I emptied my tea over the side and checked the load of my rifle, feeling trapped and exposed on the water. I wasn’t to be a spectator after all.
Captain Perree began snapping orders to raise anchor as the French sailors in his little fleet sprang to their cannon. Talma got out his notebook, looking pale. Monge and Berthollet grasped the rigging and boosted themselves up on the gunwale to watch, as if at a regatta. For some minutes the two fleets slowly closed with stately grace, great swans gliding. Then there was a thud, a blossom of smoke from the prow of the Mameluke flagship, and something sizzled past us in the air, throwing up a geyser of green water off our stern.
‘Don’t we get to parley first?’ I asked lightly, my voice more unsteady than I would have preferred.
As if in reply, the front rank of the entire Egyptian flotilla thundered as its bow cannon fired. The river seemed to heave and splashes erupted all around us, wetting us with warm mist. One ball landed directly on a gunboat to our right, kicking up a rain of splinters. Screams echoed across the water. There was that strange thrumming sound made by passing round shot, and holes opened in our sail like expressions of surprise.
‘I think negotiations have ended,’ Talma said tightly, squatting by the wheel and scribbling notes with one of Conte’s new pencils. ‘This will make an exciting bulletin.’ His fingers betrayed his tremble.
‘Their sailors seem considerably more accurate than their comrades at Alexandria,’ Monge remarked admiringly, jumping down from the rigging. He was as imperturbable as if viewing a cannon demonstration at a foundry.
‘The Ottoman sailors are Greek!’ Astiza exclaimed, recognising her countrymen from their costume. ‘They serve the bey in Cairo. Now you shall have a fight!’
Perree’s men began firing back, but it was hard to swing against the river current to make a proper broadside, and we were clearly outgunned. While we luffed our sails to keep from closing with the enemy too quickly, the rival fleets were inevitably converging. I glanced ashore. The start of this naval cannonade had apparently been the signal for the land-based Mamelukes. They waved their lances and charged toward the picket of French bayonets, galloping straight into hissing sheets of French fire. Horses dashed against the squares like surf against a rocky shore.
Suddenly there was an enormous bang and Astiza and I were thrown from our feet, landing in an ungainly tangle. Given more ordinary circumstances I might have enjoyed this moment of unexpected intimacy, but it had been caused by a cannonball slamming into our hull. When we rolled apart I was sickened. The round had skipped along the main deck, clipping to pieces two of our gunners and spraying the forward half of the vessel with gore. Splinters had wounded several more men, including Perree, and our fire slackened even as that of the Arabs seemed to be increasing.
‘Journalist!’ the captain shouted at Talma, ‘Stop scribbling and take the wheel!’
Talma blanched. ‘Me?’
‘I need to bind my arm and serve the cannon!’
Our scribe sprang to obey, excited and scared. ‘Which way?’
‘Toward the enemy.’
‘Come, Claude-Louis!’ Monge shouted to Berthollet as the mathematician clambered forward to take over another unmanned gun. ‘It’s time to put our science to use! Gage, start using your rifle, if you want to live!’ My God, the scientist was past fifty and seemed determined to win the battle himself! He and Berthollet ran to the forward cannon. Meanwhile I finally fired, and an enemy sailor tumbled out of his rigging. A fog of cannon haze rolled down on us, Arab boats gauzy in its murk. How long before we were boarded and cut to ribbons by scimitars? I noticed dimly that Astiza had crawled forward to help the scientists haul on the gun tackle. Her admiration of Greek marksmanship had apparently been overcome by her instinct for self-preservation. Berthollet himself had rammed home a charge and now Monge aimed the gun.
‘Fire!’
The cannon belched a sheet of flame. Monge sprang up on the bowsprit and stood on his tiptoes to judge his aim, then leapt back disappointed. The shot had missed. ‘We need bearings to accurately calculate distance, Claude-Louis,’ he muttered, ‘or we’re wasting powder and shot.’ He snapped at Astiza. ‘Sponge and reload!’
I aimed my rifle again, squeezing carefully. This time a Mameluke captain pitched out of sight. Bullets pattered around me in return. Sweating, I reloaded.
‘Talma, hold a steady course, damn you!’ Monge shouted back.
The scribe was clutching the wheel with pale determination. The Ottoman fleet was drawing steadily closer, and enemy sailors bunched at their prows, ready to board.
The scientists, I saw, were taking bearings on points ashore and sketching intersecting lines to get an accurate estimate of distance to the enemy flagship. Water was blasting into fountains all around us. Chips of debris buzzed through the air.
I primed my pan, shot a Greek Ottoman gunner through the brain, and ran to the bow. ‘Why don’t you fire?’
‘Silence!’ Berthollet cried. ‘Give us time to check our arithmetic!’ The two scientists were elevating the gun, aiming it as precisely as a surveying instrument.
‘One more degree,’ Monge muttered. ‘Now!’
The cannon barked once more, its ball screamed, I could follow the shadow of its passage, and then – wonder of wonders – it actually struck the Mameluke flagship perfectly amidships, punching a hole into the vessel’s bowels. By Thor, the two savants had actually figured the thing.
‘Hooray for mathematics!’
A moment passed, and then the entire enemy boat blew up.
Apparently the scientists had made a direct hit on the magazine. There was a concussive roar that radiated out a cloud of shattered wood, broken cannon, and human body parts, arcing outward and then sluicing into the opaque surface of the Nile. The clap of air sent us sprawling, and smoke roiled into the blue Egyptian sky in a vast mushroom. And then there was just disturbed water where the enemy flagship had been, as if it had vanished by magic. The Muslim fire immediately went silent in stunned consternation, and then a wail went up from the enemy flotilla as its smaller boats tacked to flee upriver. At the same moment the Mameluke cavalry, forming for a second charge after their first failed, suddenly broke and retreated southward at this seeming sign of French omnipotence. In minutes, what had been a swirling land-and-sea battle turned into a rout. With that single well-placed shot, the battle of Shubra Khit was won, and the wounded Perree was promoted to rear admiral.
And I, by association, was a hero.
When Perree went ashore to receive Bonaparte’s congratulations he generously invited the two scientists, Talma, and me, giving us full credit for the decisive shot. Monge’s precision was something of a marvel. Despite the Greek expertise, the new admiral later calculated that the two fleets had exchanged fifteen hundred cannon shots in half an hour and his flotilla had come away with just six dead and twenty wounded. Such was the state of Egyptian artillery, or ordnance in general, at the close of the eighteenth century. Cannon and musket fire was so inaccurate that a brave man could put himself at the forefront of a charge and actually have a decent chance of survival and glory. Men fired too soon. They fired blind in the smoke. They loaded in panic and forgot to discharge, ramming one bullet atop another without shooting at all, until their musket burst. They shot off the ears and hands of their comrades in the rank ahead of them, broke eardrums, and jabbed each other when fitting bayonets. Bonaparte told me that at least one out of ten battle casualties came from one’s own comrades, which is why uniforms are so bright, to prevent friends from killing each other.
Expensive rifles like mine will someday change all this, I suppose, and warfare shall devolve into men groping in the mud for cover. What glory in murder? Indeed, I wondered what war would be like if savants did all the aiming and every bomb and bullet hit. But this, of course, is a fanciful notion that will forever be impossible.