The Rosetta Key

“Mon dieu!” Najac crossed himself, which I considered the height of hypocrisy, given that his piety had as much value as a Continental dollar. “It’s a sign! You should not speak as you did!” Napoleon momentarily went pale, but regained his composure. He frowned at the enemy swarming on the walls, looked at the sprawled colonel, and then picked up his hat. “It was Lambeau who took the bullet, not me.”

“But the power of the Grail!”

“This is the second time my stature has saved my life. If I had the height of our General Kléber, I would be dead twice over. There’s your miracle, Najac.”

My captor was transfixed by the hole in the general’s hat.

“Perhaps it’s a sign we can all still help each other,” I tried.

“And I want the American gagged as well as bound. Another word, and I will have to shoot him myself.”

And with that he stalked away, my plight unimproved. “All right, they have a foothold! Lannes, get a three-pounder into that breach!”

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I missed much of what happened next and am grateful for it. The Ottoman troops fought ferociously, so much so that a captain of engineers named Ayme had to find his way through Jaffa’s cellars to take the enemy from behind with the bayonet. With that, angry French soldiers began fanning into Jaffa’s alleys.

Meanwhile, General Bon on the northern side of town had turned his diversionary attack into a full-fledged assault that broke in from that direction. With French troops swarming, the defenders’ morale collapsed and the Ottoman levies began to surrender. French fury at 1 1 6

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the foolish emissary beheadings hadn’t been slaked, however, and killing and looting first went unchecked, then turned into mob frenzy.

Prisoners were shot and bayoneted. Homes were ransacked. As the bloody afternoon gave way to concealing night, whooping soldiers staggered through the streets heavy with plunder. They fired muskets into windows and waved sabers wet with blood. The looters refused to even stop to help their own wounded. Officers who tried to stop the massacre were threatened and shoved aside. Women’s veils were ripped from their faces, their clothes following. Any husband or brother who tried to defend them was shot down, the women raped in sight of the bodies. No mosque, church, or synagogue was respected, and Muslim, Christian, and Jew alike died in the flames.

Children lay screaming on the corpses of their parents. Daughters pleaded for mercy while being violated on top of dying mothers.

Prisoners were hurled from walls. Flames trapped the elderly, the sick, and the insane in the rooms where they hid. Blood ran down the gutters like rainwater. In one monstrous night, the fear and frustration of nearly a year’s bitter campaigning was taken out on a single helpless city. An army of the rational, from the capital of reason, had gone insane.

Bonaparte knew better than to try to stem this release; the same anarchy had reigned in a thousand sackings before, from Troy to the Crusader pillages of Constantinople and Jerusalem. “One should never forbid what one lacks the power to prevent,” he remarked. By dawn the men’s emotion had been spent and the exhausted soldiers sprawled like their victims, stunned by what they’d done, but satiated as well, like satyrs after a debauch. A hungry, demonic anger had been fed.

In the aftermath, Bonaparte was left with more than three thousand sullen, hungry, terrified Ottoman prisoners.

Napoleon did not shrink from hard decisions. For all his admiration of poets and artists, he was at heart an artilleryman and an engineer.

He was invading Syria and Palestine, a land with two and a half million people, with thirteen thousand French soldiers and two thousand Egyptian auxiliaries. Even as Jaffa fell, some of his men were displayt h e

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ing symptoms of plague. His fantastic goal was to march to India like Alexander before him, heading an army of recruited Orientals, carving out an empire in the East. Yet Horatio Nelson had destroyed his fleet and cut him off from reinforcements, Sidney Smith was helping organize the defense of Acre, and Bonaparte needed to frighten the Butcher into capitulation. He dared not free his prisoners, and he couldn’t feed or guard them.

So he decided to execute them.