‘I see.’ Napoleon lowered his head for a moment and took a deep breath. He felt a rage born of pure frustration welling up in his veins, and knew that if he surrendered to it he would turn into a screaming, hysterical monster, a side of his character he had no wish to display to this officer or the wider army. Not when his men needed him to be strong and impervious to the misfortunes that assailed them. He cleared his throat and looked up. ‘Thank you for letting me know, Colonel. You may return to your men.’ He strode towards his tent, glancing back over his shoulder. ‘Berthier, Junot, inside now.’

As soon as they were seated around Napleon’s campaign desk he leaned forward, folded his hands and rested his chin on them. ‘So, what are our options, gentlemen?’

Berthier spoke first. ‘We cannot continue the siege without heavy artillery, sir.’

‘Granted. So we must send word back to Kléber to send us more siege guns.’>

‘But, sir, that will take weeks, months perhaps. In the meantime, the plague will claim more men.’

‘And it will give the Sultan a chance to send a relief force to Acre,’ Junot added.‘What if we are caught between Ahmad Pasha and the Army of Damascus? The longer we are here, sir, the longer we invite disaster.’

‘It’s a risk,’ Napoleon conceded. ‘But then all campaigns are risky ventures. However, given the past performance of the enemy, I think we can handle any relief force they send to Acre. That need not concern us unduly. The immediate problem is how do we overcome Acre’s defences without siege artillery?’

‘We still have the army’s field guns, sir,’ said Junot.

Berthier shook his head.‘Field guns are no good against those walls.’

‘We don’t know that, unless we give it a try,’ Junot countered. ‘It’s possible the walls are not as strong as you seem to think. If they’re anything like the defences of the other fortifications we’ve dealt with, we should be able to complete the job with our field guns.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Berthier insisted. ‘The weight of the shot is too light.’

Napoleon intervened. ‘All very true, Berthier, but we must continue the siege with the tools that we have, while we send a message to General Kléber to ship us some more siege guns. Until they arrive we’ll use the field guns, and we’ll just have to resort to more traditional methods of siegecraft. The engineers will tunnel under the wall and use a mine to try to bring down that bastion.’ He leaned back and ran a hand through his hair. ‘That’s all, gentlemen. Berthier, send that message to Kléber at once, and Junot, get our field pieces moved forward into the siege batteries.’