BONAPARTE'S INVADERS

by
Richard Howard

1998 1st. published by Little, Brown and Company (UK)

ISBN 0 316 88158 9

BONAPARTE'S INVADERS
Richard Howard

Seventeen thousand French troops leave Toulon harbour in May 1798 unaware of their
ultimate destination. Barely three months after taking Rome, Napoleon Bonaparte has rewarded the finest regiments of that campaign with a place among the Army of Orient, the elite invasion force bound — as Bonaparte's more guarded tones reveal — for Egypt.

For the men on board the ships of the fleet, however, the first battle is merely to survive the degradation of life at sea. When the discontented ranks of Alain Lausard's cavalry unit — the unit formed when condemned prisoners were enlisted into the army three years earlier — vent their violent frustrations towards the crew of the frigate L'Esperance and members of the infantry, the voyage begins yielding victims of its own. By the time they stagger, starved and exhausted, upon the shores of Egypt, Lausard's dragoons have more than glory to fight for.

As his beleaguered soldiers march into the desert, Bonaparte watches his tactical gamble collapse. Worn down by the blistering heat, these desperate men summon unknown strengths to resist the Arab warrior raids that blight their path towards the Nile — but as they are drawn deeper into forbidding territory, despair spreads throughout the ranks as ferociously as disease. Even when the Mameluke army is defeated beneath the shadow of the Pyramids, Nelson's destruction of the French fleet and Bonaparte's obsessive warmongering convinces Lausard he will never see
Paris again ...