This siege of nine weeks' duration had cost him severe losses, among them being Generals Caffarelli and Bon: but worst of all was the loss of that reputation for invincibility which he had hitherto enjoyed. His defeat at Caldiero, near Verona, in 1796 had been officially converted into a victory: but Acre could not be termed anything but a reverse. In vain did the commander and his staff proclaim that, after dispersing the Turks at Mount Tabor, the capture of Acre was superfluous; his desperate efforts in the early part of May revealed the hollowness of his words. There were, it is true, solid reasons for his retreat. He had just heard of the breaking out of the war of the Second Coalition against France; and revolts in Egypt also demanded his presence.[116] But these last events furnished a damning commentary on his whole Syrian enterprise, which had led to a dangerous diffusion of the French forces. And for what? For the conquest of Constantinople or of India? That dream seems to have haunted Bonaparte's brain even down to the close of the siege of Acre. During the siege, and later, he was heard to inveigh against "the miserable little hole" which had come between him and his destiny--the Empire of the East; and it is possible that ideas which he may at first have set forth in order to dazzle his comrades came finally to master his whole being. Certainly the words just quoted betoken a quite abnormal wilfulness as well as a peculiarly subjective notion of fatalism. His "destiny" was to be mapped out by his own prescience, decided by his own will, gripped by his own powers. Such fatalism had nothing in common with the sombre creed of the East: it was merely an excess of individualism: it was the matured expression of that feature of his character, curiously dominant even in childhood, that _what he wanted he must of necessity have_. How strange that this imperious obstinacy, this sublimation of western willpower, should not have been tamed even by the overmastering might of Nature in the Orient!