Discontent now began to spread through the troops, and hunger, that evil counsellor, whispered suggestions of rebellion among the men, and even among the officers. So, amidst dejection and complaints, they began to march towards Rhamanieh. It was no good the soldiers being impatient, since they had themselves alone to blame for their lack of provisions. Almost dying with hunger, they at last reached Rhamanieh, where they learnt they must halt for the 11th and 12th, to wait for provisions, which had been ordered in the Delta. These duly arrived, and the fresh food and the nearness to the Nile, into which the soldiers plunged the moment they reached it, somewhat restored courage to the army. My father managed to procure two or three water-melons, and invited several generals of his acquaintance to eat them in his tent. They were not slow to respond to his invitation. We have seen how badly the campaign had opened and how much the troops had already undergone since they left Alexandria. The Egypt that they had seen from afar, as a large emerald green riband unrolled in the midst of the desert, no longer appeared in its ancient fertility, as the granary of the world, but in its modern poverty, its shifting populations, its ruined and deserted villages. Desaix's complaints were re-echoed by the whole army. The gathering under my father's tent, which had met for the purpose of consuming the melons, very soon took a political turn, as each general gave vent to the ill-humour all shared alike. What had they come to that accursed land for?--a land which had successively devoured all who tried to conquer it, since the days of Cambyses until the time of St. Louis. Had they come to found a colony? What was the good of leaving France, where the sun warmed a man without scorching him up,--France with its lovely forests, its fertile plains,--for this heaven of brass, this shadeless desert, these burning plains? Did Bonaparte want to shape a kingdom for himself in the East, after the fashion of the old Roman proconsuls? He might at least have asked his generals if they were willing to be the heads of this new satrapy. Such schemes might have succeeded with ancient armies composed of freed men and slaves, but not with the patriots of 1792, who were not the satellites of one man but soldiers belonging to a nation. Were these recriminations simply murmurs wrung from them by their present hardships? Or were they already the undercurrent of rebellion against the ambitious spirit of the hero of the 18th Brumaire? Maybe those who took part in that gathering could not themselves have answered these queries. But they were repeated to Bonaparte as grave attacks upon his authority by a general who had been the loudest in his reproaches against the motives of the general-in-chief and the first to appreciate the good flavour of my father's melons.