What was left of the ruling caste finally broke and galloped for the desert.
‘Now!’ Napoleon roared. ‘To the wall, before their leaders regroup!’ Bugles sounded and, with a cheer, a thousand troops formed column and trotted forward. They had no ladders or siege artillery but had little need for them. Under the naval bombardment the walls of the old city were coming apart like rotted cheese. Some of the houses beyond were already in flames. The French approached within musket range and a brisk fire broke out on both sides, the defenders showing more courage in the face of this furious onslaught than I’d have expected. Bullets whined like hornets and a few of the Europeans at last fell over, barely balancing the carnage left in their wake.
Napoleon followed, I by his side, the pair of us stepping past still or groaning bodies of the enemy, great dark stains in the sand beneath. I was surprised to see that many of the Mameluke slain had much fairer skin than their subjects, their bared heads revealing red or even blond hair.
‘White slaves from the Caucasus,’ the gigantic Dumas growled. ‘They’ll couple with the Egyptians, it is said, but won’t have pups by them. They also lay with each other, and prefer their own sex and race to any kind of contamination. Fresh boys eight years old are bought every year from their home mountains, creamy pink, to continue the caste. Rape is their initiation, and cruelty their school. By the time they’re full-grown they’re grim as wolves and contemptuous of anyone who’s not a Mameluke. Their only loyalty is to their bey, or chief. They also recruit the occasional exceptional black or Arab, but most view darkness with contempt.’
I looked at the general’s own racially mixed skin. ‘I suspect you’ll not allow Egypt to sustain that prejudice, General.’
He kicked at a dead body. ‘ Oui. It’s the colour of the heart that matters.’
We stayed just out of range at the base of a mammoth solitary pillar that jutted up outside the city walls. It was seventy-five feet high, thick as a man is tall, and named for the old Roman general, Pompey. We were on the rubble of several civilisations, I saw: an old Egyptian obelisk overthrown to help make the pillar’s base. The column’s pink granite was pitted and warm to the touch. Bonaparte, hoarse from shouting orders, stood on the rubble in the pillar’s meagre shade. ‘This is hot work.’ Indeed, the sun had climbed surprisingly high. How much time had gone by?
‘Here, take a fruit.’
He glanced at me with appreciation and I thought perhaps this small gesture seeded friendship. Only later was I to learn that Napoleon valued anyone who could do him a service, was indifferent to those of no use, and implacable toward his enemies. But now he sucked greedily like a child, seemingly enjoying my company while showing his command of the tableau before us. ‘No, no, not that way,’ he’d occasionally call. ‘Yes, that gate over there, that’s the one to force!’
It was Generals Kleber and Jacques Francois Menou who were at the forefront of the attack. The officers fought like madmen, as if they believed themselves invulnerable to bullets. I was equally impressed by the suicidal courage of the defenders, who knew they had no chance. But Bonaparte was the grand choreographer, directing his dance as if the soldiers were toys. His mind was already beyond the immediate fight. He glanced up at the pillar, crowned by a Corinthian capital that supported nothing. ‘Great glory has always been acquired in the Orient,’ he murmured.
The Arab fire was slackening. The French had reached the foot of the shattered walls and were boosting each other up. One gate was opened from within; another collapsed after being battered by axes and musket butts. A tricolour appeared on a tower top, and others were carried inside the city walls. The battle was almost over, and soon came the curious incident that changed my life.
It had been a savage scuffle. The Arabs had grown so desperate when they ran out of powder that they’d hurled rocks. General Menou, hit by stones seven times, came away so dazed and battered that it took him several days to recover. Kleber received a grazing bullet wound over one eye and stormed about with his forehead wrapped in a bloody bandage. Yet suddenly, as if instantaneously communicating to each other the hopelessness of their cause, the Egyptians broke like a ruptured dam and Europeans flooded in.
Some of the inhabitants hunkered down in abject fear, wondering what barbarities this tide of Christians would perform. Others crowded into mosques. Many streamed out of the city to the east and south, most returning within two days when they realised they had no food or water and nowhere to go. A handful of the most defiant barricaded themselves in the city’s tower and citadel, but their shooting soon slackened from lack of gunpowder. French reprisal was swift and brutal. There were several small massacres.
Napoleon entered the city in early afternoon, as emotionally impervious to the wails of the wounded as he’d been to the thunder of the guns. ‘A small battle, hardly worth a bulletin,’ he remarked to Menou, bending over the litter that carried the bruised general. ‘Although I will inflate it for consumption in Paris. Tell your friend Talma to sharpen his quill, Gage.’ He winked. Bonaparte had adopted the certain wry cynicism all the French officers exhibited since the Terror. They took pride in being hard.
As a city, Alexandria was disappointing. The glories of the East were contradicted by unpaved streets, scurrying sheep and chickens, naked children, fly-spotted markets, and murderous sun. Much of it was old ruins, and even without the battle it would have seemed half-empty, a shell around former glory. There were even half-sunken buildings at the harbour’s edge, as if the city was slowly settling into the sea. Only when we glimpsed the shadowy interiors of fine houses through smashed doorways did we get a sense of a second, cooler, more opulent, and more secretive world. There we spied splashing fountains, shaded porticoes, Moorish carving, and silks and linens gently billowing in currents of dry desert air.
Random gunfire still echoed across the city as Napoleon and a cluster of aides made their way cautiously down the main avenue for the harbour, where the first French masts were now appearing. We were passing a fine section of merchant homes, with fitted stonework and wood-grilled windows, when there was a whine like an insect and a section of plaster exploded in a little geyser of dust just past Bonaparte’s shoulder. I started, since the shot had barely missed me. The grazing had made the cloth fibre of our general’s uniform suddenly stand erect like a file of his troops. Looking up, we saw a puff of white gun smoke at a screened window being wafted away by the hot wind. A marksman, firing from the shadowy shelter of a bedroom, had almost hit the expedition’s commander.