Napoleon turned his attention back to the desperate charge across the open ground. The first men had reached the city’s defences and were struggling to lean their ladder up against the wall beneath the breach. The top rung was some distance below the gap and even as the first man scrambled up Napoleon realised that the engineers had miscalculated. Reaching the top of the ladder, the soldier valiantly stepped on to the top rung, and flattened himself to the masonry while his hands groped up towards the lip of the breach. The distance was too great, and as Napoleon and his staff watched in silence, willing the man on, a Turk leaned out from the bastion, took careful aim, and shot the French soldier in the back. He spasmed, arched and tumbled off the ladder on to his companions below. As the sailors’ guns knocked out the batteries on the left flank, the assault on the defenders began to slacken and all along the wall musket fire poured down on the attackers as they threw their ladders up against the walls only to discover that none of them was long enough. Seeing that his men were being relentlessly cut down, Napoleon shook his head.

‘It’s no good. They’re getting cut to pieces. Sound the recall.’

The moment the notes from the bugles cut across the battlefield the French troops turned and ran for their lives, pursued all the way back to their trenches by musket fire. At the same time Napoleon ordered the guns on his left flank to be abandoned. As the crews hurried out of range the British sailors methodically knocked out one battery after another until they ran out of targets, and it seemed as if stillness and quiet returned to the scene, until the combatants’ ears recovered from the numbing effects of the previous din and could pick up the thin cries and shrieks of the wounded and dying men still out on the battlefield.

‘What now, sir?’ Berthier asked quietly as he surveyed the wrecked batteries and the bodies scattered before the walls of Acre.

Napoleon shrugged. ‘Now we have to try something else. We’ll attempt another assault when the sappers have mined that bastion.’