f the siege of Acre.
During the siege, and later, he was heard to inveigh against "the
miserable little hole" which had come between him and his destiny--the
Empire of the East; and it is possible that ideas which he may at
first have set forth in order to dazzle his comrades came finally to
master his whole being. Certainly the words just quoted betoken a
quite abnormal wilfulness as well as a peculiarly subjective notion of
fatalism. His "destiny" was to be mapped out by his own prescience,
decided by his own will, gripped by his own powers. Such fatalism had
nothing in common with the sombre creed of the East: it was merely an
excess of individualism: it was the matured expression of that feature
of his character, curiously dominant even in childhood, that _what he
wanted he must of necessity have_. How strange that this imperious
obstinacy, this sublimation of western willpower, should not have been
tamed even by the overmastering might of Nature in the Orient!

As for the Empire of the East, the declared hostility of the tribes
around Nablus had shown how futile were Bonaparte's efforts to win
over Moslems: and his earlier Moslem proclamations were skilfully
distributed by Sir Sidney Smith among the Christians of Syria, and
served partly to neutralize the efforts which Bonaparte made to win
them over.[117] Vain indeed was the effort to conciliate the Moslems
in Egypt, and yet in Syria to arouse the Christians against the
Commander of the Faithful. Such religious opportunism smacked of the
Parisian boulevards: it utterly ignored the tenacity of belief of the
East, where the creed is the very life. The outcome of all that
_finesse_ was seen in the closing days of the siege and during the
retreat towards Jaffa, when the tribes of the Lebanon and of the
Nablus district watched like vultures on the hills and swooped down on
the retreating columns. The pain of disillusionment, added to his
sympathy with the sick and wounded, once broke down Bonaparte's
nerves. Having ordered all horsemen to dismount so that there might be
sufficient transport for the sick and maimed, the commander was asked
by an equerry which horse he reserved for his own use. "Did you not
hear the order," he retorted, striking the man with his whip,
"everyone on foot." Rarely did this great man mar a noble action by
harsh treatment: the incident sufficiently reveals the tension of
feelings, always keen, and now overwrought by physical suffering and
me