Innocent Soldier (9780545355698) (20 page)

Q:
What parts of the book are factual, and what parts are fictional?

A:
Almost all of the book is based on true events, such as, of course, what happened over the course of the campaign; the route of the Württemberg army; which battles it fought. I drew heavily from chronicles of the campaign written by actual participants. I only made up the individual experiences of Adam and Konrad Klara. But their experiences are quite probable; an even more realistic portrayal of their lives would have been even more horrible and adventurous than the story I told. This is certain. Unfortunately, my protagonist, the man whose records I found in our village archive, left no written diary and the oral history has dried up over the past 200 years.

Q:
Why do you like to write historical fiction?

A:
I think it is a good thing to wrestle out some stories from what is in the past and forgotten.

Q:
You were a teenager during World War II. How did that experience influence this book?

A:
It’s true. I was just a boy during the Second World War, and was sent into the military at only seventeen years of age. I based the figure of Sergeant Krauter in the novel on my own staff sergeant, for instance. Because I myself took part
in countless military engagements — against the Russians, just like Adam — I can imagine the earlier war very well.

Q:
Which part of the book was hardest to write?

A:
Some parts of the book felt so real to me that I dreamed about them at night. Despite the fact that Napoleon’s campaign lies now in the distant past, I saw parallels [with my own experience in the Second World War], and sometimes they really got under my skin. Having experienced war myself definitely influenced my ability to imagine the situations and to identify emotionally with the characters in the novel.

Q:
What message do you hope that readers get from
An Innocent Soldier
?

A:
That the vast majority of wars are, and have always been, terrible and senseless.

Napoleon expected a lot from his troops. “The first qualification of a soldier,” he said, “is fortitude under fatigue and hardship. Courage is only the second.” The Russian campaign would test his troops’ fortitude more than any war before.

Soldiers in Napoleon’s
Grande Armée
wore dark-colored uniforms made of wool, even in summer. The uniforms included an undergarment and stockings, a shirt, trousers, a coat, a buttoned-up gaiter (a covering for the leg from the ankle to the knee), and garter belts — elasticized bands — to hold up the gaiters. The boots were square-toed, to distinguish them from civilian boots, which were round-toed. This was supposed to prevent the boots from being resold on the black market.

Each soldier carried a pack made of stiffened leather, containing a couple of extra shirts, collars, gaiters, stockings, an extra pair of boots, spare hobnails and boot soles, a sewing kit, a clothes brush, pipe clay and boot wax, a bandage and lint (used to staunch blood from a wound), and a supply of food rations. An overcoat was rolled up and strapped to the top of the pack. In some past campaigns, soldiers had been issued tents to strap to their packs as well, but for the Russian campaign Napoleon decreed that the
troops did not need them. “Tents are unfavorable to health,” he insisted. “The soldier is best … [when] he sleeps with his feet to the fire, which speedily dries the ground on which he lies.” This would prove to be a deadly decision.

In addition to clothing and food, each soldier carried his weapon: the musket. The basic design of the gun carried by Napoleon’s troops had been in use for almost one hundred years, without much improvement. The musket did not use bullets as we know them; instead, they used cartridges (paper cylinders containing a small amount of gunpowder) and a lead ball. The soldiers wore a leather strap over their shoulders with a case containing two packets of cartridges (about sixty rounds of ammunition), a vial of cleaning oil, a screwdriver, and other gun-cleaning instruments.

To load the musket, the soldier would bite off the end of a cartridge and, keeping the ball in his mouth, sprinkle a little of the powder into a pan in his musket. He would then close the flap on the pan, pour the rest of the powder down the barrel of the gun, and spit the ball in after it. Next, he wadded up the paper and rammed it down on the ball with a special tool, the ramrod. When he fired the musket, the powder in the pan would ignite and set off a charge in the barrel, firing the lead ball. The whole process took about one and a half minutes for a trained soldier.

Unfortunately, even for a trained soldier, the muskets were extremely unreliable and dangerous. It was important to keep the gun barrel as clean as possible, because after about a dozen shots, the gunpowder would have caked up the inside of the barrel so much that it became impossible to load any more balls. The worst defect of the gun was that sometimes the powder in the pan would go off, but not in the barrel. (This is where we get our expression “a flash in the pan.”) In the midst of battle, a soldier might not realize that the gun hadn’t fired — and start loading another ball. If the first one then went off, it would explode in his face.

Soldiers in Napoleon’s army were supposed to receive a daily ration of food. The standard ration included one and a quarter pounds of biscuits, a handful of rice or dried vegetables, about half a pound of salt beef and lard, some salt, half a pint of wine, and a shot of brandy.

At the beginning of the campaign, Napoleon had accumulated rations to support 400,000 men and fodder for 50,000 horses for fifty days. In other words, he had millions of pounds of rice, wheat, oats, wine, and brandy. Meat was supplied by herds of cattle that were driven behind the marching army.

Napoleon realized that the supply train following the
Grande Armée
would be enormous, and this created a problem:
It meant there would be thousands of horses and oxen pulling the wagons laden with food and supplies, and these horses and oxen would have to be fed. The only way to have enough fodder to feed all these animals of burden would be to harvest hay and oats from fields as the army moved through the countryside. And the crops would not be ripe for harvesting until the middle of summer. This meant that Napoleon could not start his campaign until then — and that left him only a few months to achieve victory before the bitter Russian winter began. So he was determined to win the war quickly with a decisive battle.

The
Grande Armée
had a rigid marching routine. No matter what the weather, the soldiers were expected to march between ten and twenty-two miles a day. If the commanders needed to get somewhere quickly, they might order the soldiers to march even faster, and cover up to thirty-four miles in one day. In ideal circumstances, they would receive a day of rest after five days of marching.

The march to Russia was certainly less than ideal, though. As the
Grande Armée
massed on the western frontier of Russia in mid-June, 1812, it faced formidable challenges. The roads were much worse in Eastern Europe than in France, Germany, or Italy; the weather was oppressively hot and dry. As these hundreds of thousands of men churned
down the narrow dirt roads toward Russia, they created huge plumes of dust. Almost immediately, soldiers and horses began dying of exhaustion and dehydration.

Finally, on the morning of June 24, the whole army crossed the River Niemen, the border of Russia. They had officially invaded. Although conditions were still terrible, most soldiers felt hopeful that they would soon meet the Russian army and fight to a glorious victory. Instead, their first battle would be against Mother Nature.

Four days after the
Grande Armée
entered Russia, a sudden storm broke out in the evening. Within minutes, the dry and sweltering heat was broken by a torrent of freezing rain. It rained all night and all the next day, and the dust turned into rivers of mud. Wagons were swept away, soaked supplies were rendered useless, and huge numbers of horses drowned or froze to death.

From this point on, the supply system completely broke down. Soldiers no longer received any rations from the military, so they were forced to forage for everything they needed. Foraging meant taking food, drink, and other necessities from the local population. Unfortunately, the Russian countryside was not as fertile as other parts of Europe, and what little there was belonged to the Russian peasants, who hid their cattle in the forest and buried their food underground to protect it. The soldiers soon learned to turn whole villages upside down in their quest for sustenance.

One of the worst hardships of the march was the shortage of water. The soldiers at the head of the army often drank dry the wells along the roadside. To make matters worse, the Russians deliberately polluted wells by dumping dead horses or men into them. As a result, many thousands of soldiers became ill and died from dysentery (a disease that causes severe diarrhea).

Napoleon kept rushing the
Grande Armée
forward in pursuit of the Russian army. He knew from his scouts that the Russians had a sizable force just ahead of him, and he was baffled and frustrated when they refused to stand and fight. This behavior seemed cowardly according to the military standards of the time. But the longer the Russians could delay, and the farther they could draw back into Russia, the weaker the
Grande Armée
became.

In mid-August, though, the two armies did collide at the city of Smolensk. Here, Napoleon hoped to deal the Russians the decisive blow he had planned from the beginning of the campaign. Both sides fought fiercely, but the result was inconclusive. The Russians managed to evacuate Smolensk during the middle of the night, and they would not admit defeat.

The
Grande Armée
continued to pursue the Russian army along the road to Moscow. At the beginning of September,
Napoleon was overjoyed to hear that the Russians were preparing battle positions in the town of Borodino, a short distance outside Moscow. On September 7, the two armies were once again facing each other at close range. The battle began at 6 a.m. and raged for twelve hours of intense, often hand-to-hand combat. By the end, at least 73,000 men died on both sides — the most deadly battle in history.