The Illustrious Dead (16 page)

The last push for a breakthrough occurred on the right. Spurred by the attack on the redoubt, Poniatowski and his Polish regiments renewed their assault on the town of Utitsa, which marked the southernmost point of the advancing French line, pushing around the sides of the hill with combined cavalry and infantry attacks. The Russians, seeing their position grow untenable, retreated from the hill and left it to the triumphant Poles. A last-ditch counterattack of 650 men was cut to pieces by the French and the battle on the extreme left was over. The Poles had managed to expel the Russians from a stronghold but failed again to break through the line or turn the flank.

The artillery on both sides continued to fire, but when Poniatowski broke off contact with the enemy, the action at Borodino ceased. Finally, at six o’clock, the guns too fell silent.

T
HE FIELD OF BATTLE
was now a landscape gashed and cratered by artillery shells and covered from nearly one end to the other by corpses, body parts, dead or dying horses, regimental flags, the immense detritus of war. The Würrtemburg lieutenant H. A. Vossler walked across the field and saw men and horses “gashed and maimed in every conceivable way.” Studying the faces, he wrote that one could see the last emotions to pass over their faces before dying. For the French, “desperation, defiance, cold, unbearable pain.” Among the Russians, “passionate fury, apathy, and stupor.”

Napoleon, too, rode out to survey the landscape and witnessed the carnage firsthand. The men cried out, “In the name of God, take care of the wounded,” but there was little that could be done for the catastrophic injuries that characterized Borodino. One of his officers’ horses stepped on a dying Russian soldier: it was almost impossible to avoid on grounds tightly packed with casualties and body parts. Napoleon erupted in rage, to which one of his staff replied that it was only a Russian. “There are no enemies after a victory, but only men!” he shouted, a reversal of his remark to Caulaincourt at Smolensk. He ordered his men to fan out and assist the wounded in any way they could.

“They lay one on top of the other,” wrote one Captain von Kurz, “swimming in pools of their own blood, moaning and cursing as they begged for death.” The scene at the Raevsky Redoubt was indelible. “It was horrible to see that enormous mass of riddled soldiers,” wrote the Prussian baron Wolzogen when he came across it. “French and Russians were cast together, and there were many wounded men who were incapable of moving and lay in that wild chaos intermingled with the bodies of horses and the wreckage of shattered cannon.” Even the men who had escaped the Russian bullets looked spectral: their uniforms were ripped here and there by bullets and bayonets; their faces were ashen from the black powder used in their muskets. As miserable as they were, the men called out to the emperor, congratulating him. But the victory was only half-achieved. The Russian army was still visible, massed within musket shot, and the droves of prisoners that usually signaled a great triumph were nowhere to be seen.

The worst places were near the bottom of the ravines that snaked across the battlefield. Soldiers had been hurled back from cavalry charges or blasted by canister shot and ended up in the streambeds. Others had come crawling in search of water. One soldier, horribly mutilated, whose legs and one arm had been blown away, looked so “full of hope, even gaiety” that officers were moved to try to save him. As they carried him off, he complained of pain in the missing limbs. There is no record of his fate, but it would have been a miracle if he had survived his wounds, especially in the fetid “hospitals” that sprang up after the battle. Men were found living in the shelter of stacked corpses, and one legend of Borodino is that a single Russian soldier crawled into the still-warm carcass of a disemboweled horse and survived by eating its raw flesh.

The emperor returned to his tent dejected and in physical pain. At ten o’clock, Murat, his gaily colored tunic torn and dirtied by powder and dirt, barged in to request the Imperial Guard once more, claiming that a disorganized and vulnerable Russian army was retreating across the Moskva and that a surprise attack would finish them as a fighting force. Napoleon sharply reprimanded him and never seriously considered the pursuit.

The German strategist Clausewitz was surprised that Napoleon, having shredded the Russians’ front lines and pushed their reserves into a compact, vulnerable mass against the Moskva River, didn’t deliver the coup de grâce. “It is another question whether Bonaparte, who had time and fresh troops sufficient, should not have made greater exertions on the 7th, and have raised his success to the pitch of a complete victory,” he wrote. “He might have …achieved the utter destruction of the enemy.” The fact that Napoleon had in the past thrown in the reserves and attained dazzling victories made the decision at Borodino even more inscrutable to Clausewitz. He attributed it to the “consumption, rapid beyond all expectation” of the Grande Armée.

Barclay, too, expected the final blow to fall at any moment: Napoleon had taken the major fortifications and the Russian army was exhausted, its reserves depleted and many of its key officers— from generals down to the regimental commanders—out of action, dead or badly wounded. Murat estimated that he needed only 10,000 infantry soldiers to break the Russian center.

Napoleon knew that his officers, and historians a hundred years later, would focus on the question of the Imperial Guard. After dinner, he chatted with an officer and his secretary of state. Napoleon asked about medical facilities for the wounded, attended to some other minor matters, and then fell asleep after an exhausting day. Then, suddenly, twenty minutes later, as if prodded by a dream, he woke up and began defending his rationing of the Guard. “People will be surprised that I did not commit my reserves in order to obtain greater results, but I had to keep them for striking a decisive blow in the great battle which the enemy will fight in front of Moscow,” he told his startled aides. “The success of the day was assured, and I had to consider the success of the campaign as a whole.”

As a chilly night settled on Borodino, and the wounded crawled on their elbows and knees toward the campfires or resigned themselves to a lonely death, the French and Russians began to count their dead. The French had lost 28,000 men, including 49 generals; the Russians, about 45,000, roughly half of their entire front line troops, including 29 generals. It was the deadliest engagement in the annals of warfare to that date. It would take a hundred years, until the Battle of the Somme, for the totals to be exceeded.

Neither side at the Somme was hampered by a lack of men; each had millions to throw into a futile confrontation. But typhus had stolen precious thousands of troops from Napoleon, and with them, the battle, the war, and the future of his empire. If he’d had the tens of thousands of men who had fallen to
Rickettsia
, he would most likely have broken the Russian army as a fighting force and put immense pressure on Alexander to reach a settlement—or inspired a pro-peace party to unseat the tsar and negotiate in his stead. Even if he hadn’t gotten a treaty, he would have marched out of Russia at the head of a significant army, by a far more tenable route than he eventually took, and may well have fended off the swarming attacks on his regime that were soon to follow. The pathogen destroyed any chances for that.

The emperor, fatally wounded, limped away from Borodino toward an utterly different future for himself and for Europe.

C  H  A  P  T  E  R     11

The Hospital

T
HE WOUNDED ON BOTH SIDES WERE LEFT IN A DESPERATE
situation. Dr. Larrey had ordered five of the six light ambulance divisions to remain at Smolensk to care for the thousands of ill and wounded, leaving only a rudimentary medical staff to care for the thousands of patients at Borodino. “There was virtually no sanitary service or activity,” one officer remembered.

All the villages and houses close to the Moscow road were packed full with wounded in an utterly helpless state. The villages were destroyed by endless fires which ravaged the regions occupied or traversed by the French army. Those wounded who managed to save themselves from the flames crawled in their thousands along the high road seeking some way to prolong their pitiful existence.

The Russian soldiers were remarkably stoic. A French colonel who walked through the battlefield after the last guns had fallen silent was surprised to find the enemy troops, even those with terrible wounds, mostly quiet, avoiding the hooves of passing horses. They took the religious medals from their necks and held them in their hands, sometimes praying to them. The most popular was Saint Nicholas, the Miracle Worker of the Orthodox Church, protector of the poor and powerless. The Russian saying “If anything happens to God, we’ve always got Saint Nicholas” was particularly appropriate to the men’s situation as night closed in.

If one was a soldier unlucky enough to find himself sick or wounded the morning of September 8, he was at the beginning of a searing, uncertain journey. Doctors were scarce, patients uncountable. The dawn was cold, wet, and violently windy, the sun obscured by heavy fog as soldiers picked their way through the battlefield, the heavy mist cloaking most of the carnage but revealing here and there a shattered ammunition wagon, a dead horse with an enormous, bloated stomach, abandoned pistols and muskets, sabers twisted or impaled in the dirt, and the corpses of soldiers missing heads or entrails, pieces of men and animals seemingly thrown violently against the ground, their blood smeared in the dirt. Each small tableau was uncovered and then obscured by the fog.

The injured soldiers walked toward the field hospitals rumored to have been set up in houses and stone buildings nearby; the medical services were already a shambles and reliable information was hard to come by. The men fell in line with the parade of wounded and healthy trudging on the rutted lanes, their faces blackened by powder and mud, their tunics ripped by ball or streaked with mud and gore. If they had a friend willing to help them, they slung an arm around the other man’s neck. Solitary figures used shattered musket stocks as canes or rifles as crutches.

On the side of the road, men who had begun the journey but were unable to go on cried out. “Mercy, please!” they shouted or called out their unit number looking for a mate. There were attempts at humor. One man called out to a soldier whose lower leg was mangled, “If thy foot offend thee, cast it away!” But mostly men cried for water, doctors, and their mothers in a half dozen languages.

The surest way to find a doctor would have been to follow one’s nose: a putrid smell meant bodies, and bodies meant hospitals. The odor carried for hundreds of yards, a mix of the smell of clotted blood, of putrefying flesh, of feces and the musty stench of filthy dressings. The flying ambulances from the battlefields, which looked like large coffins fixed to the back of two-horse wagons, could guide the soldiers but they rushed ahead, too fast for anyone to keep up with. Every house on the road to Moscow, no matter how ramshackle, were filled with wounded. But only a few had doctors.

Imagine the journey of a wounded soldier staggering from the battlefield on September 8 and coming upon one of these hospitals. When at last the destination came into view, it would most likely have been a local nobleman’s house or a church, the most substantial structures around, taken over by the army to house the wounded. Men clustered around the entrance, begging to be let in. Corpses littered the yard in front; some of their shirts had been torn off to use as bandages. Others were naked and dogs had gotten to their exposed flesh. Horses lay disemboweled in the mud, pieces of their flanks cut away for food. There was shouting and cries of pain coming from inside the building. Orderlies carried in men with their heads drooping off the ends of the stretchers.

There was a standing order in the Grande Armée stating that any man with serious wounds was to be saluted—a remnant of the original Revolution’s fervor for the common man. It had long fallen into disuse; the numbers were too overwhelming. And the decree that stated that enemy soldiers were to be given equal treatment, which was symbolized in the doctors’ uniforms with the word “Humanité” inscribed on the buttons, was also void. Around the back of the hospital, Russian patients had been dumped into the garden to die.

If you were an officer, you would have stood a better chance of making it inside the typical hospital. Rank and birth, whatever Napoleonic rhetoric stated, still mattered. The men stumbled through the lines of patients littering the floor. Some lay on filthy straw taken from nearby barns, others used corpses as pillows; in places men had toppled on unconscious soldiers and lay there, too exhausted or sick to move.

Those sick with typhus would have desperately looked for a place to lie down. The energy had been sucked out of their muscles and they felt faint, their heads splitting with headache that made it difficult to open their eyes. They collapsed anywhere they could. But after a battle, the wounded took precedence over the ill when it came to medical attention. Typhus patients would be among the last to be seen, and the grunts and cries from the next room told them that the surgeon was busy with casualties from Borodino.

The surgery would have been the center of the typical hospital. Pale men still in shock, their limbs sometimes hanging from a ribbon of flesh or muscle, flowed toward it in a steady stream, and bandaged or dead men flowed out. At the center of the room was a stout wooden table surrounded by assistants. Amputations were almost the only thing on offer. Some leading doctors advocated waiting a day or two before operating on a damaged limb, but Dr. Larrey and his staff were firm believers in amputating quickly. The patient was often already in shock from the wound and would feel less pain, and the impact of the wound actually lowered the blood pressure, meaning he would bleed less during the operation. The risk of gangrene—deadlier to the soldier than the bullet itself— would be minimized if the limb was gotten off quickly. Speed was highly prized.

The table would have been covered in blood, bits of tissue, and uniforms. The surgeon didn’t wash his hands between operations, or clean his instruments; perhaps he dipped them in a bowl of bloody water between procedures, but that was it. Beside him on the table were his tools. The typical traveling surgeon’s case of the early nineteenth century would have contained everything from scalpels to elevators used to lift bones in skull fractures to trepanning braces and drills for penetrating into the skull to spreaders for peeling back the rib cage, encompassing twenty to thirty instruments in all. But the French doctors, prodded to be quick, had reduced it to the bare minimum: On the table lay different-size knives for cutting through skin and major muscles, a large bone saw made of steel and horn with a stout solid blade for cutting through femurs and humeri, and a smaller version for tibiae, fingers, and more delicate work.

The soldier’s friends would have hoisted the injured man onto the table and held him down. The doctor then examined the wound, sometimes probing the hole with his filthy finger to see if the bullet was close to the surface. If the wound was to an arm or a leg and the patient was conscious, the doctor rattled off a quick diagnosis, usually recommending the limb come off. Officers were typically given the choice of amputation or a patching-over of the wound. In counseling one general whose arm had been shattered by a musket round, Dr. Larrey spelled out the options: “Doubtless we might have some chance of success if we tried to save your arm,” he explained. “But…numberless fatigues and privations still await you and you’re running the risk of fateful accidents.” Namely, infection. (The general refused the amputation.) Average soldiers, however, could find their limb removed without any kind of consultation. If the soldier insisted on keeping his limb, the doctor simply shrugged, patched the wound with a bit of linen, and nodded for the man’s friends to take him to nearby rooms, where he was lowered into a bed or, more likely, a bit of straw on the floor. When the soldier agreed to an amputation, a leather tourniquet was tied around the top of the limb, cinching off the major blood vessels, and the other end was tied to a leg of the table. The man was given a bullet or a bit of wood to bite on; officers were offered a quick shot of liquor if any was available.

Growling for the friends to grip the man tight, the surgeon would have cut down to the muscle with one of the knives, making the incision all around the circumference of the limb. Then he grasped the larger knife and, leaning into the patient’s body, began sawing to the bone. Some patients cursed and bucked from the pain, but others, tensed and stoic, only stared up at the ceiling. It was considered bad form to scream.

The amputation of a leg at the thigh would have taken around four minutes, but if one got to the operating table late in the day after the surgeon had worked on dozens of men, the bone saw would have been perceptibly dulled and the operation would have taken much longer. Unconscious men came to in the middle of the procedures and began screaming. One British officer whose arm was amputated during the Napoleonic Wars raged at the surgeon as the blunted blade of the saw took twenty minutes to cut through the bone. Many of the heavy Russian balls had not only cut through muscle and broken bones but also shattered them, sending shards into the tissue. The doctors had to probe the wounds for these pieces. “The muscles were lacerated and reduced to the consistency of jelly,” Dr. Larrey observed in a typical patient suffering from a wound from a musket ball.

Once the limb was off, the surgeon would have sewn the flaps of skin together with black thread to give the man a stump that stood a fair chance of healing. Then a piece of linen or cloth dipped in water was wrapped around the stump and the man was lifted off the table and sent out of the room. The limb he left behind was tossed into a pile with the others: by the end of the day, the jumble of arms and legs would reach the ceiling.

The propensity of the artillery balls to bounce waist-high through a regiment resulted in countless disembowelments, and men would have been brought into the hospitals holding their intestines in their hands. The bloody mess was simply cleaned off as best as possible and stuffed back in the body cavity, then covered with a wrap of linen. In a torso injury, any wound where the bullet had penetrated deeper than the length of the doctor’s finger was deemed inoperable. An injury caused by a ball to the chest, the lungs, or the intestines was often waved away as being too dangerous for surgery. The hopeless cases—“horribly disemboweled or mutilated …motionless, with hanging heads, drenching the ground with their blood”—were left to die.

Surgeons worked nonstop as more patients were brought in. Dr. Larrey himself performed 200 amputations in twenty-four hours after Borodino, an average of 8 per hour, but he would have been examining patients, triaging, and supervising the field hospital at the same time, and a good surgeon working steadily could have easily doubled that number. Larrey recorded some exceptional cases in his memoirs, including one Russian colonel who had his nose cut off by a musket ball and a soldier who had a piece of mortar shrapnel hit him in the right calf, ricochet and travel upward through the thigh muscles, and then shoot out of the top of the leg, having sheared the man’s calf muscle off and shattered both bones of the leg. But the vast majority of what a surgeon did at Borodino was butcher’s work.

A
S EVENING FELL
, wax tapers would have been lit in the dark rooms. Men’s faces were thrown into sudden illumination by the flickering candles and then covered by darkness again. The stench was overpowering: the fetid, rotting-meat smell of gangrene, the sickly odor of suppurating wounds, and the coppery tang of fresh blood, as well as the smell of feces and urine. The rooms were so dark that when orderlies came through with the evening meal, unconscious men lying in the straw were sometimes missed and died from thirst or simple inattention.

As the night progressed, some typhus patients would have entered their own worlds. Long-dead friends appeared and the patients struck up conversations with them, or they screamed at phantoms only they could see, or stared unblinking at sights or visions that, even after they recovered, they found impossible to put into words. Sometimes the patients had never before seen the fever-people that visited them and couldn’t account for how they had pictured them so vividly. Typhus patients had been known to reenact scenes from their past lives: a young cowherd imagined that the other patients were his cattle and called to them constantly with the cry used to move cows into their pens; thieves bragged again and again of the same accomplices, the same heists. A thick noxious film covered their tongues and their teeth turned black; observers remarked on their resemblance to breathing cadavers. The rooms echoed with dry, urgent coughs. Sometimes a man’s cheek flushed a deep red color and then, hours later, the color drained away and appeared in the other cheek. The men often gave off a peculiar odor that smelled like ammonia or “putrid animal matter,” though that could have been an olfactory projection by observers, as it was widely believed that decaying plants and animals caused the infection in the first place.