Battle of Shubra Khit

• 1. Introduction

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  The Battle of Shubra Khit unfolded on the 13th of July 1798, on a stretch of Nile riverbank that most of the French soldiers had never heard of two weeks before. They had landed near Alexandria less than a fortnight earlier, marched fifty miles across barren terrain on less than two days of rest, and now stood in massive rectangular formations facing an army famous for destroying a crusade led by Saint Louis in the thirteenth century.

  What happened that day would be called inconclusive, even a protracted skirmish, by the historians who came after. Yet for the men inside those rectangles, watching elaborately armored horsemen circle them for three hours in the Egyptian sun, it was anything but small. And out on the Nile, Napoleon's secretary was filling the pockets of a companion with rocks so he could sink fast enough to avoid being captured.

  How did a French army end up here, hedged between desert and river, fighting a cavalry force in formation tactics borrowed from another era? And what did both sides actually learn when the gunsmoke cleared?

• 2. The March to Shubra Khit

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  Napoleone Bonaparte landed his expeditionary force near Alexandria on the 1st of July 1798, and the first thing he encountered was not an army but a charge by local Bedouins during the landing itself, which cost the French many casualties before a single organized battle had begun.

  Alexandria fell after its governor, Koraim Pasha, refused to surrender. Koraim had already sent urgent messages to the Mameluke leadership in Cairo warning them of the scale of the French arrival, but the warnings did not prompt a swift organized defense.

  Napoleon divided his forces with care. He sent a column eastward under Charles Dugua to take the port of Rosetta, the western Nile outlet, and ordered a separate flotilla of xebecs and riverine vessels under Jean-Baptiste Perrée to sail down the Nile carrying supplies for the advance on Cairo. The plan called for Perrée to reach Rosetta in three days. It took him six, because tides in the Nile delta were rising.

  Meanwhile, the main column was ordered to march fifty miles across terrain that Egyptian guides had falsely described as manageable. The column covered forty miles in four days to the waypoint of Damanhur, with the division of Desaix arriving on the 7th of July. The division of Reynier, made up largely of troops from the Army of the Rhine who had never served under Napoleon, lagged behind and fared far worse. Napoleon had not yet won their trust.

  Damanhur turned out to be far less of a resupply point than promised. A small Mameluke contingent attacked Desaix's division there but was routed, costing the French only four casualties. More ominously, general Mireur was assassinated by Bedouins near the camp during the broader march. The barren crossing had cost the expedition hundreds of troops before any set-piece battle.

  After resting for less than forty-eight hours at Damanhur, the army set out again on the nights of the 9th and the 10th of July, this time toward Ramaniyah on the Nile bank. The head elements arrived on the 10th of July, a date the French calendar marked as the 22nd of Messidor, and the soldiers celebrated with unusual abandon at the sight of the river. Dugua's column arrived a day later, but without the flotilla, whose vessels were running aground constantly because the Nile was at its lowest seasonal levels. The flotilla numbered approximately sixty-five ships in total, twenty-five of them armed.

• 3. Murad Bey's Calculation

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  Murad Bey, one of the two Mameluke leaders who held the real power in Egypt, had reportedly dismissed the French invasion as a logistical problem that would solve itself. His view was that the desert terrain and lack of water would destroy the invaders before any army needed to. His own forces would only need to deliver the final blow.

  The nominal Ottoman governor of Egypt, Abu Bakr Pasha, called a council in Cairo. But the plan that emerged came from Murad and his fellow bey Ibrahim, not from the governor. Ibrahim would assemble a large army outside Cairo near the village of Bulaq. Murad would take a smaller intercepting force and move to meet the French before they reached the capital.

  Murad's army as it approached was not small by any measure. It began with three thousand Mameluke cavalry and two thousand of their squires, then was reinforced by local Mameluke chieftains and an infantry contingent that brought the total to approximately twenty thousand. Murad stopped near the village of Shubra Khit and chose to make his stand there.

  The Mamelukes arranged their line so it extended from the west bank of the Nile out toward the desert, curving slightly around the flank of the French position. The spectacle they presented was extraordinary. Napoleon himself later wrote that he remembered how the sun touched their helmets and coats of mail, making their fine line glimmer. A French cavalry officer named Desvernois described horses sumptuously harnessed, snorting and prancing beneath riders covered in arms inlaid with gold and jewels, some wearing turbans with egret feathers, others in golden helmets, each armed with sabers, lances, maces, spears, rifles, axes, daggers, and three double-barreled pistols.

  What neither side knew clearly was how the other would fight. The Mamelukes had maintained a fearsome reputation in Europe for centuries on the strength of their victory over Saint Louis's crusade. Napoleon and his generals had almost no intelligence on Mameluke battlefield tactics.

• 4. Squares Against Cavalry

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  Napoleon ordered his divisions into giant rectangular formations, each six ranks deep rather than the standard three, as a precaution against whatever the Mamelukes might attempt. The oblongs were three hundred yards wide at the front and fifty yards on the sides, with artillery posted at each corner covering one-hundred-and-eighty degree firing arcs. Cavalry and baggage waited in the center.

  For approximately three hours, the Mamelukes circled these formations looking for an opening. Tensions inside the French ranks rose sharply during that long, circling suspense. French observers watched Mameluke riders gallop along their own lines encouraging their men. Then, in disorganized groups, the first horsemen broke and charged. They reached the French ranks, some charging directly while others searched for gaps, and French sharpshooters picked them off as they galloped through. They pulled back.

  Napoleon later wrote with a measure of admiration about what he saw: the Mamelukes were at one with their horses, which appeared to sense their every wish, and having fired all six of their weapons they would pass between the French squares with marvelous dexterity.

  The decisive charge came after Napoleon observed a conference among the Mameluke commanders on a small hillock. Seven beys led a massed cavalry force directly into the gap between the squares of General Reynier and General Dugua, where Napoleon himself was positioned, expecting to find the formations open from the rear. Napoleon recorded what happened: buckshot and rifle fire came first from the front, then from the flanks, then from the rear as the horsemen passed through. Several who rushed to the rear of a square died on bayonets. When Murad Bey saw that the fire from behind was as strong as from the front, he withdrew. The Mamelukes left some sixty dead and wounded among the French squares. A follow-up charge at the French reserves was also repulsed by grapeshot and volley fire.

• 5. Battle on the Nile

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  Perrée's flotilla had overshot the land battle entirely. Driven by strong winds in the night, his ships had scattered, and his staff had no reliable fix on their position relative to the army. Perrée pressed forward planning to debark at the first habitation they found.

  The Egyptian flotilla was commanded by a man named Nicola, a Greek Christian who served as Murad Bey's naval advisor. Nicola's expert knowledge of the Nile allowed him to set a simultaneous ambush of seven gunboats, manned by Greek sailors, supported by a shore battery of nine-pounder cannons concealed on the riverbanks. Perrée's lead vessels ran directly into it.

  Within a short time, two French gunboats and a galley had to be abandoned and were boarded by the Mamelukes. That left only a xebec and a third gunboat still fighting, both crowded with civilians and soldiers who had fled the captured vessels. Among the passengers were Napoleon's secretary, Bourienne, and several scientists including the mathematician Monge, a close friend of Napoleon, and the chemist Berthollet. Berthollet, watching the situation deteriorate, began filling his pockets with rocks so he would sink quickly enough to avoid capture.

  Bourienne later wrote a stark account of what he witnessed: several French ships were boarded before their eyes, and the crews were massacred with what he called barbaric ferocity, their decapitated heads held aloft by the hair.

  The tide turned on a single shot. A French vessel scored a hit on the magazine of the Mameluke flagship. It caught fire and exploded, sinking the gunboat. Almost simultaneously, the explosion combined with a French infantry counter-attack sent both the Mameluke flotilla and ground forces into retreat.

  The naval engagement lasted from roughly eight-thirty or nine in the evening to around noon, and Perrée and Bourienne recorded twenty French killed and many wounded, with more than fifteen hundred cannon shots fired in the course of the fight. Bourienne was explicit that claims of Ottoman flotilla destruction were exaggerated: the Turks, as the French called their enemies, had done considerable damage and suffered little themselves.

• 6. Aftermath and Reckoning

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  Perrée was promoted to rear admiral after the battle. In his report to Vice Admiral Brueys, he recorded twenty wounded and several killed, and noted that he himself had lost several parts of his left arm. Historians have estimated the actual French losses were at least several hundred. Napoleon, writing later, acknowledged the real French losses at Shubra Khit had been a few hundred.

  For the Mamelukes, three hundred of their elite cavalry became casualties in the land fighting, and nine cannon were abandoned when Murad's army retreated southward toward Cairo. The Mameluke flagship was destroyed. The losses to the elite cavalry mattered; squires and local infantry could be replaced far more easily than the trained Mameluke horsemen.

  Napoleon had only three hundred cavalry of his own, making any pursuit unthinkable. He marched his infantry quickly to the aid of Perrée's beleaguered flotilla and later claimed, with what the source calls some delusion, that he could have cut off the Mameluke army had the naval crisis not forced him to divert. He did not have the cavalry to do so.

  The French looted the Mameluke dead. The valuables found on each fallen warrior convinced the French soldiers that Egypt was not as impoverished as the desert crossing had led them to believe; it was the richness of the rulers, not the land, that the treasure reflected.

  The broader strategic result was ambiguous enough that Napoleon could not easily frame it as a clear victory for his report to the Directory in Paris. Some historians classified the engagement as nothing more than a protracted skirmish. What it did give the French was concrete information about how the Mamelukes fought, information that Napoleon would apply three weeks later at the far larger confrontation near the Pyramid of Giza.