ood there,
while with gesture and voice--a voice audible even above the fierce and
sustained crackle of the musketry--he urged his men on. Napoleon,
standing on a gun in the nearest French battery, watched the sight with
eager eyes--the French grenadiers running furiously up the breach, the
grim line of levelled muskets that barred it, the sudden roar of the
English guns as from every side they smote the staggering French
column. Vainly single officers struggled out of the torn mass, ran
gesticulating up the breach, and died at the muzzles of the British
muskets. The men could not follow, or only died as they leaped
forward. The French grenadiers, still fighting, swearing, and
screaming, were swept back past the point where Kleber stood, hoarse
with shouting, black with gunpowder, furious with rage. The last
assault on Acre had failed. The French sick, field artillery, and
baggage silently defiled that night to the rear. The heavy guns were
buried in the sand, and after sixty days of open trenches Napoleon, for
the first time in his life, though not for the last, ordered a retreat.

Napoleon buried in the breaches of Acre not merely 3000 of his bravest
troops, but the golden dream of his life. "In that miserable fort," as
he said, "lay the fate of the East." Napoleon expected to find in it
the pasha's treasures, and arms for 300,000 men. "When I have captured
it," he said to Bourrienne, "I shall march upon Damascus and Aleppo. I
shall arm the tribes; I shall reach Constantinople; I shall overturn
the Turkish Empire; I shall found in the East a new and grand empire.
Perhaps I shall return to Paris by Adrianople and Vienna!" Napoleon
was cheerfully willing to pay the price of what religion he had to
accomplish this dream. He was willing, that is, to turn Turk. Henri
IV. said "Paris was worth a mass," and was not the East, said Napoleon,
"worth a turban and a pair of trousers?" In his conversation at St.
Helena with Las Cases he seriously defended this policy. His army, he
added, would have shared his "conversion," and have taken their new
creed with a Parisian laugh. "Had I but captured Acre," Napoleon
added, "I would have reached Constantinople and the Indies; I would
have changed the face of the world. But that man made me miss my
destiny."

Las Cases dwells upon the curious correspondence which existed between
Philippeaux, who engineered the defences of Acre, and Napoleon, who
attacked it. "They we