Jaffa portrays the leader as a Christ-like figure. But the effect on morale of his
courage was real enough at the time. By the 191 end of March he was able to resume the march on
Acre, even though he left 300 plague cases behind. The Fates were not smiling on the Syrian campaign,
for the delays at El Arish and Jaffa effectively precluded a successful conclusion. If Napoleon had arrived
at Acre any time before IS March, he could simply have walked into the city. But meanwhile two things
happened. On IS March Sir Sidney Smith appeared off Acre in the Royal Navy ships Tigre and Theseus,
just in time to prevent Djezzar Pasha evacuating the town. Smith had faced Napoleon at Toulon but, in
an even more bizarre turn of events, he brought with him the very same Phelipeaux, now an emigre
officer of engineers, who had once been Napoleon's classmate at the Paris Military Academy. Smith at
once landed some companies of British troops, while Phelipeaux put Acre in a sound state of defence.
Even so Napoleon might still have prevailed had not British naval power once more tilted the odds. His
flotilla bearing most of his siegeguns was intercepted by the Royal Navy off Mount Carmel, with the
consequence that when the French assaulted Acre they came under fire from their own artillery. With
proper siege-guns Napoleon could have blown Acre apart, but without them he was reduced to slow
sapping and mining or costly frontal assaults on prepared positions. Smith concentrated his fire on the
French trenches, making good use of the lighthouse mole and being supported by broadsides from
Theseus and Tigre. All the time fresh supplies reached Acre, while in the French lines the sick list
continued to grow. Morale was not aided by the news that Djezzar Pasha was paying a large bounty for
every infidel head brought to him. Operations went into temporary abeyance in the first week of April at
word of the approach of the Army of Damascus. Once contact was made with the enemy, the French
won all the early rounds. On 8 April an outnumbered Junot was the victor in a cavalry skirmish near
Nazareth, while on I I April Kleber with I ,soo men routed 6,ooo Turks in a more substantial battle at
Canaan. In yet another engagement the dashing cavalry leader Joachim Murat crossed the Jordan to the
north of Lake Tiberia and defeated s,ooo Turks. Emboldened by these easy successes, on I6 April Kleber
with just 2,000 men attempted a surprise dawn attack on the entire zs,ooo-strong Army of Damascus as
it lay unsuspecting in its tents. Not surprisingly, the attack failed and soon the French had their backs to
the wall, in a desperate position under Mount Tabor, with stocks of ammunition running low. They
formed square and prepared to sell their lives dearly. Suddenly, at about 4 p.m. Napoleon appeared,
having made a forced march from Acre. A devastating barrage from his cannon and some well- 192
aimed volleys from his advancing squares panicked the Turks, who had seen what just 2,ooo Frenchmen
could do and were terrified at the thought of being caught between the two armies. The retreat became
a rout, and soon the threat from the Army of Damascus was no more. Amazingly, Kleber's army, which
had fought all day, had lost just two killed and sixty wounded in a ten-hour battle with 25,000 horsemen.
If everything had gone right against the Army of Damascus, at Acre everything was still going wrong.
When, on 1 April, the French sappers exploded a large mine under the 'Tower of the Damned' guarding
the city, against all predictions it failed to crack the masonry and provide the breach needed. In a frontal
assault Napoleon narrowly escaped death from an exploding shell through the quick action of his
personal bodyguard, the Guides. There was a shortage of food and essential materiel, also of
ammunition and cannonballs. Even when the rest of the siege artillery arrived safely at Jaffa and
Napoleon was able to bring big guns to bear on Acre, he still could not take the city. Then plague broke
out again, with 270 new cases by the end of April.