THE LAST ASSAULT  
During the night following Faraud's promotion to a sub-lieutenancy, Bonaparte received eight heavy pieces of artillery and an abundance of ammunition. Faraud's thirty-four hundred balls had served to repulse the sorties from the town. The "Accursed Tower" was almost completely demolished, and Bonaparte resolved to make a last effort.
Then, too, the circumstances rendered this imperative.
A Turkish fleet of thirty vessels, escorted by English warships, was sighted on the 8th of May. It was scarcely daylight when Bonaparte learned of this. He climbed the little hill whence he could survey the entire harbor. It was his opinion that the fleet came from the Island of Rhodes, and was conveying ammunition, troops and provisions to the besieged.
It became imperative therefore to take Saint-Jean-d'Acre before the town received these reinforcements.
When Roland saw that he had decided upon the attack, he asked the general for two hundred men with full permission to use them in any way and for whatever purpose he should choose.
Bonaparte asked for an explanation. He had great con[Pg 641]fidence in Roland's bravery, which amounted almost to rashness; but because of this very rashness he feared to intrust the lives of two hundred men to him. Then Roland explained that the day when he took his long swim he had seen a breach in the walls from the sea which could not be seen from land, and which had evidently caused the besieged no anxiety, defended as it was by an inside battery and the fire from the English frigates. He intended to enter the town through this breach and then create a diversion with his two hundred men.
Bonaparte gave him the desired permission. Roland chose two hundred men from the thirty-second brigade, and among them Sub-lieutenant Faraud.
Bonaparte ordered a general attack. Murat, Rampon, Vial, Kléber, Junot, generals of division, generals of brigade, chiefs of corps, all were to charge at once.
At ten o'clock in the morning all the outer works which had been recaptured by the enemy were thrown down once more. Five flags were taken, three cannon carried off, and four more spiked. But the besieged did not yield an inch; as fast as they were beaten down, others took their places. Never had such audacity and ardor, never had more impetuous courage and obstinate valor, struggled for the possession of a city.
Generals, officers and soldiers fought together in confusion in the trench. Kléber, armed with an Albanian rifle which he had wrested from its owner, made a club of it, and raising it above his head as a thresher uses his flail, he brought down a man with every blow. Murat, with his head uncovered and his long hair floating in the wind, was flashing his sabre back and forth, its fine temper bringing its message of death to all those who came in contact with it. Junot killed a man, now with a pistol, now with a rifle, every time he fired.
Boyer, the commander of the eighteenth brigade, fell in the disorder with seventeen officers and more than a hundred and fifty soldiers of his corps; but Lannes, Bon, and[Pg 642] Vial passed over their bodies, which only served to raise them closer to the ramparts.
Bonaparte, not in the trench, but upon it, was directing the artillery himself, and motionless, a target for all, was making a breach in the wall on his right with the cannon in the tower. They had made a practicable opening at the end of an hour. They had no bushes with which to fill up the ditch; but they threw in the corpses as they had already done at another part of the ramparts. Mussulmans and Christians, French and Turks, thrown out through the windows of the tower where they laid heaped up, raised a bridge as high as the ramparts.
Shouts of "Long live the Republic!" were heard, with cries of "To the assault............