. In the footsteps of Napoleon, his life and its famous scenes. foot soldiers ofFrance to find themselves beating against solid squares of steeland fire. Dazed at first and then enraged they rode againand again to the slaughter. But when they saw their army broken into two parts andthe irresistible French squares wedging in between, they fledin mad panic. One division galloped over to the Pyramidsand vanished into the desert, while another raced into thevillage of Embabeh, from behind the guns of which they sal-lied forth once more only to fall before the unwaveringsquares like grass before a
. In the footsteps of Napoleon, his life and its famous scenes. foot soldiers ofFrance to find themselves beating against solid squares of steeland fire. Dazed at first and then enraged they rode againand again to the slaughter. But when they saw their army broken into two parts andthe irresistible French squares wedging in between, they fledin mad panic. One division galloped over to the Pyramidsand vanished into the desert, while another raced into thevillage of Embabeh, from behind the guns of which they sal-lied forth once more only to fall before the unwaveringsquares like grass before a steam mowing machine. Those ?who escaped from the French leaped from their uselesshorses into the Nile, along with a mob of other of them swam to safety; but history makes the grew-some record that after the victors had finished robbing thethousands of dead bodies that bestrew the plain they amusedthemselves by angling for the drowned, who numbered character of the eonfiict is established by the number ofF!rench killed, which was THE BATTLE OF THE PYRAMIDS 85 Such was the Battle of the Pyramids, a combat between themiddle ages and modern times. In a military sense, it wasnot above the level of a massacre, but it was a great battle inits consequences. It shattered forever the despotism of the Mamelukes, thosealien slaves who, revolting against their masters, had ruledEgypt for nearly six centuries. And it did far more thanthat. When the blue squares of France broke through theMameluke line on that plain down by the little grove ofdate palms, they opened the lane by which the west passedthrough to the east. From the field of the Battle of the Pyra-mids, Occidental civilisation started on its eventful journeyround the earth to the banks of the Ganges, to the shore ofthe Sea of Japan and over the Great Wall of China. Napoleon himself was not to realise his dream of empirein the Orient, but there by the Nile his sword cut the firstbreach in the barrier w
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookdecade1910, booksubjectnapoleo, bookyear1915
