or having done so: the soldiery murmured, asking how these barbarians
were to be fed, when they themselves were already suffering severe
privations. The General summoned his chief officers to council and,
after long discussion, it was resolved that, in this case, necessity
left no room for mercy. On the 10th--three days after their
surrender--the prisoners were marched out of Jaffa, in the centre of a
battalion under General Bon. When they had reached the sand-hills, at
some distance from the town, they were divided into small parties, and
shot or bayoneted to a man. They, like true fatalists, submitted in
silence; and their bodies were gathered together into a pyramid, where,
after the lapse of thirty years, their bones are still visible whitening
the sand.

Such was the massacre of Jaffa, which will ever form one of the darkest
stains on the name of Napoleon. He admitted the fact himself;--and
justified it on the double plea, that he could not afford soldiers to
guard so many prisoners, and that he could not grant them the benefit of
their parole, because they were the very men who had already been set
free on such terms at El-Arish. To this last defence the answer is,
unfortunately for him, very obvious. He could not possibly have
recognised in every one of these victims, an individual who had already
given and broken his parole. If he did--still that would not avail
him:--the men surrendered with arms in their hands. No general has a
right to see men abandon the means of defence, and then--after the lapse
of three days too!--inflict on them the worst fate that could have
befallen them had they held out. The only remaining plea is that of
expediency; and it is one upon which many a retail as well as wholesale
murderer might justify his crime.

Buonaparte had now ascertained that the Pacha of Syria,
Achmet-Djezzar,[27] was at St. Jean d'Acre, (so renowned in the history
of the crusades,) and determined to defend that place to extremity, with
the forces which had already been assembled for the invasion of Egypt.
He in vain endeavoured to seduce this ferocious chief from his
allegiance to the Porte, by holding out the hope of a separate
independent government, under the protection of France. The first of
Napoleon's messengers returned without an answer; the second was put to
death; and the army moved on Acre in all the zeal of revenge, while the
necessary apparatus of a siege was ordered to be sent round by sea from
A