Napoleon Bonaparte tried to conquer the world from India and that path lead to Egypt. Author Paul Strathern covers this disastrous campaign where Napoleons navy and army were eventually stopped in the deserts of Syria after subduing Egypt and months of brutal battle against desert Bedouins. These Bedouins taught the French straggler constrict who got lost from his company the art of sodomy torture and French soldiers were already jittery far away from home in one of the most inhospitable places in the world. The Egyptians didn't buy the French proclaims that they were liberating the region from Mameluke control and most Egyptians jut saw these atheist French spreading their revolutionary ideas as another foreign invader which the lands had suffer much in the past. This book shows the war that had napoleon Bonaparte capturing most of Egypt from the joint Mameluke control of Murad and Ibrahim Bey.
The French constantly defeated the armies and calvarias sent by these men and proceeded into Syria before being stopped by the Turkish English navy keeping napoleons power in check and forcing him to seek new lands for battle and conquest. The French committed their share of atrocities on village non-combatantents including a suicidal charge of drunk foot soldiers who were shocked thet y were successful and were to loaded on wine to stop their advances on unarmed peasants once the regular Mameluke Calvary had withdrawn. This was another Western war in the Muslim world where Europeans thought they would be welcomes as liberators and which the opposite developed and a war of attrition would take many of their lives shattering dreams of continual conquest. this war was basically all about napoleon and him wanting to make a huge name of himself hoping to repeat the successes of Alexander the great. Paul Strathern makes this point out and power given to this man should of been obviated to prevent these pointless foreign excursions which undoubtedly must of been devastating to the French treasury.
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