This richly detailed account reveals how Sir Ralph Abercromby's strategy restored the honour of the British army and averted disaster for the Empire.

This richly detailed account reveals how Sir Ralph Abercromby's strategy restored the honour of the British army and averted disaster for the Empire. In 1800 the British army's reputation was in tatters, having experienced nothing but failure in wars across the world for forty years. At home, a divided cabinet had to face the problem of Egypt, which had been occupied by Napoleon's Army of the Orient since 1798. The momentous task of ejecting France fell to a disparate band of soldiers led by Sir Ralph Abercromby, an elderly general with a dubious military record. Yet, against all the odds, Abercromby's force decisively defeated the French army on 21 March 1801, bringing Napoleon's Egyptian Campaign to a definitive and crushing end. Piers Mackesy vividly brings to life the events of the battle and the characters involved, revealing how Abercromby's carefully planned and brilliantly executed strategy, and the discipline of the soldiers he had welded into cohesion, restored the honour of the British army, averted disaster for the Empire, and set the standard by which all future battles would be fought.

"Mackesy has here written military history of the best sort; humane, perceptive and above all full of the sense of men taking difficult decisions under extreme stress." - Times Literary Supplement

"A clear, readable account of an exciting and momentous campaign, Piers Mackesy’s study reclaims for the historical page an episode wrongly consigned to the footnotes and restores to the pantheon a forgotten Scottish hero." - The Scotsman

"By consulting every conceivable printed authority, French and English, and a quantity of new manuscript material, Mackesy has been able to give a colour and a richness to his account absent from any that have gone before, and he has made of it not only a very good ‘read’, as they say, but thoroughly sound history besides . . . a worthy recipient of the Templer Medal." - Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research

"Piers Mackesy . . . does full justice to the tale . . . his knowledge of the sources is awe-inspiring . . . he writes clearly, and vigorously." - Books in Scotland

"A fine example of classic military history based upon high scholarship and fine discussion . . . Mackesy has written a definitive study." - International History Review

"What Piers Mackesy has given us here is military history of a high order, clear in its detail, and meticulously based on archival research." - Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society