IX. 
EGYPT. 357 
b}^ \he fifty -eighth and twenty-third; and followed chap. 
by a part of {he forty-second, who cut off their 
retreat; so that a most desperate contest ensued. 
Our men attacked them like wolves, with less 
order than valour, displaying a degree of intre- 
pidity nothing could resist. After expending 
all their ammunition, they had recourse to stones 
and to the but-ends of their muksets, transfixing 
the Frenchmen with their bayonets against the 
walls of the building, until they had covered the 
sand with the blood and bodies of their enemies ; 
where they remain heaped at this hour, a striking 
monument of the tremendous glory of that day. 
Not fewer than seven hundred Frenchmen were 
bayonetted or shot among those Ruins. 
By some unaccountable negligence, the prin- 
cipal part of the artillery and ammunition had 
not been brought to the station then occupied 
by our army : hence originated a saying, that 
the French had been defeated by an enemy 
destitute of artillery. Certain it is, that both the 
twenty-eighth and forty-second regiments, towards 
the termination of the contest, were reduced 
to the necessity of throwing stones*. General 
(2) " The French on the right, during the want of ammunition among 
the British, having also exhausted theirs, pelted stones from the ditch at the 
tu'enty-eighlh ; who returned these unusual, yet not altogether harmless, 
instruments of violence, as a serjcant of the twenty-eighth was killed by 
one breaking through his forehead." Hist, of the Exped. p. 34. 
VOL. III. Z 
