The Rosetta Key

The sun kept climbing. More and more enemy cavalry poured into the gentle vale below us, shaking lances and warbling cries. Periodically a few hundred would wheel and charge toward our squares.

Another volley, and the results would be the same. Soon there was a semicircle of dead around us, their silks like cut flowers.

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“What the devil are they doing?” Ned muttered. “Why don’t they really charge?”

“Waiting for us to run out of water and ammunition, perhaps,” Mohammad said.

“By swallowing all of our lead?”

I think they were waiting for us to break and run—their other enemies must be less resolute—but the French didn’t waver. We bristled like a hedgehog, and they couldn’t get their horses to close.

Kléber stayed mounted, ignoring the whining bullets, slowly riding up and down the ranks to encourage his men. “Hold firm,” he coached.

“Hold firm. Help will come.”

Help? Bonaparte at Acre was far away. Was this some kind of Ottoman game, to let us sweat and worry until they finally made the penultimate charge?

Yet as I sighted through the scope that Sir Sidney had given me, I began to doubt such an attack would come. Many Turks were holding back, inviting others to break us first. Some were sprawled on the grass to eat, and others asleep. At the height of a battle!

As the day advanced, however, our endurance sapped and their confidence grew. Powder was growing short. We began to hold our volleys until the last second, to give precious bullets the surest target.

They sensed our doubt. A great shout would go up, spurs would be applied to horses, and waves of cavalry would come at us like break-ers on a beach. “Hold . . . hold . . . let them come . . . fire! Now, now, second rank, fire!” Horses screamed and tumbled. Brilliantly cos-tumed janissaries tumbled amid clods of earth. The bravest would spur onward, weaving between their toppling fellows, but when they reached the hedge of bayonets their horses would rear. Pistols and muskets pocked our ranks, but the carnage was far worse on their side. So many horse carcasses littered the fields that it was becoming difficult for the Turks to hurtle past to get at us. Ned, Mohammad, and I helped drag French wounded into the center of the squares.

Now it was noon. The French injured were moaning for water and the rest of us longed for it. Our hill seemed dry as an Egyptian tomb.

The sun had halted its arc across the sky, promising to beat down 1 8 0

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on us forever, and the Turks were taunting each other on. A hundred French had fallen, and Kléber gave orders for the two squares to join into one, thickening the ranks and giving the men badly needed reassurance. It looked like all the Muslims in the world were massed against us. The fields had been trampled into soil and dust rose in great pillars. The Turks tried sweeping over the crest of Djebel-el-Dahy and coming down on us from above, but chasseurs and cara-biniers in the old Crusader castle forced them to diverge and they spilled uselessly down both sides of our formation, letting us thin them by firing into their flanks.

“Now!” A volley would roar out, smoke acrid and blinding, bits of wadding fluttering like snow. Horses, screaming and riderless, would go galloping away. Then teeth would tear at cartridges, pouring in precious powder. The ground was white with paper.

By midafternoon my mouth was cotton. Flies buzzed over the dead.

Some soldiers fainted from standing in place too long. The Ottomans seemed impotent, and yet we could go nowhere. It would end, I supposed, when we all died of thirst.

“Mohammad, when they overrun us pretend you’re dead until it’s over. You can emerge as a Muslim. No need to share the fate of addled Europeans.”

“Allah does not tell a man to desert his friends,” he replied grimly.

Then a fresh cry rose up. Men claimed they’d spied the glimmer of bayonets in the valley to the west. “Here comes le petit caporal !” Kléber was disbelieving. “How could Bonaparte get here so soon?” He gestured to me. “Come. Bring your naval spyglass.” My English telescope had proven sharper than standard French army issue.

I followed him out of the comfort of the square and onto the exposed slope of our hill. We passed a ring of bodies of fallen Muslims, some groaning in the grass, their blood a scarlet smear on the green wheat.

The Crusader ruins gave a panoramic view. If anything, the Turks looked even more numerous now that I could see farther over their ranks. Thousands trotted this way and that, gesturing as they argued what to do. Hundreds of their comrades already carpeted the hill t h e

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below us. In the distance their tents, supplies, and thousands of servants and camp followers were visible. We were like a blue rock in a sea of red, white, and green. One determined charge and surely they would crack our formation open! Then men would run, and it would be the end.