MOUNT TABOR
MAY 1799
Aharon Zemach reined in at the ridgeline an hour before dawn. Miles to the north, the mountain loomed in shadow; to the west, beyond the valley, the last stars were disappearing. Somewhere between here and there were the French.
Aharon scanned the darkness for movement and patterns, although he knew it was far too early.
Patterns in the darkness all around, he thought with a minor flash of poetry.
Patterns we still can’t see.
Some of the patterns were obvious enough. The Sultan had refused to ratify the officials Napoleon had appointed in Jerusalem and had declared him an open enemy, but that hadn’t stopped him from marching north. No one had imagined it would. He wanted Palestine and Syria, and if he wasn’t willing to let the Porte stand in his way, he certainly wasn’t going to step aside for the Banu Zaydan.
Jaffa, abandoned by its garrison, had surrendered without a fight, and twelve thousand Frenchmen camped at Acre’s walls. Acre hadn’t surrendered. The troops from Jaffa had joined the defenders there, and so had others from the Jabal Amil and Chouf, from the coastal plain, from throughout the western part of the emir’s domains.
They still fought, and now a second army from the east – Aharon’s army – was marching to relieve them. And there, the pattern blurred.
The men of the Galilee were with him, and those of Jenin and Jezreel and the Wadi Ara and the local Bedouin tribes; eighteen thousand, the largest army that had been raised in these hills for centuries. But though messengers had been sent to the wali of Damascus, it was clear now that he wasn’t coming and that he would wait to see who won before choosing a side. And Nablus, too, was keeping its own counsel; the Tuqans hadn’t said they
weren’t coming, and they surely knew that Napoleon coveted their lands too, but their best defense had always been to stay in their hills and let their enemies come to them.
And now it was too late to wait longer. Acre couldn’t hold out forever, and peasants reported that a force of four thousand Frenchmen had left the siege camp and was marching up the valley to intercept the relief force. Aharon and his eighteen thousand had no choice but to meet them.
Eighteen thousand. Aharon knew that, in Egypt, the French had defeated larger forces than that despite being outnumbered. And those were Mamluks with seven hundred years of tradition as warriors.
There was no warrior tradition among the Jews of the Galilee, just two hundred years of service as militia and defense against sieges and raids. Maybe, Aharon thought, it was better that there was not. The home truths of the Livorno Guard and the town militia might work where the Mamluks’ traditions had not:
choose your ground and let them come to you.
This ground was the best he was likely to find.
_______
Five miles away, Napoleon Bonaparte and Jean-Baptiste Kléber halted their troops and conferred. “There,” said Kléber, pointing east to the low ridge that had appeared in the predawn light. “The scouts say they’re waiting for us on that ridge.”
“That’s not what George says,” answered Napoleon, gesturing to the Bethlehem townsman who sat next to them on a lathered horse. “He saw their column south of here, advancing from Jenin.”
“The men of Jenin have joined the Galileans, so everyone says. Are you sure he isn’t tricking you?”
“Lefebvre was with him.”
At that, Kléber was checked; Lefebvre had proved his worth a hundred times since the landing at Alexandria, and if he said there were troops marching from the south, then he wasn’t lying. He might be deceived, but he wasn’t telling a lie.
“I will take the third battalion and march south,” said Napoleon. “You advance to the ridge and wait. I’ll call for you if I need you.” Minutes later, the word taken for the deed, the third battalion marched off, leaving Kléber and twenty-five hundred men behind.
It was frustrating, thought Kléber, as the fog of war always was. In fact,
frustrating was a good way to describe this whole campaign – every credit in the ledger thus far had been balanced with a debit. Jerusalem and Bethlehem had provided ample food and clothing, but beyond a few scouts, they had no trained soldiers. He’d been elated when Jaffa fell without a battle, but it had taken only days to learn that its garrison and most of its guns were now behind the walls of Acre. Bashir Shihab, the prince of Mount Lebanon, kept hinting that just a little more gold would bring him to Acre, but so far, the gold had yielded no troops.
And Acre itself – it was surrounded by sea on three sides with the damnable British protecting its flanks, and on the one side the French army could attack, the defenders were devilishly clever. The men in these parts might be outclassed by modern infantry, but they had centuries of experience in siegecraft, and were quick to repair breaches and to build secondary walls of rubble where the outer wall was weakest. The whole enterprise had become a deadly morass, a death of a thousand cuts in front of the walls while the Bedouins raided the supply trains.
There were no walls on the ridge, at least. Even with a divided force, this would be the kind of fighting at which Kléber’s men excelled. It would be a welcome change.
_______
“There they are,” said Joseph Zemach, passing the spyglass to his brother. For a moment, Aharon’s eyes swam at the sudden change in his vision, but then he too saw them, two columns of French troops advancing up the valley.
“Twenty-five hundred, I make it,” said Ali al-Atashi, who was sheikh of the Banu Zabidah and who the other Bedouins in the army also acknowledged as their captain. “There were supposed to be four thousand, weren’t there?”
“Maybe the peasants were wrong,” Aharon said. But even as he said so, another possibility leaped to mind: that the other fifteen hundred Frenchmen were to one side or the other, coming around to flank them. “Send riders north and south,” he began, but no sooner had he given the command than he heard the hoofbeats of thousands of horses.
The Bedouins and the Wadi Ara cavalry erupted in motion, turning to face the enemy, their movements sure even in the gloom. Behind them, the militiamen who’d been digging in along the ridge began digging across it. There was little time, but even a crude trench would slow the advancing cavalry down, maybe give them a chance.
Not much of a chance, he realized; the hoofbeats were far louder now than a mere fifteen hundred horses would make. The French had gathered thousands more from somewhere – from Bethlehem and Jerusalem? – and the army of the Galilee was about to be annihilated.
But then the hoofbeats were joined by voices – Arabic voices, not French – and in the first rays of dawn, Aharon saw the Tuqan battle standard.
Nablus had come.
_______
Kléber, eight hundred yards from the foot of the ridge, looked incredulously at the ridgeline where thirty thousand soldiers had appeared.
There were only supposed to be eighteen thousand, he thought, and then he realized what must have happened. There
had been a column advancing past Jenin, but it hadn’t been
from Jenin – it was the Nabulsi. The armies of Nablus and the Galilee were both up there. And Napoleon was miles away now, too late to intercept them.
“George!” he called to the scout Bethlehem. “Ride to Napoleon and tell him the enemy is here. At the gallop, now!”
George obeyed, urging his horse into a run. And from the top of the ridge, other horsemen were riding. The Nabulsi were cavalry, Kléber realized, and his two battalions, which had stayed in column in the expectation of facing a force heavy on infantry, were about to become a deathtrap.
“Form square!” he shouted, making his voice carry. “Form square!”
_______
Aharon watched from the ridge as the Nabulsi and Bedouin horsemen thundered toward the French. He knew what they hoped to do – if they could reach the Frenchmen before their square was formed, they would destroy them.
They almost did.
The leading Nabulsi squadrons covered the eight hundred yards to the French troops in less than a minute. But the Frenchmen, who had drilled until their movements were second nature, formed two hollow squares with astonishing speed. With the Nabulsi only forty yards away, they presented their muskets and fired.
Aharon had heard about battles in Egypt where hollow squares had broken cavalry. Now he saw it. A few Frenchmen died, but at least a hundred Nabulsi fell from their horses and the troops behind them turned aside in disarray.
Some of the horsemen came around for a second charge at the corners of the squares, sensing correctly that those were the weakest points. But their fallen comrades were in their way. That was one of the things that made hollow squares so formidable – not only did they face front on all sides, but they made a rampart of the enemy dead.
Within minutes, the Nabulsi and the Bedouins were riding back up the ridge, leaving their dead and wounded behind them.
When they arrived, a heated argument broke out among them. Al-Atashi wanted to attack again; the French were so outnumbered, he said, that they would batter down the squares eventually. But Yusuf Tuqan demurred. “Maybe we can. But how many thousands will die? Let them come uphill to us first, let the cannon soften them up, let them face the infantry.”
Aharon lacked the experience to take sides in an argument between cavalrymen, but he did remember the lessons of the militia, as he’d done two hours before:
choose your ground, let them come to you.
He nodded to Tuqan and then to the captain of the Galilee riflemen. “Skirmishers to their places.”
_______
Kléber had anticipated, and hoped, that the cavalry would charge again – the Mamluks in Egypt had mounted such charges, and it had cost them dear. But no charge came; instead, grapeshot thundered from the guns behind the ridgeline. Someone up there had a cool head.
At seven hundred yards, most of the grapeshot missed. But most didn’t mean all. A hollow square was a fortress, but like any fortress, it was vulnerable if it stayed in one place. It had to advance or retreat, or else the guns would pound it to pieces. And the enemy, behind the ridgeline, was mostly protected from
his guns.
An advance uphill would be costly, but retreat was unthinkable. And by now, George surely had reached Napoleon.
“Vive la France!” he shouted. “Forward!”
_______
There was something inexorable, thought Aharon, about how the hollow squares moved. The cannon took their toll, and so did the riflemen on the hill, who could shoot at the French from much farther than the French could shoot back. But once again, the Frenchmen’s drill took over; gaps in the square were plugged as fast as they appeared, and the men in front who fell were replaced by others from the sides and rear.
Slowly, the distance closed: five hundred yards, then four hundred, then three. The militiamen put their shovels down and picked up their muskets. The real battle would start soon.
It would start sooner, in fact, than Aharon thought.
“Troops to the south!” called Joseph, who had the spyglass again. “Fifteen hundred infantry, a mile away!”
The divided force was reuniting; the Frenchmen who’d separated from their comrades before sunrise had returned. And the arriving force would see where the fighting was, and where the Galilean troops were. They would do exactly what Aharon had feared that morning: ascend the ridge from the south and take his army in the flank.
He called Tuqan and al-Atashi to him and sketched a map on the ground. “We have to go to them after all,” he said. “All of us – horse and foot, hammer and anvil. My men in front, yours to the corners,” and he pointed at the far corner of each square.
The command was relayed, and the men of the Zaydani army and those who followed Nablus formed up. Many were calling out the names of their towns or their leaders. Some were calling Aharon’s name or shouting for the Sanhedrin.
Aharon pointed his sword at the oncoming French, and wondered for a moment what
he should say. Just as there was no warrior tradition among militia, there were no battle cries. And then it came to him.
“Am Yisrael chai!” he said – the people of Israel live! “Forward!”
_______
The enemy flowed over the ridgeline, thousands upon thousands. It would be a battle at last. “Stand!” ordered Kléber; his men presented their muskets, and his cannon unleashed fire.
_______
Nothing – not all the stories of battles in Egypt, not even what he’d seen when the Nabulsi cavalry charged – prepared Aharon for what he now faced. The artillery spoke first, canister shell after canister shell raining death among his men. And then, at seventy yards, the French squares unleashed their first volley. They fired by half-companies, one rank firing while the other knelt to reload, and in that way, they could shoot a volley every twelve seconds. Bullets ripped into the Zaydani infantry and men fell wounded and dead on the smoke-veiled hillside. Aharon’s troops fired back, loosing volleys of their own, but they couldn’t match the French speed and training; dozens of Frenchmen fell, but hundreds of Galileans did.
But where hundreds fell, thousands more advanced, and now, the cavalry was thundering down to join them. “Am Yisrael chai!” shouted Aharon. “Forward!”
The distance between the two lines had closed to ten yards, and a command came from within the French ranks; Aharon didn’t understand it, but he saw the front line of the square fixing their bayonets. “Pikemen forward!” he called – few of the militiamen had bayonets for their muskets, but maybe an old-fashioned version of the same thing would do. “Charge!”
The infantry and cavalry charged at the same time. The Galilean battle line became a confused melee, and the Bedouin and Nabulsi horsemen crashed into the corners of the squares that now could engage them only from one side. Smoke and gunfire added to the confusion as the Frenchmen who hadn’t had time to fix their bayonets fired a few at a time.
A hammer blow struck Aharon in the chest.
“Forward!” he tried to say, but he was on his knees – how had that happened? – and everything was veiled in red.
He just had time to see the corners of the squares crumple before death claimed him.
_______
Kléber watched in horror as the Nabulsi poured into the breaches, their sabers rising and falling as they took their revenge. He shouted orders, rushing men across the square to try to close the breach, but there were too many enemy soldiers already inside, and now the infantry were also pushing through. He gave more commands, hoping to at least form tighter squares and protect the artillery, but it was too late even for that.
The right-hand square collapsed altogether. Some of the men tried to run to Kléber’s square or to Napoleon’s advancing battalion and got cut down for their pains. Those who formed knots and faced outward on all sides, presenting their bayonets like a hedgehog, fared better; the horses sheered off from them and many reached safety. But not enough came to reinforce Kléber for his square to hold.
“Form around me and retreat!” he ordered, and those who still could – several hundreds all told – cut their way through the enemy, formed a square around him, and retreated toward Napoleon’s force, daring the Galileans to stop them.
The Galileans didn’t try. But some of their riflemen had climbed up on the guns, and Kléber’s hat made a perfect target.
The bullet struck the back of his skull, and he was dead before he ever knew that he was hit.
_______
Still nine hundred yards to the south, Napoleon surveyed the unfolding chaos. He had hoped to form his men into square and put them between the enemy and their camp, and even to trap them between his square and Kléber’s. But that wasn’t going to happen now. The Zaydani soldiers were already forming up in front of the artillery, and there were far too many for Napoleon to overcome.
This battle was lost. He wouldn’t beat the relief army here; he would have to fall back on Acre, where his whole army was, and defeat them there.
He waited just long enough for the last refugees from Kléber’s battalions to reach him, and sounded the retreat.
_______
That night, two men stood miles apart and spoke the same words.
Napoleon, by his campfire, faced his troops and gave the eulogy for Kléber. “My brother is dead,” he said, “and I weep.”
Joseph Zemach, now the nagid of the Galilee and standing by the captured artillery, gazed at where Aharon’s body lay on the hillside. “My brother is dead,” he said, “and I weep.”
In the same moment, both men looked to where the North Star had appeared above the mountain and wondered what the next days would bring.
