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tacks from the eastward, it will perhaps be necessary to repel efforts which may be made from the west." On the 20th of May, Napoleon, for the first time in his life, relinquished an enterprise unaccomplished. An incessant fire was kept up in the trenches till the last moment, while the baggage, the sick, and the field artillery were silently defiling to the rear, so that the Turks had no suspicion that the besiegers were about to abandon their works. Napoleon left three thousand of his troops, slain or dead of the plague, buried in the sands of Acre. He had accomplished the ostensible and avowed object of his expedition. He had utterly destroyed the vast assemblages formed in Syria for the invasion of Egypt, and had rendered the enemy, in that quarter, incapable of acting against him. Acre had been overwhelmed by his fire, and was now reduced to a heap of ruins. Those vague and brilliant dreams of conquest in the East, which he secretly cherished, had not been revealed to the soldiers. They simply knew that they had triumphantly accomplished the object announced to them, in the destruction of the great Turkish army. Elated with the pride of conquerors, they prepared to return, with the utmost celerity, to encounter another army, assembled at Rhodes, which was soon to be landed, by the hostile fleet, upon some part of the shores of Egypt. Thus, while Napoleon was frustrated in the accomplishment of his undivulged but most majestic plans, he still appeared to the world an invincible conqueror. There were, in the hospitals, twelve hundred sick and wounded. These were to be conveyed on horses and on litters. Napoleon relinquished his own horse for the wounded, and toiled along through the burning sands with the humblest soldiers on foot. The Druses and other tribes, hostile to the Porte, were in a state of great dismay when they learned that the French were retiring. They knew that they must encounter terrible vengeance at the hands of Achmet the Butcher. The victory of the allies riveted upon them anew their chains, and a wail, which would have caused the ear of Christendom to tingle, ascended from terrified villages, as fathers and mothers and children cowered beneath the storm of vengeance which fell upon them, from the hands of the merciless Turk. But England was too far away for the shrieks to be heard in her pious dwellings. At Jaffa, among the multitude of the sick, there were seven found near to death. They we
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