ty, on the night of
May 20th gave orders to retreat.

This siege of nine weeks' duration had cost him severe losses, among
them being Generals Caffarelli and Bon: but worst of all was the loss
of that reputation for invincibility which he had hitherto enjoyed.
His defeat at Caldiero, near Verona, in 1796 had been officially
converted into a victory: but Acre could not be termed anything but a
reverse. In vain did the commander and his staff proclaim that, after
dispersing the Turks at Mount Tabor, the capture of Acre was
superfluous; his desperate efforts in the early part of May revealed
the hollowness of his words. There were, it is true, solid reasons for
his retreat. He had just heard of the breaking out of the war of the
Second Coalition against France; and revolts in Egypt also demanded
his presence.[116] But these last events furnished a damning
commentary on his whole Syrian enterprise, which had led to a
dangerous diffusion of the French forces. And for what? For the
conquest of Constantinople or of India? That dream seems to have
haunted Bonaparte's brain even down to the close of 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 ef