The man’s eyes were wild. ‘Please, sir, I need rest. I am bleeding
…’
‘He’s not as lucky as you think,’ the Arab said.
‘No? He looks alive to me.’
‘The Bedouin habit is to beat captive women… and rape captive men. Repeatedly.’ There was crude laughter among the officers and a slap to the back of the unfortunate soldier, who staggered. Some of the jocularity was sympathetic, some cruel.
The general pursed his lips. ‘I am to pity you?’
The young man began to sob. ‘Please, I am so ashamed…’
‘The shame was in your surrender, not your torture. Take your place in the ranks to destroy the enemy who humiliated you. That’s the way to erase embarrassment. As for the rest of you, tell this story to the rest of the army. There is no sympathy for this man! His lesson is simple: Don’t be captured at all.’ He turned back to the battle.
‘My pay, effendi?’ The Arab waited.
‘When I take the city.’
Still the Arab didn’t move.
‘Don’t worry, your purse is growing heavier, Black Prince. There will be even bigger rewards when we reach Cairo.’
‘If we reach it, effendi. I and my men have done all the fighting so far.’
Our general was unperturbed by this observation, accepting insolence from this desert bandit he never would from his officers. ‘My American ally was just about to correct that by demonstrating the accuracy of the Pennsylvania longrifle. Weren’t you, Monsieur Gage? Tell us its advantages.’
All eyes were again on me. I could hear the tramp of the Egyptian army coming closer. Feeling the reputation of my country was at stake, I held up my gun. ‘We all know that the problem with any firearm is that you only get one shot and then must take anywhere from twenty seconds to a full minute to reload,’ I lectured. ‘In the forests of America, a miss means your quarry will be long gone, or an Indian will be on you with his tomahawk. So to us, the time it takes to load a longrifle is more than compensated by a fighting chance to hit something with that first shot, unlike a musket where the path of the bullet can’t be predicted.’ I put the weapon to my shoulder. ‘Now, the long barrel is of soft iron, and that and the gun’s weight helps to dampen a discharge’s whip when the bullet leaves the muzzle. Also, unlike a musket, the inside of a rifle’s barrel is grooved, putting a spin on the bullet to improve its accuracy. The length of the barrel adds velocity, and it allows the rear sight to be set well forward, so that you can keep both it and its target in focus with the human eye.’ I squinted. One Mameluke was riding ahead of his fellows, just to the rear of the peasant mob shambling in front of him. Allowing for the wind off the ocean and the bullet’s drop, I aimed high at his right shoulder. No firearm is perfect – even a rifle gripped in a vice won’t put each bullet atop each other – but my gun’s ‘triangle of error’ was only two inches at a hundred paces. I squeezed the set trigger, its click releasing the first trigger so that the second was at hair touch, minimizing any jerk. Then I kept squeezing and fired, figuring the bullet would hit the man square in the torso. The rifle kicked, there was a haze of smoke, and then I watched the devil buck backward off his stallion. There was a murmur of appreciation, and if you don’t think there’s satisfaction in such a shot, then you don’t understand what drives men to war. Well, I was in it now. I put the stock down butt first on the sand, ripped open a paper cartridge, and began to reload.
‘A good shot,’ Bonaparte complimented. Musket fire was so inaccurate that if soldiers didn’t aim for the enemy’s feet, the kick of the gun could send a volley over their heads. The only way for armies to hit each other was to line up tightly and blast away from close distances.
‘American?’ the Arab queried. ‘So far from home?’ The Bedouin wheeled his horse, preparing to leave. ‘To study our mysteries, perhaps?’
Now I remembered where I’d heard his voice! It was the same as the lantern bearer in Paris, the man who had led the gendarmes to me when I had discovered the body of Minette! ‘Wait! I know you!’
‘I am Achmed bin Sadr, American, and you know nothing.’
And before I could say anything more, he galloped off.
Under shouted orders the French troops rapidly assembled into what would be their favourite formation against Mameluke cavalry, a hollow square of men. The squares were several ranks thick, each of the four sides of men facing outward so that there was no flank to turn, their bayonets forming a four-sided hedge of steel. To crisp the ranks, some officers drew lines in the sand with their sabres. Meanwhile the Egyptian army, or more accurately, its rabble, began to stream toward us with ululating cries under a hammer of drums and blare of horns.
‘Menou, form another square next to the dunes,’ Napoleon ordered. ‘Kleber, tell the rest of them to hurry.’ Many of the French troops were still coming up the beach.
Now the Egyptians were running straight at us, a tide of peasants armed with staves and sickles, pushed by a line of brilliantly dressed horsemen. The commoners looked terrified. When they got within fifty metres, the first French rank fired.
The crash of gunfire made me jump, and the result was as if a giant scythe had swept a rank of wheat. The front line of peasants was shredded, scores falling dead and wounded, the rest simply collapsing in fright from a disciplined volley unlike any they’d seen before. A huge sheet of white smoke lashed out, obscuring the French square. The Mameluke cavalry stopped in confusion, the horses wary of stepping on the carpet of cowering bodies before them, and their masters cursed the underlings they’d been driving to slaughter. As the overlords slowly forced their mounts forward over their cringing subjects, the second French rank fired, and this time some of the Mameluke warriors toppled from their horses. Then a third French rank let loose, even as the first was finishing reloading, and horses screamed, plunging and writhing. After this hurricane of bullets the surviving peasantry rose as if on command and fled, pushing the horsemen back with them and making a fiasco of the first Egyptian attack. The warriors slashed at their subjects with the flat of their swords but it did nothing to stem the flight. Some peasants pounded on the gates of the city, demanding refuge, and others ran inland, disappearing into the dunes. Meanwhile the French coastal ships started firing at Alexandria, the shots exploding against the city walls like a hammering fist. The ancient ramparts began crumbling like sand.
‘War is essentially engineering,’ Napoleon remarked. ‘It is order imposed on disorder.’ He stood with hands clasped behind his back and head swivelling, absorbing details like an eagle. He was unusual in being able to hold in his mind’s eye a picture of the entire battlefield and to know where concentration would turn the outcome, and this is what gave him his edge. ‘It is discipline triumphing over irresolution. It is organisation applied against chaos. Do you know, Gage, it would be remarkable if even one percent of the bullets fired actually hit their target? That’s why line, column, and square are so important.’
As much as I was taken aback by the brutality of his militarism, his coolness impressed me. Here was a modern man of scientific calculation, bloody accounting, and emotionless reasoning. In a moment of directed violence, I saw the grim engineers who would rule the future. Morality would be trumped by arithmetic. Passion would be harnessed by ideology.
‘Fire!’
More and more French troops were arriving near the city walls, and a third square formed to the seaward of the first, its left side ankle-deep in seawater when the waves surged in. Between the squares some light artillery pieces were placed and loaded with grapeshot, which would sweep enemy cavalry with small iron balls.
The Mamelukes, now unencumbered by their own peasantry, attacked again. Their cavalry charged at full tilt, thundering down the beach in a spray of sand and water, the men shouting war cries, silken robes billowing like sails, feathers and plumes bobbing on fantastic turbans. Their speed made no difference. The French fired again and the Mameluke front rank went down, horses screaming and hooves churning. Some of the horsemen just behind collided with their stricken comrades and somersaulted as well; others managed to dodge or jump them. Yet no sooner would their cavalry form a newly coherent front than the French would fire again, a ripple of flame, bits of wadding spitting out like confetti. This advance too would be torn. The bravest of the survivors came on anyway, hurtling over the corpses of their comrades, only to be met with swathes of grapeshot or balls from the field cannon. It was simple slaughter, as mechanical as Bonaparte implied, and even though I’d been in scrapes during my fur-trapping days, the ferocity of this massed violence shocked me. The sound was cacophonous, the fired metal shrieking through the air, and the human body contained more blood than I’d thought possible. Great plumes of it sometimes geysered when a body was severed with round shot. A few horsemen stumbled all the way to the French lines, probing with lance or raising their swords, but they couldn’t get their mounts to close with the hedge of bayonets. Then the command would ring out in French, another volley would be fired, and they’d go down too, riddled with balls.