To feed 3000 or 4000 prisoners added greatly to the difficulties, and Napoleon took a step which has been a foul blot on his reputation. They were marched into a vast square formed of French troops; as soon as all had entered the fatal square the troops opened fire upon them, and the whole were massacred. The terrible slaughter occupied a considerable time; and when their cartridge-boxes were emptied, the French soldiers had to complete the massacre with their bayonets. Of the whole of these victims one only, a mere youth, asked for mercy; the rest met their fate with heroic calmness and resolution. Napoleon's excuse for this hideous massacre was that the soldiers had broken the engagement they took at El A'rich, but this applied to only a very small proportion of the garrison, and the massacre was wholly indefensible, for if unable to feed his prisoners, they should have been allowed to depart unarmed to seek subsistence for themselves.
The effects of this horrible massacre recoiled upon those who perpetrated it. The great number of dead bodies speedily tainted the air, and the maladies from which the troops suffered became vastly more serious, and the plague broke out among them and carried off a considerable number. Kleber's division made a reconnaissance towards Jerusalem, but the people of Nablous and the mountaineers assailed them with so terrible a fire, as they endeavoured to make their way up the narrow valleys, that they were forced to retire and join the main body of the army. When the French marched from Jaffa there were still many of their men stricken with the plague in hospital. Napoleon has been accused of having had these poisoned.
The statement has been repeated over and over again, and has been as often vehemently denied, among others by Bonaparte himself. It still remains, and always will remain, doubtful. There can be no doubt that the transport of plague-stricken men would have been a source of danger to the whole army; and as very few of those once attacked by the plague ever recovered, but few would have benefited by the operation, while the condition of the great majority would have been rendered still more hopeless and painful by the journey. Upon the other hand, had they been left behind they would assuredly have been massacred by the inhabitants, who had suffered so terribly at the hands of the French. Rather than be so left, the unfortunate men would assuredly have vastly preferred some painless form of death at the hands of their friends. The probabilities are that all the sick, whose final recovery was considered by the surgeons as within the limits of probability, were taken on, and that those whose cases were absolutely hopeless were not allowed to fall alive into the hands of their foes.