the tricolour on the north-east tower; but all further progress was checked by English blue-jackets, whom the commodore poured into the town; and the Turkish reinforcements, wafted landwards by a favouring breeze, were landed in time to wrest the ramparts from the assailants’ grip.  On the following day an assault was again attempted:  from the English ships Bonaparte could be clearly seen on Richard Coeur de Lion’s mound urging on the French; but though, under Lannes’ leadership, they penetrated to the garden of Gezzar’s seraglio, they fell in heaps under the bullets, pikes, and scimitars of the defenders, and few returned alive to the camp.  Lannes himself was dangerously wounded, and saved only by the devotion of an officer.

Both sides were now worn out by this extraordinary siege.  “This town is not, nor ever has been, defensible according to the rules of art; but according to every other rule it must and shall be defended”—­so wrote Sir Sidney Smith to Nelson on May 9th.  But a fell influence was working against the besiegers; as the season advanced, they succumbed more and more to the ravages of the plague; and, after failing again on May 10th, many of their battalions refused to advance to the breach over the putrid remains of their comrades.  Finally, Bonaparte, after clinging to his enterprise with desperate tenacity, on the night of May 20th gave orders to retreat.

This siege of nine weeks’ duration had cost him severe losses, among them being Generals Caffarelli and Bon:  but worst of all was the loss of that reputation for invincibility which he had hitherto enjoyed.  His defeat at Caldiero, near Verona, in 1796 had been officially converted into a victory:  but Acre could not be termed anything but a reverse.  In vain did the commander and his staff proclaim that, after dispersing the Turks at Mount Tabor, the capture of Acre was superfluous; his desperate efforts in the early part of May revealed the hollowness of his words.  There were, it is true, solid reasons for his retreat.  He had just heard of the breaking out of the war of the Second Coalition against France; and revolts in Egypt also demanded his presence.[116] But these last events furnished a damning commentary on his whole Syrian enterprise, which had led to a dangerous diffusion of the French forces.  And for what?  For the conquest of Constantinople or of India?  That dream seems to have haunted Bonaparte’s brain even down to the close of the siege of Acre.  During the siege, and later, he was heard to inveigh against “the miserable little hole” which had come between him and his destiny—­the Empire of the East; and it is possible that ideas which he may at first have set forth in order to dazzle his comrades came finally to master his whole being.  Certainly the words just quoted betoken a quite abnormal wilfulness as well as a peculiarly subjective notion of fatalism.  His “destiny” was to be mapped out by his own prescience, decided by his own will, gripped by