LITMIR.BIZ

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      As the force moved onwards towards Cairo the heat became daily more and more oppressive and enervating to the troops, to whom, fresh from the genial spring climate of Southern Europe, the fierce and dazzling glare of the sun in the shelterless lands through which their route lay, was little short of an agonising misery. To add to their sufferings the food obtainable was, as before, neither adequate nor adapted to their needs.

      It was not until the 20th of July that the army caught its first sight of the pyramids and of the Mokattam hills overhanging the city of Cairo. As they had drawn nearer the capital, the evidence of a greatly increased density of population, and the greater abundance and variety of the supplies they had been able to secure, gave the jaded troops fresh energy and hope. They were still much more than a long day's march from the pyramids when Bonaparte received intelligence that the Mamaluk army was encamped at Embabeh, a village on the west bank of the river, at the spot where it is now crossed by the railway bridge. As it was then evening the army was halted and bivouacked for the night at the hamlet of Om el Dinar, but only to rise and resume its march before the first dawn of day. Animated by the prospect of the combat now but a few hours before them, and which, as they confidently expected, was to gain them a fair reward for all the hardships they had been enduring, the troops pressed onward eager for battle, but it was not until two o'clock in the afternoon that at the end of a twelve hours' march, they found themselves in touch with the enemy.

      Learning that the Mamaluks had entrenched themselves in front of the village of Embabeh, and had planted a battery of forty guns in position behind their trenches, Bonaparte decided that it would be necessary to advance in such a way as to be able to attack the enemy's position upon its flanks, and he therefore so disposed his forces that, each division marching in the form of a hollow square, the whole would approach the enemy's position in the form of a crescent, and so that, while the right and left wings would threaten the Mamaluks' flanks, the centre would be prepared to repulse the front attack he expected them to make according to their custom.

      Murad Bey, who, with his long white beard covering his breast, was in personal command of the Mamaluks, was not slow to detect the aim of the French General, and quickly ordered Eyoub Bey, one of the best and bravest of the Mamaluk commanders, to advance and attack the division of General Desaix, who was moving round towards the west with a view to outflanking the left wing of the Egyptian position. Eyoub, who had under him a large and fearless, but wholly undisciplined, body of cavalry, at once bore straight down on the French without seeking cover of any kind, and, when within charging distance, dashed upon the French square with the wild cries, brandishing of arms, and tumultuous crowding customary to all Oriental warfare of that day.

      Faithful to the orders they had received, the French withheld their fire until the enemy were close upon them, so close that the ruthless rending of the ranks of the Mamaluks by the fierce hail of shot poured upon them was all insufficient to stay their headlong charge, which, bearing down the resistance of their foes, carried them into the centre of the broken square. But the French veterans, always cool and prompt, turned about, and the Mamaluks, finding themselves encircled by their enemies' fire, fought their way back and out of the square, but only to bring themselves under a heavy crossfire from the square and the division of General Kleber, who was moving up to its support. Eyoub's party being thus routed, the French made a direct attack in force upon the entrenched position in front of the village of Embabeh and carried it at the bayonet's point, while the divisions forming the left wing of the attack pushed on between the village and the river. The Mamaluks were thus caught between the horns of a crescent that was threatening to close and entirely surround them. Seeing the danger, Murad Bey at once withdrew his men, and sought the scanty shelter of a grove of date-trees at a little distance from the village. In doing this he was compelled to leave behind him some hundreds of the Mamaluk troops who, caught between the French and the river, utterly unable to defend themselves or to fly, were deliberately shot down by the French or perished in an attempt to escape across the river. As one historian says, it was no longer a fight but a massacre; and thus ingloriously ended what is termed by the Egyptians the "Battle of Embabeh," and by the French the "Battle of the Pyramids," a battle by which the power of the Mamaluks was shattered, and Bonaparte was left for the moment master of Egypt; a battle in which the steady discipline of modern warfare proved once and for all its immeasurable superiority over the wild chivalry of the past; a battle which, apart from this and the vast consequences that have resulted from its issue, is scarcely worthy of remembrance.

      The whole combat had lasted rather less than an hour, and when it was over the French soldiers, forgetting their fatigues and weariness, turned the field into a vast mart, bartering and selling the spoils of rich armour, weapons, apparel and other things they were able to reap from the bodies of their vanquished foes.

      Murad Bey, finding it impossible to recover his position, and that his forces were too disorganised and dismayed by a system of warfare so strange and incomprehensible to them to make any further effort, abandoned the field and hastened away to his summer palace at Ghizeh, whence, after collecting his most portable valuables, he set out for Upper Egypt.

      The justice that never fails had thus overtaken the iniquities of the Mamaluks. For centuries they had desolated the land, sacrificing all else to their own ambitious greed, and now they were "shattered and broken," never again to recover. For a short time they were to struggle and hope vainly for a return to power, but it was not to be. The fiat of Heaven itself was against them, and the decree of their doom went forth as infinitely more inexorable than the laws of the Medes and the Persians as Omnipotence is to impotency. Some years afterwards, when the British were encamped upon the banks of the Nile near Beni Souif, a poor, half-blind, wholly-destitute fugitive sought protection and a pittance at their hands. It was Ibrahim, the last of the great Mamaluk Beys, a man by no means typical of the baser of his class, with many faults, yet with some good points, one who under happier circumstances might have left an honourable record of service for the welfare of his fellow-men. As it was, his fate was but a part of the answer of that wrath that had at last heard the cry of the distressed, and avenged the wrongs of the widow and the orphan.

      CHAPTER VII

      AFTER THE BATTLE

      Before leaving Cairo to meet and oppose the French advance, Murad Bey had arranged that a large chain was to be stretched, as a boom, across the river, and batteries erected upon the adjacent shore to play upon the enemy in the confusion he anticipated would arise from their meeting with this obstacle. It was not, however, until the news of the defeat of the Mamaluks at Shebriss had thrown the capital into the utmost confusion, that any serious efforts were made to prepare the defences of the city. When that news came to the people, who had been looking forward to receiving tidings of the destruction of the French, then Ibrahim Bey and Bekir Pacha, filled with alarm at this first note of disaster, jointly called upon the whole population to take up arms and hasten to the riverside for the defence of their homes and families. Weapons and ammunition were served out as long as they could be got to all comers, and when the supply of deadlier arms ran short, the deficiency was made good in intention, if not in fact, by the distribution of naboots, long staffs of hard wood, which the Egyptians of the lower classes are accustomed to use much as our distant forebears used their quarter-staffs. Other impromptu weapons were provided by the people themselves, such as knives lashed to the end of long sticks, this primitive arm which could be either wielded as a lance or thrown as a javelin being destined at a later date to deprive the French of one of their ablest generals.

      Cairo was at that time separated from the river by an open stretch of ground, now covered by the avenues lined by the villas and mansions that form the Kasr el Aini and Ismailia quarters of the town. At the north end of this space was the small town of Boulac, which served as the port of the city then as it still does. This was the spot chosen by Ibrahim Bey as the headquarters for the defence of the town, and here and around the people were gathered, and quantities of stores and ammunition of every kind collected, whatever was needed or desired, if not found in the magazines of the State, being seized without ceremony wherever it could be got. For several days the space between the two towns was covered with the crowds coming and going, engaged in the transport of the various materials required; and so great was the haste to finish the work and the desire to help it on, that men of almost all degrees assisted in the task. As it was impossible to find accommodation for everybody at

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