Meanwhile, the transports were sent back to France and the battleships placed in defensive anchorage at nearby Abukir Bay. The invaders still feared the reappearance of Nelson’s fleet.
Most debarking soldiers found themselves either camping in the city’s squares or in the dunes outside. Officers were luckier, appropriating the finer homes. Talma and I shared, with several officers, the home I’d helped capture from Astiza’s master. Once the slave woman had recovered her senses she seemed to accept her new situation with odd equanimity, studying me out of the corner of her eye as if trying to decide if I was entirely a calamity or perhaps some new opportunity. It was she who took some coins, bartered with neighbours, and found us food, even while murmuring about our ignorance of Egyptian ways and barbaric habits. As if acquiescing to destiny, she adopted us as we’d adopted her. She was dutiful but wary, obedient but resigned, watchful but skittish. I was intrigued by her, as I am by too many women. Franklin had the same weakness and so, indeed, did the entire army: there were hundreds of wives, mistresses, and enterprising prostitutes. Once on land, the French women discarded their male disguises for dresses that displayed more of their charms, much to the horror of the Egyptians. The females also turned out to be at least as tough as their men, enduring the primitive conditions with less complaint than the soldiers. The Arab men regarded them with fear and fascination.
To keep his troops occupied, Napoleon sent some marching southeast toward the Nile by land, a seemingly simple sojourn of sixty miles. Yet this first step toward the capital at Cairo proved cruel, because what had been promised to be rich delta farmland was stunted at this end of the dry season, just before the Nile flood. Some wells were dry. Others had been poisoned or filled with stone. Villages were mud brick and thatch, and farmers tried to hoard their few scrawny goats or chickens. The troops initially thought the peasants exceedingly ignorant because they’d disdain French money and yet reluctantly trade food and water for the soldiers’ buttons. Only later did we learn that the peasants expected their ruling Mamelukes to win, and that while a French coin would signal collaboration with the Christians, a button would be assumed to have been cut from European dead.
Their stifling march could be tracked by its pillar of dust. The heat exceeded one hundred degrees and some soldiers, depressed and crazed by thirst, committed suicide.
Things were not quite so grim for those of us back in Alexandria. Thousands of bottles of wine were unloaded alongside the tack of infantry rations, and bright dress uniforms filled the streets like an aviary of tropical birds, rainbow plumage highlighted by epaulettes, braid, frogging, and stripes. The dragoons and fusiliers were in green coats, the officers were wrapped at the waist with brilliant red sashes, the chasseurs had upright tricolour cockades, and the carabiniers boasted plumes of scarlet. I began to learn something about armies. Some branches took their name from their weapons, such as the light musket called a fusil that had originally equipped the fusiliers, the grenades apportioned to the heavy infantry called grenadiers, and the short carbines distributed to the blue-clad carabiniers. The chasseurs, or chasers, were light troops equipped for rapid action. The red-jacketed hussars were light cavalry or scouts, who took their name from cousin units in central Europe. The dragoons were heavy cavalry who wore helmets to ward off sabre strokes.
The general plan of battle was for light infantry to disrupt and confuse the enemy as artillery pounded, until a line or column of heavy infantry with massed firepower could deliver the decisive blow to break the opposing formation. Cavalry would then swoop in to finish the destruction. In practice, the tasks of these units sometimes blurred together, and in Egypt the French army’s task was simplified by the Mameluke reliance on cavalry and the French shortage of same.
Added to the French force was the Legion of Malta, recruited when that island was taken, and Arab mercenaries like Achmed bin Sadr. Napoleon already had plans to enlist a company of Mamelukes, once he had defeated them, and to organise a camel corps of Egyptian Christians.
The land force totalled thirty-four thousand, of which twenty-eight thousand were infantry and three thousand each were cavalry and artillery. There was an acute shortage of horses that would be remedied in Egypt only slowly and with difficulty. Bonaparte did unload 171 cannon, ranging from twenty-four-pounder siege guns to light field pieces capable of getting off up to three shots per minute, but again, the lack of horses limited how many he could immediately bring along. Rank-and-file infantry were even more ill equipped, suffering in the heat from heavy 1777 muskets, leather backpacks, blue Alpine wool uniforms, and bicorne hats. The dragoons boiled in their brass helmets, and military collars became stiff with salt. We savants were not as rigidly dressed – our jackets could come off – but we were equally dazed by the heat, gasping like landed fish. Except when travelling, I went without the garment that had given me the nickname ‘green coat’ (as well as ‘the Franklin man’) from the soldiers. One of Bonaparte’s first orders was to secure enough cotton for new uniforms, but they wouldn’t be ready for months and, when they were, proved too cold for winter.
The city itself was a disappointment, as I’ve said. It seemed half-empty, and half-ruined. There was no treasure, little shade, and no Ottoman temptresses. The richest and most beautiful Arab women were cloistered out of sight or had escaped to Cairo. Those few who did appear were usually shrouded head to foot like Inquisition priests, peering at the world over the brim of veils or through tiny slit-holes in their hoods. In contrast, peasant women were immodestly dressed – some of the poor showed their breasts as casually as their feet – but looked scrawny, dusty, and diseased. Talma’s promise of lush harems and exotic dancing girls seemed a cruel joke.
Nor had my companion found any miracle cures yet. He announced he was succumbing to new fevers within hours of debarking, and disappeared into the souk seeking drugs. What he returned with were quack remedies. A man who gagged at red meat gamely tried such ancient Egyptian medicines as worm’s blood, ass’s dung, pounded garlic, mother’s milk, hog’s tooth, tortoise brain, and snake venom.
‘Talma, all you’re getting is a case of the runs,’ I lectured.
‘It’s purging my system. My druggist told me of Egyptian priests a thousand years old. He looks venerable himself.’
‘I asked and he’s forty. The heat and his poisons have wrinkled him like a raisin.’
‘I’m sure he was joking. He told me that when the cramps go away, I’ll have the vigour of a sixteen-year-old.’
‘And the sense, apparently.’
Talma was newly flush with money. Though a civilian, his role as journalist made him essentially an adjunct of the army, and he’d written an account of our assault so flattering that I scarcely recognised it. Bonaparte’s chief of staff, Berthier, had accordingly quietly slipped him some extra pay as reward. But I saw little in Alexandria’s markets worth buying. The souk was hot, shadowy, swarming with flies, and poorly stocked after our capture of the city. Even so, through shrewd bargaining, the wily merchants fleeced our bored soldiers more thoroughly than their own city had been pillaged. They learnt clumsy French with astonishing rapidity. ‘Come, look my stall, monsieur! Here is what you want! Not you want? Then I know you need!’
Astiza was a happy exception to our disillusion. Picked out of the rubble and given a chance to clean herself, she wrought a wondrous transformation. Neither as fair as the fierce Mamelukes nor as dark as common Egyptians, her features, bearing, and complexion were simply Mediterranean: skin of sun-polished olive, hair jet but streaked with strands of copper, lavish in its thickness, eyes almond shaped and liquid, her gaze demure, her hands and ankles fine, her breasts high, waist thin, hips transfixing. An enchantress, in other words, a Cleopatra, and I relished my luck until she made clear she viewed her rescue as dubious, and me with distrust.