sympathy with the sick and wounded, once broke down Bonaparte's
nerves. Having ordered all horsemen to dismount so that there might be
sufficient transport for the sick and maimed, the commander was asked
by an equerry which horse he reserved for his own use. "Did you not
hear the order," he retorted, striking the man with his whip,
"everyone on foot." Rarely did this great man mar a noble action by
harsh treatment: the incident sufficiently reveals the tension of
feelings, always keen, and now overwrought by physical suffering and
mental disappointment.

There was indeed much to exasperate him. At Acre he had lost nearly
5,000 men in killed, wounded, and plague-stricken, though he falsely
reported to the Directory that his losses during the whole expedition
did not exceed 1,500 men: and during the terrible retreat to Jaffa he
was shocked, not only by occasional suicides of soldiers in his
presence, but by the utter callousness of officers and men to the
claims of the sick and wounded. It was as a rebuke to this inhumanity
that he ordered all to march on foot, and his authority seems even to
have been exerted to prevent some attempts at poisoning the
plague-stricken. The narrative of J. Miot, commissary of the army,
shows that these suggestions originated among the soldiery at Acre
when threatened with the toil of transporting those unfortunates back
to Egypt; and, as his testimony is generally adverse to Bonaparte, and
he mentions the same horrible device, when speaking of the hospitals
at Jaffa, as a camp rumour, it may be regarded as scarcely worthy of
credence.[118]