The crossing had been a nerve-shredding exercise in calculated risk. For weeks, Napoleon's vast, unwieldy armada had crept across the Mediterranean, a floating city of men and horses, constantly shadowed by the unseen but ever-present threat of Nelson's fleet. They had been saved by a combination of luck, bad weather, and Napoleon's own deceptive genius in feinting towards Malta. But the tension had been immense. Now, under the blazing, unfamiliar sun of an Egyptian summer, the true test began.
The French army landed near Alexandria. The ancient city, a sleepy shadow of its former glory, was taken in a swift, brutal assault, a chaotic and bloody affair that served as a harsh introduction to this new kind of war. But Alexandria was merely the gateway. The true prize, the heart of Egypt, was Cairo. And between the army and Cairo lay the desert.
The march was an agony, a descent into a special kind of hell for which no European war had prepared them. The soldiers, clad in their thick, woolen uniforms designed for the cool fields of Flanders, were tormented by a heat that was a physical, malevolent entity. The sun was a hammer, beating down from a white-hot, merciless sky. The sand, fine as flour, got into everything: their food, their water, their muskets, their eyes. Water, carried in insufficient quantities in their canteens, became more precious than gold, and was often brackish and warm. They were tormented by thirst, by heatstroke, by dysentery, and by the constant, harassing attacks of Bedouin skirmishers, ghostly figures on horseback who would appear from the shimmering heat haze, strike at the flanks of the long, straggling column, and vanish back into the desert before the French could even form a line of battle.
Morale, which had been so high upon leaving Toulon, plummeted. The men, trudging through the endless, suffocating sand, began to curse. They cursed this godforsaken land of dust and flies. They cursed the government in Paris that had sent them here. And most of all, they cursed the small, pale-faced general who had led them into this inferno with his promises of glory.
Napoleon rode amongst them, his own face impassive, but his mind a whirlwind of calculation and concern. He knew his army was approaching its breaking point. He was not just fighting the enemy; he was fighting the landscape itself, and the landscape was winning. He needed a victory, a great, decisive victory, and he needed it now.
On the 21st of July, after a grueling march, they finally saw it. On the western horizon, beyond the green ribbon of the Nile, they could just make out the faint, geometric shapes of the great pyramids of Giza. And arrayed on the plains before them, near the village of Embabeh, was the reason they had come. The army of the Mamluks.
It was a fearsome and magnificent sight, a vision from a crusader's epic. Ten thousand of the world's finest and most feared horsemen, an army that had ruled Egypt for six centuries. They were a glittering, multi-colored tide of warriors, clad in shimmering chainmail and silk robes, their heads wrapped in brilliant turbans. The sun glinted off their polished steel helmets and the damascene blades of their famous scimitars. They sat astride magnificent Arabian stallions, creatures of fire and spirit that were as legendary as their riders. They looked upon the dusty, exhausted French infantry with a mixture of contempt and eager anticipation. They were confident, with the absolute certainty of a warrior caste that had never known defeat, that they would ride down these European foot soldiers and slaughter them like sheep.
Napoleon's own generals, men like Desaix and Reynier, looked upon the enemy with grim concern. Their own men were exhausted, outnumbered in cavalry, and on the verge of collapse. A traditional battle in a long, thin line of infantry would be suicide against such a charge.
But Napoleon's genius had always shone brightest in the face of impossible odds. He was not going to fight a traditional battle. He galloped along the line, his voice sharp and clear, his commands unorthodox and precise. The French army, division by division, began to transform itself. They did not form a line. They formed squares.
Massive, hollow infantry squares, each one a division of several thousand men. Each side of the square was a wall of men six ranks deep, a forest of bayonets pointing outwards. At the corners of these living fortresses, he placed his mobile artillery, the cannons angled to provide devastating fields of enfilading fire. They were five immense, bristling squares of flesh and steel, seemingly immobile, waiting on the desert plain.
Napoleon rode to the center of his army, and in a moment that would become legend, he raised his sword and pointed it towards the ancient wonders on the horizon. "Soldiers!" he cried, his voice ringing with a strange, almost mystical power. "From the height of these pyramids, forty centuries of history look down upon you!"
The battle began. The Mamluk Beys, Murad and Ibrahim, seeing this strange, static formation, gave the order to charge. The Mamluk army moved forward, first at a trot, then a canter, then a full, earth-shaking gallop. It was a sight of terrible beauty, a thunderous, glittering wave of ten thousand horsemen, their scimitars raised, their war cries splitting the air, crashing down upon the small, silent French squares.
From the perspective of a young French grenadier in the front rank of Desaix's square, it was the apocalypse. He gripped his musket, his knuckles white, the sweat stinging his eyes. He could feel the ground trembling under his feet. The sheer, overwhelming power of the charge was a physical force that threatened to break his nerve. He could see the individual faces of the Mamluk warriors now, their eyes burning with fanaticism, their teeth bared in snarls.
He knelt, his bayonet planted firmly in the sand before him, the man behind him resting his own musket on his shoulder. He waited. The command from the center of the square was unnaturally calm. "Première ligne… en joue!" First rank… make ready!
The Mamluks were almost upon them, a wall of horseflesh and steel just fifty meters away.
"Feu!" Fire!
The front face of the square erupted in a single, disciplined, rolling volley of musket fire, a devastating, point-blank blast of lead that tore into the front ranks of the Mamluk charge. Horses and riders screamed and fell, creating a horrific, tangled barricade of their own bodies. The charge faltered, but did not break. The Mamluks, with incredible bravery, spurred their horses on, trying to break through the wall of bayonets.
Then the cannons at the corners of the square, loaded with canister shot, opened up. Each cannon was a giant shotgun, firing hundreds of musket balls in a wide, sweeping arc that shredded everything in its path. The effect on the dense cavalry formation was catastrophic.
The Mamluk charge, which had been a disciplined wave, shattered into a thousand individual acts of desperate, futile courage. Some riders tried to wheel their horses to attack the flanks of the square, only to be met with another perfectly timed volley. Some, their horses shot out from under them, charged on foot, only to be impaled on the forest of French bayonets.
The Mamluks, who had never encountered this kind of disciplined, geometric firepower, were utterly bewildered. They regrouped and charged again. And again. And each time, their magnificent, individualistic bravery was broken against the cold, collective, and unshakeable mathematics of the French squares.
By the end of the day, the battle was over. The legendary Mamluk army, the rulers of Egypt, was annihilated. The plain was littered with the bodies of thousands of their finest warriors and their beautiful horses. The French, protected within their mobile fortresses, had suffered fewer than three hundred casualties. They were the undisputed masters of Egypt.
That evening, a triumphant Napoleon established his new headquarters in a captured Mamluk palace in Cairo. He was no longer a general; he was a conqueror, a new Caesar, the man who had brought the Orient to its knees. He was at the absolute zenith of his power and his glory.
A courier, a dusty cavalry officer from the coast, was ushered into his presence. He bore a dispatch from the naval station at Alexandria. Napoleon, basking in the glow of his victory, took the message casually, expecting a routine report.
He broke the seal and began to read. As his eyes scanned the lines of text, the color drained from his face. The expression of triumph dissolved, replaced by a look of pure, horrified, and absolute disbelief. The dispatch contained a single, catastrophic piece of news from the coast, from a place called Aboukir Bay. His fleet. Nelson. It was gone.