Beware of Heroes: Admiral Sir Sidney Smith's War against Napoleon Read online

  Hutchinson delegated the task to Colonel Spencer, giving him the 58th Regiment and the 40th Flank Companies, with a detachment of Hompesch’s Hussars and eight pieces of cannon. He also gave him orders to abandon the enterprise if he should encounter serious resistance. Although Sir Sidney was not inferior in rank, he voluntarily placed himself under Colonel Spencer’s command. On 31st March he rode out into the desert with an escort, reconnoitring the route they were to follow, and contacting the Bedouin tribes. Eleven sheikhs and their followers came out to greet him, and assured him of their friendship.

  One of them brought him a letter from Murad Bey which left no doubt of his favourable response to Sir Sidney’s overtures:

  I thank you, my excellent friend for thinking of me in my present situation, for writing to me as a friend, for having confidence in me although the French choose to call me their vassal and governor of Upper Egypt for them; can I, Murad Bey, forget what I was before they came, and what they have reduced me to? I have employed blood and gold against them, and in the name of God I will do it again, when I can. The ships you mention have been seen on the coast; I have sent 500 camels to meet and aid them. I shall do all I can, all you desire...

  This referred to the approach of General Baird’s force from India, and to Sir Sidney’s request that he should help them and send transport for them to cross the desert from the Red Sea to the Nile. With regard to the reconciliation that Sir Sidney was anxious to bring about between him and the Porte, Murad Bey wrote that he wouldn’t treat directly with the Turks, not trusting them, unless Sir Sidney would take him by the hand to the Grand Vizier and make peace between them. He said he didn’t think that he had been too culpable towards the Sublime Porte, but that ‘no one is without imperfections save God alone who draws us out of nothingness and gives us life’. However great his faults, he did not doubt that the Porte would welcome Sir Sidney’s intercession on his behalf, and he would never forget his friendship so long as the world was the world.

  The Captain Pasha had landed at Abukir, after the night battle of the 21st, with 4,000 Turkish troops, and these also were added to Colonel Spencer’s force. The expedition set out from the British camp on 2nd April. On the same day the Captain Pasha, accompanied by Lord Keith, visited General Hutchinson and presented him with two very large tents, richly coloured and decorated, for his own use.

  On Colonel Spencer’s approach to Rosetta, on 7th April, the French garrison of 800 men abandoned the town and retired up river. Although all his seamen had been retained inactive in the vicinity of Alexandria, Sir Sidney at once organised a boat service on the Nile, assisted by two naval officers and Colonel Bromley. They also fitted four captured djerms with carronades and supported Colonel Spencer’s further advance. Fort St. Julian, four miles upriver, surrendered on the 19th. Returning downriver, he learned that 500 of the Captain Pasha’s troops had been sent to garrison Rosetta. He immediately went there and used his authority to prevent them from pillaging the town and massacring the inhabitants; but they had already wiped out the Coptic Christian community in a village on their route before he could overtake them. These massacres were not carried out under stress of emotion or from motives of hatred or revenge; they were routine affairs. The Christians were simply vermin, and they were considered to have no significance at all as human beings. One Turkish soldier cut off a little girl’s head only to make it easier to take her necklace.

  Sir Sidney’s intervention to protect the citizens of Rosetta from these atrocities occasioned a protest from the Reis Effendi to Lord Elgin who passed it on to the proper authorities in London with the complaint that he was still interfering in Turkish affairs. The Reis Effendi wrote that Sir Sidney was ‘encouraging certain descriptions of people, such as the Copts and other inhabitants of Egypt, whose natural dispositions of character call for a particular mode of treatment whereof no one can be supposed so competent to judge as the Ottoman Government.’

  The Grand Vizier, with a new rabble of an army, had once again crossed the desert and entered Egypt, this time without opposition. Misunderstanding a letter from Sir Sidney, he got it into his head that the other leaders had been trying to make peace without consulting him. He therefore complained to Hutchinson, who replied that they hadn’t the least intention of entering into a treaty of peace with the French. He passed on the complaint to Keith, saying, ‘I have been obliged to disavow Sir Sidney in the most solemn and serious manner.’

  Keith at once wrote as follows to the Captain Pasha:

  Most excellent and illustrious Pasha, I understand that His Highness the Vizier is offended at some letter Sir Sidney has written to him, stating that he had been authorised to offer peace to the French. I beg to assure you, who are my friend, and to request that you will assure the Vizier, that I never gave any authority to Sir Sidney Smith to offer peace or make any proposals, but only to carry the letter which you know was sent and to act for me on other similar occasions if it should be necessary, as I was far from the shore. I was sent to co-operate with you, the Vizier and the General, and it cannot be supposed that I am to condescend to consult with any of my inferiors. May God bless your Highness, and may you be persuaded that I always remain your sincere friend, Keith.

  Meanwhile Sir Sidney with the armed flotilla, accompanied by cavalry patrols on the banks, had reconnoitred the Nile as far as El Taft, twenty-five miles above Rosetta. He reported to General Hutchinson that he could provide water transport for the army to proceed as far up the river as might be required. The general at last decided to make a move towards Cairo. On 26th April he set up his headquarters at Rosetta. One of his first acts there was to relieve Sir Sidney of all his duties in collaboration with the army. He ordered him to return to his ship.

  According to the official historian of the expedition, Major Wilson, who was also a serving officer, it was the Captain Pasha who insisted on Sir Sidney’s recall although he was the saviour of the Turkish Empire. He supposes that the Turks had never forgiven him for preventing them from slaughtering the French army in detail on its way to the embarkation ports by warning Kléber that the Convention of El Arish was not going to be observed.

  He describes the effect on the army of his dismissal as follows:

  Sir Sidney was endeared to officers and men by his conduct, courage and affability. With pride they beheld the hero of Acre; with admiration they reflected on the Convention of El Arish; they had witnessed his exertions, and calculated on his enterprise. The Arabs regarded him as a superior being. To be the friend of Smith was the highest honour they coveted, and his word the only pledge they required...It is true that as a seaman he could not complain on being ordered to reassume the command of his ship; but the high power he had been invested with, the ability he had displayed as a soldier and statesman, entitled him to a superior situation in this expedition, and the interest of the service seemed to require that the connection he had formed with the Mamelukes should through him be maintained. The army, therefore, saw Sir Sidney leave them with regret, but he carried with him their best wishes and gratitude.

  His three aides-de-camp, John Bromley, Le Grand and Frotté, who had served him and the Allied cause so devotedly since they had all escaped from France together, retired to The Tigre with him, but they were not allowed to remain there. Lord Elgin had frequently complained about them, saying that more French than English was spoken in the wardroom of The Tigre, and he had objected to Sir Sidney using them as couriers. Lord Keith ordered them to leave and go where they would. ‘I’ll have no foreigners in the fleet,’ he wrote. (There were more than 500 foreigners serving with the land forces, many of them French emigrés.) They went first to take leave of the Grand Vizier who thanked them for their services and awarded each of them an additional three months’ pay. Then they went to Constantinople to collect it.

  Shortly after his return to The Tigre:, Sir Sidney received a letter from the Mameluke leader Osman Bey Tambourgi, announcing that he had been elected Chief in place of Murad Bey who
had died of plague.

  My honourable and dear Sidney Bey Smith [he wrote]; Murad Bey, our father, set out three days after having written to you his friendly letter, with the hearty wish to join you. On the road he felt himself sick, and died when he was about to write you another letter...We know very well that Murad Bey was very much afraid of the Sublime Porte, and that he put himself under your protection. We are no less afraid, and you know that there is no power in the world in which we put more perfect confidence than in the court of Great Britain. We, and all our brethren, trust first in God Almighty, and then in you. We put ourselves entirely under your protection. We wish to stay with our children and our families in Cairo, under the orders of the Sublime Porte, and to render you any kind of service. We respect the glory and dignity of the English, we prefer their friendship far above that of the seven kings of Europe...We pray you to remember us.

  Both the Grand Vizier and the Captain Pasha had personally guaranteed to Sir Sidney that the rights of the Mamelukes would be respected and their safety assured if they co-operated with the Allies against the French. Now that Murad Bey was dead, and that he himself had been dismissed, he was in great anxiety lest they should go back on their pledges; any treachery now on the part of the Turks against the Mamelukes might start a civil war between them that would jeopardise the British army and bring untold suffering to the Egyptians. He also feared that General Hutchinson, because of the ascendancy of the Captain Pasha over him, would not intervene firmly enough to protect the Mamelukes. He wrote to him several letters from The Tigre asking him to confirm the promises that General Abercromby had authorised him to make to them, and warning him not to be guided by ‘our ill-informed, illiberal, cruel, avaricious allies, the Turks’.

  On 2nd June, Osman Bey Tambourgi joined the Allies with 1,200 of the finest Mameluke cavalry, all richly dressed, well-mounted, well-appointed and well-armed, with numerous attendants. He had eleven beys under his command. His only insignia of rank was a diamond-hilted dagger of curious design which Bonaparte had given to Murad Bey as a token of his respect, and which Murad on his deathbed had passed on to him. He was received first by the Captain Pasha, who did his best to remove from his mind all apprehension and suspicion; and then by General Hutchinson, who was greatly impressed by the military bearing of the Mamelukes and by the order that reigned in their camp.

  The official interpreter, the Baron von Hammer-Purgstall, an eminent Austrian orientalist whose services Sir Sidney had procured for the expedition, negotiated and drew up an agreement between them and the general. From that moment the French owned nothing except the ground occupied by their garrisons, and they were left destitute of resources, because the influence of the Mamelukes over the Egyptians secured the country for the Allies.

  One of the most serious problems was still how to restrain the ferocity of the Turks. They continued to behave to the Egyptians as if they were re-conquering a province that had revolted against them, and were entitled to exact retribution. Sir Sidney had advised Hutchinson that it would be necessary for him to intervene on behalf of the native population, even at the risk of its being called improper interference: the general ignored his advice. To all appeals from Baron Hammer and from his own officers he turned a deaf ear.

  The Baron had been promised, as sole recompense for his services, opportunities to visit and study the antiquities of Egypt. The agreement was not honoured. Although it was generally acknowledged that his services had been invaluable, General Hutchinson abruptly ordered him to leave the army, and Egypt. The news was received with dismay by his staff, not only because the Baron was very popular both with the navy and the army, but because not another man with the expedition could speak any oriental language. Henceforward, in all their dealings with their allies and with the inhabitants, they were entirely dependent upon dragomen of doubtful honesty who were all the abject slaves of their Turkish masters.

  As soon as he heard of this breach of faith, Sir Sidney wrote indignantly to the general, asking what cause he had for expelling his friend without giving him an opportunity to justify himself; and questioning his right also to expel a neutral from an independent state. The general replied that he had no personal prejudice against Hammer, that he really had a regard for him, but ‘public men, who cannot always explain their conduct, must often appear unjust or partial, and must learn to submit to censure with patience, even from those they esteem’.

  What he could not explain was that he had taken this step as the result of a warning letter from Lord Elgin. His lordship had got possession of a large packet of letters written from Egypt, many of them by Baron Hammer. In these letters the Baron deplored the death of Abercromby, and the dismissal of Sir Sidney Smith brought about ‘by a shameful intrigue’. Under General Hutchinson, he said, everything had gone wrong; in order to disassociate himself from Sir Sidney, whose genius and whose activity he found odious, the general had blindly followed the advice of the Grand Vizier, the Captain Pasha, and particularly of the Reis Effendi in Constantinople. The result was that Christians were being massacred, French prisoners basely assassinated, villages burnt, and the country was being pillaged and ravaged by the unpaid Turkish hordes while the English general looked upon it all with a tranquil eye, and disassociated himself from the atrocities of his allies, saying, ‘I am not a Turk’. None of this could have happened, Hammer continued, under the authority of Sir Sidney Smith or of anyone who followed his principles of how to deal with Turks.

  It was impossible to deny that what the Baron had written was true: his allegations were abundantly confirmed from many other sources. Lord Elgin sent the letters to Lord Hawkesbury, who had succeeded Lord Grenville as Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, commenting that unfavourable reports on their affairs in Egypt were being circulated, and that they had originated in the communications of Mr. Hammer and of Mr. Tromelin, his shipmate in The Tigre. He also enclosed an intercepted letter to Baron Hammer from Sir Sidney who called him, ‘his active arm in Egypt’. The letters, Elgin continued, ‘display a regular system of espionage’. And he added:

  It is very painful indeed, my lord, that a discovery too important to be withheld from His Majesty should implicate a British officer, especially one of so high a spirit, so able, and so enterprising as Sir Sidney Smith.

  It seems that neither Lord Hawkesbury nor anyone else ever believed the allegation that Sir Sidney was implicated in ‘a regular system of espionage’. The Baron’s letters were simply one long cry of distress from a sensitive man who loved justice, humanity — and England.

  Chapter Fifteen – The Murder of the Mamelukes

  With painful slowness and hesitation, General Hutchinson moved his troops up the Nile towards Cairo accompanied by the Mamelukes, who numbered about 5,000 with their retainers, and by the Captain Pasha who employed large gangs of men to drag his ship over the mud banks to get it higher up the river than a ship of that burden had ever been before. This seemed to give him immense satisfaction. The Grand Vizier with his large but scarcely-controlled rabble of an army was moving up the east bank, also converging on Cairo. The French offered only token resistance and showed by their manoeuvres that they only wanted an honourable excuse to surrender to the British when a sufficient force had been brought against them. With extraordinary tactlessness, Hutchinson sent a Mameluke, who was a French renegade, to summon the garrison of Cairo to capitulate. He was met with a curt refusal and he was not allowed to enter the city.

  A week later General Belliard, who commanded the garrison, sent one of his officers to ask for a British officer to treat with them. The result was a conference. As soon as the French were assured that the British had brought up enough men to protect them from the Turks they agreed to capitulate. The articles, which were signed on 27th June, were practically the same as those of the Convention of El Arish.

  No doubt General Belliard, with 10,000 fighting men under his command and more than 300 guns, could have put up a more effective resistance, and have defeated Gen
eral Hutchinson whose European troops had been reduced by dysentery to about 4,500, but the whole country was against him and he was in constant fear of another insurrection in Cairo. He agreed with Kléber that in the long run it would be impossible to hold the country, and therefore it was pointless to sacrifice any more lives, particularly as the French occupation of Egypt was merely prolonging the war in Europe. His one obvious move, that Menou might have made in the first place, but he left it too late, would have been to retire to Upper Egypt where the British could not have followed him owing to the difficulties of the country and the sickliness of the troops. Now the way was closed by the defection of the Mamelukes and the approach of British troops from India.

  On 6th July, with impressive ceremony and amid scenes of great emotion, the body of Kléber was brought out from Fort Ibrahim with muffled beat of drum and the sound of minute guns which the British answered. During the night of the 10th the whole garrison withdrew from the city. On the 15th they began their march to Rosetta, escorted by the allied army. The Turks led the way, the British army followed, then the French, with flanking parties of their own cavalry on their left. The British cavalry with two beydoms of Mamelukes brought up the rear. About 300 Nile boats carried the French sick and wounded, and the baggage. The Mamelukes were reinstated, according to treaty, and some of them were sent to meet General Baird’s force in Upper Egypt and help them.

  By the middle of August the garrison of Cairo had sailed for France. General Hutchinson was able to concentrate all his forces against Alexandria. Menou had inveighed against Belliard’s capitulation, and announced that he would bury himself under the ruins of the city rather than surrender.

  It had been agreed between Sir Sidney and Kléber that the savants should be treated as non-combatants and allowed to return to France. They had been waiting for months in Alexandria to embark. Menou sent them out in l’Oiseau without first applying to Keith for a permit. She was stopped and sent back. Menou, incensed that she had not attempted to fight her way through the blockading fleet, sent her out again, threatening to sink her by gunfire. Keith ordered her to be seized and burnt, and the passengers and crew landed on the beach. Sir Sidney intervened and did everything in his power to persuade Keith to change his mind. When he proved obdurate he gave the Secretary of the Institute of Egypt asylum on board The Tigre and personally took charge of the records. After the long delay occasioned by these transactions, l’Oiseau again approached the harbour of Alexandria and this time was allowed to enter.