Sketches in Bullets

BONAPARTE IN EGYPT (424 pp.)--J. Christopher Herald--Harper & Row ($6.95).

Looking back on it, Napoleon remembered the Egyptian campaign as "the most beautiful time in my life." He pictured himself, he wrote, "founding a religion, marching into Asia, riding an elephant, a turban on my head and in my hand the new Koran that I would have composed to suit my needs. I was full of dreams."

For a time, Author Christopher Herold notes in this witty and vividly detailed account of those three years, all the dreams seemed to come true. The 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.

Square Triumph. Less than a week later, the army struck out again for Cairo, 150 miles away across the desert and up the Nile. When they met the forces of Murad Bey outside Cairo, the French were hungry and thirsty, many of them barefoot and weakened by dysentery. Nevertheless, the battle-hardened French veterans easily routed Murad Bey's Mameluke tribesmen. 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.

But the 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 victories became too costly. Napoleon pushed into Syria with 13,000 men, was stalemated by the Turks at Acre, and limped back to Cairo with only half his army. In the second battle of Abukir, the French slaughtered 9,000 Turks, but suffered almost 1,000 casualties, which the dwindling French forces could not afford. "A few more victories like this." boasted British Commodore Sir Sidney Smith to Nelson, "will annihilate the French army.'' It was never annihilated, but a year and a half after Napoleon returned to France, the French negotiated a truce and then withdrew.

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 and the nature of light.

Seldom in history have scholars risked their skins so recklessly in the pursuit of knowledge. The illustrator Vivant Denon marched 3,000 miles through Upper Egypt with General Desaix. lagging dangerously behind the army to sketch the ruins at Abydos and Tentyra. When he and other pioneer Egyptologists ran out of pencils, they sketched with bullets. The descriptions Denon wrote in his notebook still glow with the sense of wonder the French felt as discoverers of an ancient world.

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