his own powers.  Such fatalism had nothing in common with the sombre creed of the East:  it was merely an excess of individualism:  it was the matured expression of that feature of his character, curiously dominant even in childhood, that what he wanted he must of necessity have.  How strange that this imperious obstinacy, this sublimation of western willpower, should not have been tamed even by the overmastering might of Nature in the Orient!

As for the Empire of the East, the declared hostility of the tribes around Nablus had shown how futile were Bonaparte’s efforts to win over Moslems:  and his earlier Moslem proclamations were skilfully distributed by Sir Sidney Smith among the Christians of Syria, and served partly to neutralize the efforts which Bonaparte made to win them over.[117] Vain indeed was the effort to conciliate the Moslems in Egypt, and yet in Syria to arouse the Christians against the Commander of the Faithful.  Such religious opportunism smacked of the Parisian boulevards:  it utterly ignored the tenacity of belief of the East, where the creed is the very life.  The outcome of all that finesse was seen in the closing days of the siege and during the retreat towards Jaffa, when the tribes of the Lebanon and of the Nablus district watched like vultures on the hills and swooped down on the retreating columns.  The pain of disillusionment, added to his sympathy with the sick and wounded, once broke down Bonaparte’s nerves.  Having ordered all horsemen to dismount so that there might be sufficient transport for the sick and maimed, the commander was asked by an equerry which horse he reserved for his own use.  “Did you not hear the order,” he retorted, striking the man with his whip, “everyone on foot.”  Rarely did this great man mar a noble action by harsh treatment:  the incident sufficiently reveals the tension of feelings, always keen, and now overwrought by physical suffering and mental disappointment.

There was indeed much to exasperate him.  At Acre he had lost nearly 5,000 men in killed, wounded, and plague-stricken, though he falsely reported to the Directory that his losses during the whole expedition did not exceed 1,500 men:  and during the terrible retreat to Jaffa he was shocked, not only by occasional suicides of soldiers in his presence, but by the utter callousness of officers and men to the claims of the sick and wounded.  It was as a rebuke to this inhumanity that he ordered all to march on foot, and his authority seems even to have been exerted to prevent some attempts at poisoning the plague-stricken.  The narrative of J. Miot, commissary of the army, shows that these suggestions originated among the soldiery at Acre when threatened with the toil of transporting those unfortunates back to Egypt; and, as his testimony is generally adverse to Bonaparte, and he mentions the same horrible device, when speaking of the hospitals at Jaffa, as a camp rumour, it may be regarded as scarcely worthy of credence.[118]