sts favourably with the conduct of many commanders in similar
cases. Perhaps an episode like that at Jaffa is not without its uses
in opening the eyes of mankind to the ghastly shifts by which military
glory may have to be won. The alternative to the massacre was the
detaching of a French battalion to conduct their prisoners to Egypt.
As that would seriously have weakened the little army, the prisoners
were shot.

A deadlier foe was now to be faced. Already at El Arisch a few cases
of the plague had appeared in Kleber's division, which had come from
Rosetta and Damietta; and the relics of the retreating Mameluke and
Turkish forces seem also to have bequeathed that disease as a fatal
legacy to their pursuers. After Jaffa the malady attacked most
battalions of the army; and it may have quickened Bonaparte's march
towards Acre. Certain it is that he rejected Kleber's advice to
advance inland towards Nablus, the ancient Shechem, and from that
commanding centre to dominate Palestine and defy the power of
Gezzar.[114]

[Illustration: PLAN OF THE SIEGE OF ACRE FROM A CONTEMPORARY SKETCH]

Always prompt to strike at the heart, the commander-in-chief
determined to march straight on Acre, where that notorious Turkish
pacha sat intrenched behind weak walls and the ramparts of terror
which his calculating ferocity had reared around him. Ever since the
age of the Crusades that seaport had been the chief place of arms of
Palestine; but the harbour was now nearly silted up, and even the
neighbouring roadstead of Hayfa was desolate. The fortress was
formidable only to orientals. In his work, "Les Ruines," Volney had
remarked about Acre: "Through all this part of Asia bastions, lines of
defence, covered ways, ramparts, and in short everything relating to
modern fortification are utterly unknown; and a single thirty-gun
frigate would easily bombard and lay in ruins the whole coast." This
judgment of his former friend undoubtedly lulled Bonaparte into
illusory confidence, and the rank and file after their success at
Jaffa expected an easy triumph at Acre.

This would doubtless have happened but for British help. Captain
Miller, of H.M.S. "Theseus," thus reported on the condition of Acre
before Sir Sidney Smith's arrival:

"I found almost every embrasure empty except those towards the sea.
Many years' collection of the dirt of the town thrown in such a
situation as completely covered the approach to the gate from the