Word: napoleons
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Bonaparte in Egypt, by J. Christopher Herold. The vividly detailed saga of Napoleon's three years in Egypt and of the gradual erosion of both his army and his dream of Eastern empire...
...French fleet of 400 sails that left Toulon on May 19, 1798, managed to evade a British squadron under Admiral Nelson in the fog and sailed on to Alexandria undisturbed. With an advance guard of only 5,000 men (out of a total force of 50,000, including sailors), Napoleon landed through the surf on a remote beach and advanced on Alexandria by night with neither cavalry nor artillery. Taking the garrison by surprise, he captured the city with only an estimated 200 casualties...
...Formed in squares six ranks deep, the French infantry coolly cut down the wildly charging Mameluke cavalry, despite the heroics of individual Mameluke warriors whose scimitars sliced through the barrels of French rifles as if they were straws. The Battle of the Pyramids was over in two hours, and Napoleon was presumably the master of all Egypt...
...French fortunes soon changed. One trouble was that Mameluke warriors were replaceable and French riflemen were not. After Nelson finally caught the French fleet at Abukir Bay and all but destroyed it in the Battle of the Nile, Napoleon's lines of supply and communication with Europe were virtually cut off. His army was steadily reduced by sieges of sickness (most notably, ophthalmia and bubonic plague), by Bedouin raids, and by the almost incessant warfare the French were forced to wage to keep their sprawling colony subdued. Some 27,000 Frenchmen died in Egypt, and after a time even...
Studies in Slime. If anything justified the expedition, Author Herold believes, it was the ten volumes of text and 14 volumes of plates that comprise Description de I'Egypte. That monument of collective scholarship was assembled by the 167-man Commission on the Sciences and Arts that Napoleon brought with him to establish a cultural institute in Alexandria. The assembled scientists interspersed papers like "Observations on the Wing of the Ostrich'' and "Analysis of the Slime of the Nile" with studies on capillary attraction, the treatment of smallpox and bubonic plague, the formation of ammonia...