Napoleon’s Pyramids

CHAPTER SIX

I almost drowned in the surf of Alexandria because of Bonaparte’s fear of Admiral Nelson. The English fleet prowled like a wolf somewhere over the horizon, and Napoleon was in such a hurry to get ashore that he ordered an amphibious landing. It wasn’t the last time I’d be wet in the driest country I’d ever seen.

We arrived off the Egyptian city on July 1 ^ st, 1798, staring in wonder at minarets like reeds and mosque domes like snowy hillocks, all shimmering under the brutal summer sun. There were five hundred of us crowded on the main deck of the flagship, soldiers, sailors, and scientists, and for long minutes it was so quiet you could hear every creak of rigging and every hiss of wave. Egypt! It wavered in distortion like a reflection in a curved mirror. The city was dust brown, dirty white, and looked anything but opulent, almost as if we’d arrived at the wrong address. The French ships slowly wallowed in a rising wind from the north, each Mediterranean swell a topaz jewel. From the land we could hear blowing horns, the boom of signal cannon, and the wails of panic. What must it have been like to behold our armada of four hundred European ships which seemed to fill the entire sea? Households were stuffed onto donkey wagons. Market awnings deflated as the valuables they shaded were secreted in wells. Arab soldiers strapped on medieval armour and mounted cracked parapets with pikes and ancient muskets. Our expedition artist, the Baron Dominique Vivant Denon, began drawing furiously: the walls, the ships, the epic emptiness of North Africa. ‘I’m trying to capture the form of the solid buildings against the desert’s peculiar volume of light,’ he told me.

The frigate Junon came alongside to make a report. It had arrived at the city a day earlier and conferred with the French consul, and the news it brought jolted Napoleon’s staff into a frenzy of activity. Nelson’s fleet had already been at Alexandria, hunting for us, and had left just two days before! It was pure luck they hadn’t caught us unloading. How long before the English returned? Rather than risk running the gauntlet of the forts at the entrance to the city’s harbour, Bonaparte ordered an immediate amphibious landing with longboats at the beach of Marabut, eight miles to the west. From there, French troops could march along the beach to seize the port.

Admiral Brueys vehemently protested, complaining the coast was uncharted and the wind was rising toward a gale. Napoleon overruled him.

‘Admiral, we’ve no time to waste. Fortune grants us three days, no more. If I don’t take advantage of them, we’re lost.’ Once ashore, his army was beyond the reach of the British warships. Embarked, it could be sunk.

Yet ordering a landing is easier than accomplishing it. By the time our ships began anchoring in the heavy swells off the sand beach, it was late afternoon, meaning the landing would continue through the night. We savants were given a choice of remaining on board or accompanying Napoleon to watch the assault on the city. I, with more adventure than sense, decided to get off L’Orient. Its heavy roll was making me sick again.

Talma, despite his own queasy misery, looked at me as if I were mad. ‘I thought you didn’t want to be a soldier!’

‘I’m simply curious. Don’t you want to watch the war?’

‘The war I can observe from this deck. It’s the bloody details you need to be on the beach to see. I’ll meet you in the city, Ethan.’

‘I’ll have picked us out a palace by then!’

He smiled wanly, looking at the swells. ‘Perhaps I should hold the medallion for safekeeping?’

‘No.’ I shook his hand. Then, to remind him of ownership: ‘If I drown, I won’t need it.’

It was dusk by the time I was called to take my place in a boat. Bands had assembled on the larger ships and were playing the ‘La Marseillaise’, the strains shredded by the rising wind. Toward land, the horizon had turned brown with sand blowing from the desert. I could see a few Arab horsemen dashing this way and that on the beach. Clinging to a rope, I took the ladder down the warship’s side, its tumble-home shape swollen like a bicep and its guns bristling like black stubble. The longrifle I carried across my back, its hammer and pan wrapped in oil skin. My powder horn and shot pouch bounced against my waist.

The boat was heaving like a bucking saddle. ‘Jump!’ a boatswain commanded, so I did, striving for grace but sprawling anyway. I quickly clambered to a thwart as told, clinging with both hands. More and more men dropped aboard until I was certain we could hold no more without swamping, and then a few more piled in as well. We finally pushed away, water sloshing over the gunwale.

‘Bail, damn you!’

Our longboats looked like a swarm of water beetles, crawling slowly toward shore. Soon nothing could be heard above the thunder of the approaching surf. When we dipped into the wave troughs, all I could see of the invasion fleet were the mast tops.

Our helmsman, in normal life a French coastal fisherman, at first steered us expertly as the waves mounded toward the beach. But the boat was overloaded, as hard to manoeuvre as a wine wagon, and it barely had freeboard. We began to skid in the rising surf, the stern slewing as the helmsman shouted at the rowers. Then a breaker turned us sideways and we broached and flipped.

I didn’t have time to take breath. The water came down like a wall, driving me under. The roar of the gale was cut to a dim rumble as I skipped along the bottom, tumbling on the sand. My rifle was like an anchor, but I refused to let it go. The submersion seemed like a black eternity, my lungs near to bursting, and then at a lull in the surge I sank enough to crouch on the bottom and push off. My head broke the surface just before I was ready to swallow, and I gasped with desperation before another wave broke over me. Bodies bumped in the dark. Flailing, I fastened onto a loose oar. Now the water was shallow, and the next wave carried me in on my belly. Sputtering, choking on seawater, nose draining, eyes stinging, I staggered onto Egypt.

It was flat and featureless, not a tree in sight. Sand had impregnated every crevice of my body and clothes, and the wind pushed so hard that I staggered.

Other half-drowned men were lurching out of the waves. Our overturned longboat grounded and the sailors rallied us to flip it upright, emptying out the water. Once they found enough oars the seamen pushed out again, to get more troops. The moon had risen, and I saw a hundred similar scenes playing out along the beach. Some boats managed to glide in as intended, grounding neatly, while others foundered and tumbled like driftwood. It was chaotic, men tying themselves to each other with line to wade back out and rescue comrades. Several drowned bodies had washed to the sea’s edge, half buried in the sand. Small artillery pieces were sunk to their hubs. Equipment floated like flotsam. A French tricolour, raised as a rallying point, snapped and rattled in the wind.

‘Henri, remember the farms the general promised us?’ one sodden soldier said to another, gesturing at the barren dunes ahead. ‘There’s your six acres.’

Since I had no military unit, I began asking where General Bonaparte was. Officers shrugged and cursed. ‘Probably in his great cabin, watching us drown,’ growled one. There had been resentment at the spaciousness he had appropriated for himself.

And yet, far down the beach, a knot of order had begun to form. Men were assembling around a familiarly short and furiously gesticulating figure, and as if by gravity other troops were drawn to their mass. I could hear Bonaparte’s voice giving sharp commands, and ranks began to be drawn up. When I neared I found him bareheaded and soaked to the waist, his hat having cartwheeled away in the wind. His scabbard dragged on the beach, cutting a little line behind him. He acted as if nothing was amiss, and his confidence reinforced others.

‘I want a skirmish line in the dunes! Kleber, get some men up there if you don’t want to be picked off by Bedouin! Captain? Use your company to free that cannon, we’ll need it at dawn. General Menou, where are you? There! Get your standard planted to form up your men. You infantry there, stop standing like drowned rats and help those others right that boat! Has a little water knocked the sense out of you? You are soldiers of France!’

The expectation of obedience worked wonders, and I began to recognise Bonaparte’s talent for command. A mob gradually became an army, soldiers forming columns, organising equipment, and dragging away the drowned for quick, unceremonious burial. I heard the occasional pop of skirmish fire to keep roving tribesmen at bay. Boatload after boatload made it ashore and thousands of men assembled in moon and starlight, the trampled sand shining silver where water pooled in our boot prints. Equipment lost in the surf was retrieved and redistributed. Some men found themselves wearing hats too small that perched on their crowns like chimneys, and others with headgear that came down around their ears. Laughing, they traded back and forth. The night wind was warm, drying us rapidly.

General Jean-Baptiste Kleber, who I’d heard was another Freemason, came striding up. ‘They poisoned the well at Marabut and the men are getting thirsty. It was madness to sail from Toulon without canteens.’

Napoleon shrugged. ‘It was commissary incompetence we can’t correct now. We’ll find water when we carry the walls of Alexandria.’

Kleber scowled. He looked far more the general than Bonaparte: Six feet tall, thick, muscular, and boasting a mane of thick, curly hair that gave him the majestic gravity of a lion. ‘There’s no food, either.’

‘Which is also awaiting us in Alexandria. If you will look to the sea, Kleber, you will also see there is no British navy, which is the whole point of striking quickly.’

‘So quickly we come ashore in a gale and drown dozens of men?’

‘Speed is everything in war. I will always spend a few to save many.’ Bonaparte looked tempted to say more; he did not like to have his orders second-guessed. But instead he said to his general, ‘Have you found the man I told you about?’

‘The Arab? He may speak French, but he’s a viper.’

‘He’s a tool of Talleyrand and gets a livre for every ear and hand. He’ll keep the other Bedouin off your flank.’

We set off down the beach, the surf rumbling to our left, thousands of men tramping in the dark. The foam seemed to glow. Occasionally I could hear a pistol shot or the pop of a musket off in the desert to our right. A few lamps shone ahead, marking Alexandria. None of the generals were mounted yet, and walked like common soldiers. General Louis Caffarelli of the engineers stumped along on a wooden leg. Our gigantic mulatto cavalry commander, Alexandre Dumas, walked bowlegged, a head higher than any of his troopers. He had the strength of a giant, and to amuse himself at sea he’d hang from a beam in the horse stalls and grip a mount with his legs, lifting the terrified animal off the deck with sheer thigh strength. Detractors said he had muscles between his ears.

Not being attached to any unit, I walked with Napoleon.

‘You enjoy my company, American?’

‘I just reason that the commanding general will be safer than most. Why not stand next to him?’

He laughed. ‘I lost seven generals in a single battle in Italy, and led charges myself. Destiny alone knows why I was spared. Life is chance, is it not? Fate sent the British fleet away and a gale in its place. Some men drowned. Do you feel sorry for them?’

‘Of course.’

‘Don’t. Death comes to all of us, unless the Egyptians indeed found immortality. And who’s to say one death is better than another? My own could come this dawn, and it would be a good one. Do you know why? Because while glory is fleeting, obscurity is forever. Those men who drowned will be remembered by their families for generations. “He died following Bonaparte to Egypt!” Society unconsciously knows this, and accepts the sacrifice.’

‘That’s a European calculus, not an American one.’

‘No? We’ll see when your nation is older. We’re on a great mission, Ethan Gage, to unify East and West. Compared to that, individual souls mean little.’

‘Unify by conquest?’

‘By education and example. We will defeat the Mameluke tyrants that rule these people, yes, and by so doing we will liberate the Egyptians from Ottoman tyranny. But after that we will reform them, and the time will come when they bless this day that France stepped on their shore. We, in turn, will learn from their ancient culture.’

‘You’re a very confident man.’

‘I’m a visionary one. A dreamer, my generals accuse. Yet I measure my dreams with the calipers of reason. I’ve calculated how many dromedaries it would take to cross the deserts to India. I have printing presses with Arabic type to explain that I come on a mission of reform. Do you know that Egypt has never seen a press? I’ve ordered my officers to study the Koran, and ordered my troops not to loot or molest Arab women. When the Egyptians understand that we’re here to liberate, not oppress, they’ll join us in the fight against the Mamelukes.’

‘Yet you lead an army with no water.’

‘I lack a hundred things, but I’ll rely on Egypt to provide them. That’s what we did when invading Italy. That’s what Cortez did when he burnt his ships after landing in Mexico. Our lack of canteens makes clear to our men that our assault must succeed.’ It was as if he were addressing Kleber, not me.

‘How can you be so certain, General? I find it hard to be certain of anything.’

‘Because I learnt in Italy that history is on my side.’ He paused, considering whether to confide more, whether he could add me to his political seductions. ‘For years I felt doomed to an ordinary life, Gage. I, too, was uncertain. I was a penniless Corsican from the shabbiest kind of backwater royalty, a colonial islander with a thick accent who had spent my childhood enduring snobs and taunts at French military school. I had no friend but mathematics. Then the Revolution came, opportunities arose, and I made the best of them. I prevailed at the siege of Toulon. I drew notice in Paris. I was given command of a losing, threadbare army in northern Italy. A future at least seemed possible, even if everything could be lost again in a single defeat. But it was at the battle of Arcola, fighting the Austrians to liberate Italy, when the world truly opened up to me. We had to carry a bridge down a murderous causeway, and charge after charge had failed, carpeting the approaches with bodies. Finally I knew that the only way to win the day was to lead a last charge myself. I’ve heard you’re a gambler, but there is no gamble like that, bullets like hornets, all the dice cast in a smoky rush for glory, men cheering, banners snapping in the wind, soldiers falling. We carried the bridge and carried the day, nothing scratching me, and there is no orgasm like the exultation of watching an enemy army run. Whole French regiments crowded around me afterward, cheering the boy who had once been a rube Corsican, and it was at that moment that I saw that anything was possible – anything! – if I merely dared. Don’t ask me why I think fate is my angel, I just know that she is. Now she has led me to Egypt, and here, perhaps, I can emulate Alexander as you savants emulate Aristotle.’ He clasped my shoulder, his grey eyes burning into me in the pale, predawn light. ‘Believe in me, American.’

But first he had to fight his way into the city.

Napoleon had hoped that the mere presence of his advancing column on the beach might persuade the Alexandrians to surrender, but they hadn’t experienced European firepower yet. The Mameluke cavalry was cocky and bold. This caste of slave warriors, whose name meant ‘bought men’, had been organised by the famed Saladin as a personal bodyguard in the time of the Crusades. So powerful were these warriors from the Caucasus that they conquered Egypt for the Ottoman Turks. It was the Egyptian Mamelukes who had first defeated the Mongol hordes of Genghis Khan, gaining undying renown as soldiers, and they had held Egypt in the ensuing centuries, neither marrying into its population nor even deigning to learn the Egyptian language. They were a warrior elite, treating their own citizens as vassals in the ruthless way that only an ex-slave, exposed to cruelty himself, can exhibit. They galloped into battle on Arabian steeds superior to any horses the French had, hurling themselves at enemies with musket, lance, scimitar, and a sash crammed with pistols. By reputation, their courage was matched only by their arrogance.

Slavery was different in the East than the hopeless tyranny I’d seen in New Orleans and the Caribbean. To the Ottomans, slaves were the most reliable allies, given that they were stripped from their past and not part of Turkish feuding families. Some became princes, meaning the most oppressed could rise the highest. And indeed, the Mameluke slaves had become masters of Egypt. Unfortunately, their greatest enemy was their own treachery – no Mameluke sultan ever died in bed because of their endless conspiracies for power – and their weaponry was as primitive as their steeds were beautiful, for they wielded antiques. Moreover, while slaves could become masters, free men were often treated like serfs. The Egyptian population had little love for their leaders. The French saw themselves as liberators, not conquerors.

While the invasion had taken the enemy by surprise, by morning the few hundred Mamelukes of Alexandria had assembled a ragged force of their own cavalry, Bedouin raiders, and Egyptian peasants coerced into forming a human shield. Behind, on the walls of the city’s old Arab quarter, garrison musketeers and artillerymen had anxiously assembled on the ramparts. As the first French ranks approached, the enemy cannon were inexpertly fired, the shot pattering the sand well short of the European columns. The French stopped while Napoleon prepared to offer surrender terms.

No such opportunity presented itself, however, because the Mamelukes apparently took this pause as hesitation and started to drive a mass of crudely armed peasants toward us. Bonaparte, realising the Arabs meant battle, signalled with flags for naval support. Shallow-draft corvettes and luggers began working in toward shore to bring their cannon to bear. The few light guns brought ashore in the longboats were also run forward on the sand.

I was thirsty, tired, sticky from salt and sand, and finally comprehending that I’d put myself in the middle of a war, thanks to the clumsy necklace. I was now bound to this French army for survival. Still, I felt oddly safe near Bonaparte. As he had implied, he carried an aura, not so much of invincibility as luck. Fortunately, our march had accumulated a skirt of curious Egyptian opportunists and beggars. Battles attract spectators like boys to a schoolyard fight. Shortly before dawn I’d spied a youth selling oranges, bought a bag for a silver franc, and earned favour with the general by sharing it. We stood on the beach sucking the sweet pulp, watching the mob-like Egyptian army shamble toward us. Behind the peasants the Mameluke knights galloped back and forth, bright as birds in their silk robes. They waved shiny swords and shouted defiance.

‘I’ve heard that you Americans boast of your accuracy with your hunting rifles,’ Napoleon suddenly said, as if an idea for amusement had just occurred to him. ‘Do you care to demonstrate?’

Officers turned to look, even as the suggestion took me by surprise. My rifle was my pride, the maple oiled, my powder horn scraped thin to the point of translucence so I could see the fine black grains of French powder inside, and my brass polished, an affectation I’d never dare in the forests of North America, where a gleam could give you away to animal or enemy. The voyageurs had rubbed theirs with green hazelnut to obscure any shine. As beautiful as my rifle was, however, some of these soldiers considered its long barrel an affectation. ‘I don’t feel those men are my enemy,’ I said.

‘They became your enemy when you stepped on this beach, monsieur.’

True enough. I began to load my gun. I should have done it some time before, given the impending battle, but I’d been striding down the beach as if on holiday, all military bands, martial camaraderie, and distant gunshots. Now I’d have to earn my place by contributing to the fight. So are we seduced and then enlisted. I measured extra powder for long range and used the ramrod to push down the linen-wrapped ball.

As the Alexandrians came on and I primed the pan, attention suddenly swung from me to a dashing Bedouin who was riding up from the ranks behind us, his black horse spraying sand, black robes rippling in the wind. Clinging behind was a French cavalry lieutenant, weaponless and looking sick. Reining up near Bonaparte’s cluster of staff, the Arab waved in salute and hurled a cloth at our feet. It opened as it fell, scattering a harvest of bloody hands and ears.

‘These are men who will harass you no more, effendi,’ the Bedouin said in French, his face masked by the cowl of his turban. His eyes waited for approval.

Bonaparte made a quick mental tally of the butchered appendages. ‘You have done well, my friend. Your master was right to recommend you.’

‘I am a servant of France, effendi.’ Then his eyes fastened on me and widened, as if in recognition. I was disturbed. I knew no nomads. And why did this one speak our language?

Meanwhile the lieutenant slid off the Arab’s horse and stood stricken and awkward to one side, as if not sure what to do next.

‘This one I rescued from some bandits whom he chased too far in the dark,’ the Arab said. This was a trophy too, we sensed, and a lesson.

‘I applaud your help.’ Bonaparte turned to the freed captive. ‘Find a weapon and rejoin your unit, soldier. You’re luckier than you deserve.’

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.

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.

‘General! Are you all right?’ a colonel cried.

As if in reply, a second shot rang out, and then a third, so close to the first that there were either two marksmen or the former was having his hands steadily filled with reloaded muskets. A sergeant standing a few paces ahead of Napoleon grunted and sat down, a bullet in his thigh, and another patch of plaster exploded behind the general’s boot.

‘I’ll be more right behind a post,’ Bonaparte muttered, pulling our group under a portico and making the sign of the cross. ‘Shoot back, for God’s sake.’ Two soldiers finally did so. ‘And bring up an artillery piece. Let’s not give them all day to hit me.’

A lively fight broke out. Several grenadiers began blasting away at the house that had become a doughty little fortress, and others ran back for a field gun. I took aim with my rifle, but the sniper was well screened: I missed like everyone else. It was a long ten minutes before a six-pounder appeared, and by this time several dozen shots had been exchanged, one of them wounding a young captain in the arm. Napoleon himself had borrowed a musket and fired a shot, to no better effect than the others.

It was the artillery piece that excited our commander. This was the arm he’d trained in. At Valence his regiment was exposed to the best cannon training in the army, and at Auxonne he had worked with the legendary Professor Jean Louis Lombard, who had translated the English Principles of Artillery into French. Napoleon’s fellow officers had told me on L’Orient that he’d had no social life in these early posts as a second lieutenant, instead working and studying from four in the morning until ten at night. Now he aimed the cannon, even as bullets continued to peck around him.

‘It’s exactly as he did at the battle of Lodi,’ the wounded captain murmured in appreciation. ‘He lay some guns himself, and the men began calling him le petit caporal – the little corporal.’

Napoleon applied the match. The gun barked, bucking against its carriage, and the round shot screamed and hit just below the offending window, buckling the stone and blowing apart the wooden grill.

‘Again.’

The gun was hastily reloaded and the general trained it at the house door. Another report and the entry blew inward in a shower of splinters. Smoke fogged the street.

‘Forward!’ This was the same Napoleon who had charged Arcola Bridge. The French advanced, me with them, their general with his sword out. We burst through the entry, firing at the stairs. A servant, young and black, came rolling down. Leaping over his body, the assault team surged upward. On the third floor we came to the place that the cannonball had struck. The ragged hole looked out on the rooftops of Alexandria and the chamber was strewn with rubble. An old man with a musket was half-buried with broken stone, obviously dead. Another musket had been hurled against a wall, its stock broken. Several more were scattered like matchsticks. A second figure, perhaps his loader, had been pitched into a corner by the concussion of the cannon shot, and moved feebly under a shroud of debris.

No one else was in the house.

‘Quite a fusillade from an army of two,’ Napoleon commented. ‘If all Alexandrians fought like this, I’d still be outside the walls.’

I went to the dazed fighter in the corner, wondering who the pair might be. The old man we’d killed didn’t look entirely Arab, and there was something strange about his assistant, too. I lifted a section of shattered sash.

‘Careful, Monsieur Gage, he might have a weapon,’ Bonaparte warned. ‘Let Georges here finish him with the bayonet.’

I’d seen quite enough bayoneting for one day and ignored them. I knelt and lifted the dazed assailant’s head to my lap. The figure groaned and blinked, eyes unfocused. A plea came out as a croak. ‘Water.’

I started at the tone and fine features. The injured fighter was actually a woman, I realised, smudged by powder residue but otherwise recognisable as young, unwounded, and quite fine-looking.

And the request had been stated in English.

A search of the house revealed some water in jars on the ground floor. I gave the woman a cup, as curious as the French what her story might be. This gesture, and my own voice in English, seemed to earn some small measure of trust. ‘What’s your name, lady?’

She swallowed and blinked, staring at the ceiling. ‘Astiza.’

‘Why are you fighting us?’

Now she focused on me, her eyes widening in surprise as if I were a ghost. ‘I was loading the guns.’

‘For your father?’

‘My master.’ She struggled up. ‘Is he dead?’

‘Yes.’

Her expression was inscrutable. Clearly she was a slave or a servant; was she sad that her owner had been killed or relieved at her liberation? She seemed to be considering her new position with shock. I noticed an oddly shaped amulet hanging from her neck. It was gold, incongruous for a slave, and shaped like an almond eye, black onyx forming its pupil. A brow curled above, and there was an extension below in another graceful curve. The entire effect was quite arresting. Meanwhile, she kept glancing from her master’s body to me.

‘What’s she saying?’ Bonaparte demanded in French.

‘I think she’s a slave. She was loading muskets for her master, that man there.’

‘How does an Egyptian slave know English? Are these British spies?’

I put his first question to her.

‘Master Omar had an Egyptian mother and an English father,’ she replied. ‘He had merchant ties with England. To perfect his fluency, we used the language in this house. I speak Arabic and Greek as well.’

‘Greek?’

‘My mother was sold from Macedonia to Cairo. I was raised there. I am a Greek Egyptian, and impudent.’ She said it with pride.

I turned to the general. ‘She could be an interpreter,’ I said in French. ‘She speaks Arabic, Greek, and English.’

‘An interpreter for you, not me. I should treat her as a partisan.’ He was grumpy from being shot at.

‘She was following the instruction of her master. She has Macedonian blood.’

Now he became interested. ‘Macedonia? Alexander the Great was Macedonian; he founded this city, and conquered the East before us.’

I have a soft spot for women, and Napoleon’s fascination with the old Greek empire builder gave me an idea. ‘Don’t you think that Astiza’s survival after your cannon shot is a portent of fate? How many Macedonians can there be in this city? And here we encounter one who speaks my native tongue. She may be more useful alive than dead. She can help explain Egypt to us.’

‘What would a slave know?’

I regarded her. She was watching our conversation without understanding but her eyes were wide, bright, and intelligent. ‘She’s had learning of some kind.’

Well, talk of fate always intrigued him. ‘Her luck, then, and my own, that you’re the one to find her. Tell her that I have killed her master in battle and thus have become her new master. And that I, Napoleon, award her care to my American ally – you.’