The Generals

Chapter 44

‘Colonel Pesset, you’re supposed to be at Haifa, waiting for the siege guns.’>

‘Yes, sir,’ the colonel replied unhappily.

‘Then explain yourself. What are you doing here?’

‘Sir, I beg to report, the guns have been lost.’

‘Lost? How?’

‘The ships carrying them from Egypt were intercepted by the Royal Navy, just off Mount Carmel, and captured.’

Berthier and the other staff officers exchanged glances and watched Napoleon closely for his response.

‘Captured?’ Napoleon responded evenly. ‘All of them?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I see.’ Napoleon lowered his head for a moment and took a deep breath. He felt a rage born of pure frustration welling up in his veins, and knew that if he surrendered to it he would turn into a screaming, hysterical monster, a side of his character he had no wish to display to this officer or the wider army. Not when his men needed him to be strong and impervious to the misfortunes that assailed them. He cleared his throat and looked up. ‘Thank you for letting me know, Colonel. You may return to your men.’ He strode towards his tent, glancing back over his shoulder. ‘Berthier, Junot, inside now.’

As soon as they were seated around Napleon’s campaign desk he leaned forward, folded his hands and rested his chin on them. ‘So, what are our options, gentlemen?’

Berthier spoke first. ‘We cannot continue the siege without heavy artillery, sir.’

‘Granted. So we must send word back to Kléber to send us more siege guns.’>

‘But, sir, that will take weeks, months perhaps. In the meantime, the plague will claim more men.’

‘And it will give the Sultan a chance to send a relief force to Acre,’ Junot added.‘What if we are caught between Ahmad Pasha and the Army of Damascus? The longer we are here, sir, the longer we invite disaster.’

‘It’s a risk,’ Napoleon conceded. ‘But then all campaigns are risky ventures. However, given the past performance of the enemy, I think we can handle any relief force they send to Acre. That need not concern us unduly. The immediate problem is how do we overcome Acre’s defences without siege artillery?’

‘We still have the army’s field guns, sir,’ said Junot.

Berthier shook his head.‘Field guns are no good against those walls.’

‘We don’t know that, unless we give it a try,’ Junot countered. ‘It’s possible the walls are not as strong as you seem to think. If they’re anything like the defences of the other fortifications we’ve dealt with, we should be able to complete the job with our field guns.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Berthier insisted. ‘The weight of the shot is too light.’

Napoleon intervened. ‘All very true, Berthier, but we must continue the siege with the tools that we have, while we send a message to General Kléber to ship us some more siege guns. Until they arrive we’ll use the field guns, and we’ll just have to resort to more traditional methods of siegecraft. The engineers will tunnel under the wall and use a mine to try to bring down that bastion.’ He leaned back and ran a hand through his hair. ‘That’s all, gentlemen. Berthier, send that message to Kléber at once, and Junot, get our field pieces moved forward into the siege batteries.’

As they left to do his bidding, Napoleon sat still for a moment, and only when he was quite alone did he pound his fist down on the table.

‘Fuck!’ The word exploded through his clenched teeth. Why did his lucky star have to abandon him now, just when he needed it most? Had his life’s share of good fortune been consumed already? If he and his army were defeated before the walls of Acre, people back in France would barely notice.Yet if he could take Acre, and win a notable victory, then he might yet derive some advantage from this unfortunate campaign. He nodded to himself as he firmed his resolve. They would remain before the walls of Acre until Ahmad Pasha surrendered or the walls were breached, and then Ahmad Pasha and his garrison would pay a bloody price for defying Napoleon Bonaparte.

For several days the field guns bombarded the walls of Acre, and Napoleon watched with growing frustration as his guns caused only superficial damage to the defences. Just one heavy gun would have smashed a large hole in the wall in the same time, Napoleon fumed. Meanwhile, the trenches progressed slowly, thanks to the rocky ground the engineers had to work through to approach the city. Then, at the end of March, his patience ran out and he gave the order for the army to prepare an assault.The night before the attack the battalions chosen for the task filed into the trenches with their scaling ladders and moved into position as quietly as possible. There was still a gap of over a hundred paces between the trench and the wall, and the open ground would be swept by the cannon and muskets of the defenders. The attack would be preceded by an intense bombardment by Napoleon’s field guns and then the ramparts would be scourged by grape shot as the infantry rushed forward.

As the sun rose behind the French army and lit up the walls of the city Napoleon gave the command to open fire. The quiet stillness of the dawn was torn apart by the violent stabs of flame and the crash of artillery. Napoleon watched through his telescope as the Turkish gunners on the wall fired their weapons in reply. A small breach had been opened in the wall by the bastion which looked to be well within the reach of the scaling ladders, and the battery immediately in front of the gap continued to pound away at it, trying desperately to enlarge it before the assault began.

Berthier, standing beside his commander, tapped his watch. ‘It’s time.’ He nodded to the signalman standing to one side and the man lifted a red flag into the air. The French guns fell silent and there was a brief pause before their drums beat the attack. From his vantage, Napoleon watched as tiny figures spilled over the lip of the trench and ran forward.The ladder bearers went in the first wave, stumbling forward under their burdens. As soon as the Turks realised the attack was under way they appeared at the ramparts and small puffs of smoke blossomed along the length of the wall. Below, on the open ground, the first Frenchmen began to fall, while their comrades hurried on without stopping as musket balls slapped into the soil all around them. The French gunners replied with grape and Napoleon smiled with satisfaction as each blast knocked large gaps in the dense ranks of the Turks manning the wall.

There was a deep, rolling boom from his left and he and his staff glanced towards the harbour as a salvo of heavy cannon fire crashed out from the lighthouse mole.

‘What the hell?’ Berthier muttered.

‘Concealed battery,’ Napoleon muttered as he swung his telescope towards the mole and saw the muzzles pointing out through the makeshift breastwork that the defenders had erected at the start of the siege. They must have moved the guns up the previous night, to enfilade the French attack, he realised. As he watched the enemy gunners reload he saw that they weren’t Turks, but sailors from the British fleet. Then it struck him. ‘Those are our captured siege guns!’

He lowered his scope and glanced down the slight incline towards the French batteries. Whoever was in charge of the sailors knew his business; within a few shots they had the range of the nearest of Napoleon’s batteries and the heavy balls tore through the earthworks and smashed into the weapons beyond. The crews did not have a chance and were mown down along with their guns. After a few more rounds there was a short pause before the English trained their cannon on the next target and opened fire.

Napoleon turned his attention back to the desperate charge across the open ground. The first men had reached the city’s defences and were struggling to lean their ladder up against the wall beneath the breach. The top rung was some distance below the gap and even as the first man scrambled up Napoleon realised that the engineers had miscalculated. Reaching the top of the ladder, the soldier valiantly stepped on to the top rung, and flattened himself to the masonry while his hands groped up towards the lip of the breach. The distance was too great, and as Napoleon and his staff watched in silence, willing the man on, a Turk leaned out from the bastion, took careful aim, and shot the French soldier in the back. He spasmed, arched and tumbled off the ladder on to his companions below. As the sailors’ guns knocked out the batteries on the left flank, the assault on the defenders began to slacken and all along the wall musket fire poured down on the attackers as they threw their ladders up against the walls only to discover that none of them was long enough. Seeing that his men were being relentlessly cut down, Napoleon shook his head.

‘It’s no good. They’re getting cut to pieces. Sound the recall.’

The moment the notes from the bugles cut across the battlefield the French troops turned and ran for their lives, pursued all the way back to their trenches by musket fire. At the same time Napoleon ordered the guns on his left flank to be abandoned. As the crews hurried out of range the British sailors methodically knocked out one battery after another until they ran out of targets, and it seemed as if stillness and quiet returned to the scene, until the combatants’ ears recovered from the numbing effects of the previous din and could pick up the thin cries and shrieks of the wounded and dying men still out on the battlefield.

‘What now, sir?’ Berthier asked quietly as he surveyed the wrecked batteries and the bodies scattered before the walls of Acre.

Napoleon shrugged. ‘Now we have to try something else. We’ll attempt another assault when the sappers have mined that bastion.’

It took another five days for the tunnel to be dug under the foundations of the bastion.The engineers packed the small space with barrels of gunpowder, laid a fuse and withdrew from the tunnel. Once again the approach trenches were filled with assault troops as they waited for the moment to attack. When all was ready, the chief engineer lit the fuse and fell back as it sputtered brightly into the darkness of the tunnel. Every man in the French army watched in tense silence, necks and shoulders strained as they braced themselves against the blast.When it came there was a sheet of flame from the end of the tunnel and the ground at the base of the bastion blew up into the air.A shower of rock, stones, soil and dust shrouded the scene. Napoleon felt the tremor pass through the ground under his feet and then the air was filled with the roar of the detonation.

At once, every man on the staff and the assembled senior officers strained to pick out the detail through the slowly clearing pall of dust. Then a puff of wind from the sea cleared the view and Napoleon’s heart sank. The only sign of damage was the collapse of a stretch of the battlements and a small crack that ran only halfway up the wall.There was nothing for it but to call off the attack, and the men trudged back from the approach trenches to their tents in the camp.

The field guns resumed their bombardment of the wall, with the same dispiriting lack of effect, day after day, until Berthier brought it to Napoleon’s attention that their stock of ammunition was running dangerously low.The next day the army headquarters issued a proclamation offering a bounty on any enemy cannon balls that could be retrieved from the ground in front of the walls. Those men who still had enough spirit of adventure amused themselves with daring sprints from their trenches to grab the nearest ball and then hurry back to safety before the Turks could respond with a fusillade of musket fire.A few did not make it, but the steady flow of recovered shot went some way towards supplementing the dwindling supplies in the army’s stores.

The replacement siege guns were landed at Haifa in the middle of April and hauled overland to the siege lines. New, better protected, batteries were constructed on the right flank, and sweating crews manoeuvred the heavy guns into position and brought up the powder and shot ready for the renewed attack on the bastion. They opened fire on the last day of April and Napoleon noted with satisfaction that they were immediately having an effect. Each heavy ball smashed into the city’s defences, dislodging a small fall of masonry. Within a day a practical breach had been opened and the French army prepared itself for another attack.

In those first few days of May the increasingly weary French battalions launched one assault after another, only to be repulsed by the Turkish troops, who fought with a tenacity that the French had not encountered before. There were severe losses on both sides. General Bon was shot dead in the breach as he urged his men forward, and the irrepressible General Lannes was wounded, once again, as he and two companies of grenadiers managed to break into the city, only to discover that Ahmad Pasha’s men had built an inner line of defences.

In the middle of the month Napoleon called his senior officers to a meeting in his tent late in the evening. He watched as they filed in through the flaps and quietly took their seats.The strain and exhaustion of the last sixty days was etched into their faces, and even before he asked them for their views Napoleon knew that the fight had gone out of them and he would have to perform a miracle to persuade them that Acre could be taken. The trouble was, he felt as bitter and tired as they did and he was momentarily tempted to break off the siege and return to Egypt without even asking for their assessment of the army’s chances. Then some inner reserve of determination stirred in him and he resolved to try to persuade them that the fight could yet be won.

‘Gentlemen . . .’ Napoleon smiled faintly. ‘Friends. Berthier tells me that the men are at the end of their endurance, that some of you are openly saying that we cannot take Acre, and that we must retreat. Does any man here wish to say anything?’

Junot stirred uncomfortably. ‘Sir, it’s been two months and we’re no nearer taking Acre than we’ve ever been.’

‘No nearer? I think you seriously underestimate what we have achieved so far. We’ve breached their walls and must have killed thousands of their men. One last—’

‘Sir,’ Lannes interrupted. He wore a bloodstained dressing around his head and looked pained and drawn as he spoke.‘They have built an inner wall. I’ve seen it. We’d have almost as much difficulty overwhelming that as we did the outer wall. And what does it matter how many of them we kill? Yesterday - we all saw it - a flotilla of ships dropped anchor out to sea and they’ve been ferrying in fresh supplies and troops all through the night and the following day. Sir, I’d follow you anywhere, you know I would. But this is a fight we cannot win.’

‘General Lannes is right, sir,’ added Berthier.‘While the enemy can keep being supplied by sea, we are running out of supplies here on land. We’re also running low on ammunition and powder. More worrying still is this morning’s report from Desgenettes. Nearly two and a half thousand of our men are now on the list of sick and wounded. Sir, the army is being bled white by this siege and the assaults we have attempted so far.’ He would have said more, but he caught the wild glint in his commander’s eye and the words died on his lips.

Napoleon stared round the table at his officers. ‘Is there no man here who considers it our duty to continue the fight? Well?’

No one spoke and Napoleon suddenly realised he had lost them. If these men . . . if General Lannes, of all people, had lost faith in victory, then the attempt to take Acre truly was finished. He lowered his head into his hands for a moment and then looked up slowly and nodded.

‘Very well . . . I accept your views. If you will not fight then no man will. I’ll give the order . . . We’ll break camp and march back to Egypt. The siege of Acre is over.’