The Illustrious Dead (17 page)

As the night wore on, infected lice from the dead and dying would have crawled off the bodies and through the straw, seeking warmth. When they found a new host, they would feed almost immediately.
Rickettsia
feasted on the wounded.

If the doctor had run out of amputations and surgeries to perform, he would have made his rounds and done what he could for the men suffering from typhus. The Belgian surgeon de Kerckhove described what it was like to move among these men who seemed only half alive. “The face was sometimes red,” he wrote, “sometimes pale, the eyes dark and sad, often lifeless or tearful. Their ideas were incoherent, their smell and hearing was weakening, deafness at intervals.” Some of the patients shivered uncontrollably, others tried to tear off their clothing for relief from fever. Men stared, their eyes gleaming in the candlelight, their chests pumping up and down in fast, shallow breaths. “Tendon jolts” sent arms and legs snapping into the air, while other men, overcome by sudden terror attacks, tried to make it to the door, stumbling over bodies and being cursed in guttural voices. Patients cried out for someone to blow their brains out.

The hospital doctor would have moved among them, administering cool drinks where he could, herbs known as “vomitories” to those who seemed strong enough to bring up what were believed to be noxious substances in their stomach. Doctors on the march often veered into the forest searching for tonics, certain barks and plants such as elder blossom and mint. If the doctor had managed to hoard some of his primitive anesthesia such as tincture of opium or Hoffman’s drops (a combination of alcohol and ether), he gave it to the patients raving with pain. The supplies simply hadn’t arrived from Paris, so the surgeons were forced to scavenge what they could. Some of the doctors at Borodino made futile attempts to separate the typhus patients from the wounded. “If it was possible, I put the men suffering from typhus in spacious rooms, well-aerated and cool,” wrote de Kerckhove. But the ancient preventive remedy of quarantine was impossible in mass-casualty situations.

Quarantine had been used throughout history to stop an advancing microbe such as
Rickettsia.
The practice goes back at least to Justinian’s Plague in 541-2, when the Roman ruler instituted a new law to stop travelers from plague-infected areas from entering unscathed towns. Lepers were regularly isolated from the healthy by societies around the world. In times of plague, vessels from infected regions weren’t allowed to dock in “clean” harbors. Guards were posted on roads twenty miles from town and forced unhealthy-looking peddlers and workers to turn around. Those who tried to skirt the blockade could be executed. Quarantine hospitals were built on the outskirts of cities to house people suspected of having the disease, who were watched carefully for any symptoms for forty days.

Other doctors in the Grande Armée tried to get as far from the infected men as possible. Among them were the hated
cbirurgiens de pacotille
(“junk doctors”), cowards from the medical service who grabbed the first lightly wounded man they saw on the battlefield and dragged him to a hospital, their ticket to survival. There was, theoretically, a stiff penalty for cowardice under fire. Napoleon at the beginning of his career had ordered that any health officer caught abandoning a first-aid station in battle or refusing to care for a patient suffering from a contagious illness was to be court-martialed. “Whatever his station,” wrote the emperor, in an edict dripping with contempt for doctors, “no Frenchman shall fear death.” One surgeon who had refused to treat plague patients in Alexandria had been arrested, stripped of his citizenship, and then dressed in women’s clothes and paraded on a donkey through the city streets, with a sign on his back that read “Afraid to die, unworthy of being a Frenchman.”

As he tended to the ill patients, the Belgian doctor de Kerckhove had no doubt what was killing them. He described how the disease appeared among the troops and found it “generally the same as other typhus epidemics that affect armies in wartime.” The symptoms began with a general malaise, then a state of “languidness,” a slow pulse, and then a puffy and affectless visage (what the doctor called “a deterioration of facial features”). The patient became unable to move—the men called this stage of the illness “broken limbs”—and total exhaustion set in. Appetite disappeared, the subject became giddy, a whitish coat covered the tongue, and fever began shaking the patient’s body with pulses of strong heat, followed by the chills; thirst became “inextinguishable” and the brain became “congested.” The vision began to suffer as the disease spilled blood into the brain; the eyes became “dark and sad,” and then simply lifeless. Hearing and even the sense of smell weakened, with some patients going completely deaf. As the days passed, the men became shadows of their former selves. They would whisper in nearly inaudible voices; they became indifferent to their condition or their futures; their breathing speeded up and they suffered from “absolute insomnia.” Giddiness turned to full-blown hallucination and delirium, alternating with sudden fits of panic. Three days after the fever appeared, the men would become completely prostrate, unable to rise or walk. The small purplish spots appeared and spread over the body, along with what de Kerckhove called “black rusts and passive hemorrhages,” bleeding beneath the skin that he half-accurately diagnosed as being “caused by the decrease of vital energy of the vascular system.” In fact, that system was beginning to break down, threatening the heart, lungs, and brain. He found that the disease was most contagious in the fourth to tenth day.

In the final stage, the burning skin became cooler, the patients appeared better in the mornings but deteriorated at night, and “the eyes were turning off and sinking into eye-sockets.” The face became “deeply altered,” pale with exhaustion. The body began to stink, as if it were decomposing while the man was still alive; indeed, de Kerckhove wrote that the men’s figures had a “dead-body look and seemed ready to dissolve themselves.” The limbs blackened with gangrene, especially where vests or tight clothes prevented blood from circulating.

The physician found that the typhus epidemic, rooted in the “reeking places” the men were forced to occupy, was almost weirdly potent. “Here,” he wrote, “it often happened that men died in a lightning-fast way.” For this, he blamed the exhaustion of the men and the conditions in the hospitals strung back to Poland like a filthy necklace. In a final burst, looking back on those days, he called the hospitals “plague-filled cloacae,” diseased sewers. One feels the even-keeled de Kerckhove straining for vile effect, eager to fleck his reader’s eyes and ears with the awfulness of what he had seen.

Often, those typhus patients in the typical hospital who were seen by a doctor would have been bled and cupped to draw noxious substances away from the vital organs. Bleeding was a classic Hippocratic approach to restoring humors that had gotten out of balance, but it was a particularly awful solution to typhus, where the veins are already having trouble delivering blood to the body. Bark was given when available, as well as water reddened with wine, but there was so little of that to go around that few patients would have received even a taste.

Of the several courses of treatment de Kerckhove administered, the one he called “the stimulating method” gave the best results. This consisted of administering herbs to get the patient to vomit (if de Kerckhove deemed him strong enough) and then administering stimulants “if the skin was not too dry or burning.” He would give them water mixed with wine and lemonade, light tonics to cool their thirst.

It was a minimalist approach, to say the least. The doctors who tended to the poet John Donne two centuries before would have found it appallingly lacking in imagination and proactive measures; there were no split pigeons to apply to the skin, no bleeding to drain away the putrid blood, no complex formulas for balancing the humors. But de Kerckhove and his fellow physicians had few supplies, brutal conditions to work in, a largely indifferent medical administration, and patients worn out by epic marches. De Kerckhove was certain his men could stand little else besides a purging and a decent bed, if one could be found.

W
HATEVER THE CONDITIONS
of the specific hospital a wounded or sick soldier ended up in, the majority of them feared infectious diseases. The medical authorities might debate the idea of contagion, but the soldiers believed in it. “Typhus, sir,” says one doctor to Count Rostov in Tolstoy’s
War and Peace
, which chronicles the invasion of 1812, as he tries to enter a sick ward. “It’s death to go in.” It was an accurate reflection of what the soldiers felt.

The great difference between the French doctors struggling to come to grips with typhus at the hospital at Borodino and later researchers—or ourselves, watching them struggle blindly as thousands died—was the arrival of germ theory in the mid-1800s. In 1835, Agostino Bassi traced an epidemic killing Italian silkworms to infectious spores he observed under a microscope and became the first to formulate the idea of living, contagious agents as the cause of disease. John Snow’s tracking of the source of the 1854 London cholera epidemic, ending with his identification of the famous Broad Street Pump as the source of the contaminated water, advanced the cause of contagion, and Louis Pasteur proved in the early 1860s that spontaneous generation was superstition. But it was Robert Koch in 1876 who connected a pathogen—in this case,
Bacillus anthracis—
and a disease, anthrax.

As the medical historian Charles-Edward Amory Winslow has pointed out, by 1812 the key elements for a germ theory of disease had been in place for almost two hundred years. Antoine Philips van Leeuwenhoek had used primitive microscopes to identify bacteria in the human mouth. Athanasius Kircher had originated the idea of living organisms capable of transporting disease. Francisco Redi had demonstrated that piles of rags and other inanimate objects didn’t give rise to living things (there was no way, for example, that rats and insects could materialize from decomposing matter). As Winslow writes, “If an openminded and imaginative observer had put the work of these three pioneers together, the germ theory of disease could have been developed in the seventeenth century instead of the nineteenth.”

The great-man theory of medical history, the idea that progress against illness is one long string of discoveries by a series of geniuses, gains support not only from pioneers such as Pasteur or Curie but from absences such as the physician who with a flash of insight could have assembled the available evidence into an airtight case for contagion—the physician who, in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century, didn’t exist.

Dr. James Lind, the British surgeon who had invented the blind test and drastically reduced the incidence of scurvy and typhus in the Royal Navy, wasn’t that great mind. He had essentially skipped the “Eureka” moment and moved to a way of evaluating treatments and thereby found a remedy without knowing how it cured. Had that phantom genius been present to codify the work of others into germ theory, Lind could have contributed the method of proving it.

Rickettsia
profited from the competition among theories of disease. In the hunt for the secret of typhus, a key element wasn’t only an attempt to understand what caused the epidemics but to understand
how to understand
the evidence in front of one’s eyes. The most important clues would remain in plain view for hundreds of years. Generation after generation of doctors and generals, swayed by culture, conflicting evidence, and a lack of systematic thought, would confront the same evidence with the same theories and make their gambits. Those who read the evidence correctly, and there were some, survived and often prospered, for the fact is that, centuries before Napoleon faced typhus, it had been stopped dead in its tracks more than once, only to reappear and outwit its next opponent. The case of typhus illustrates how difficult and hard-won knowledge truly is.

It was Napoleon’s misfortune that the political evolution of warfare had outpaced medical thought. War had become total war, with Napoleon as its first great practitioner. But medicine lacked an equivalent genius who might have revolutionized disease theory the way that he had battlefield tactics.

T
HE MEN PACKED
shoulder to shoulder in that hospital at Borodino knew nothing of the debates and missed opportunities that had left
Rickettsia
to strike freely as the wax tapers burned. They were certainly aware of how drastically Napoleon had cut back on the medical service, and now had a chance to bitterly regret it. But neither they nor their doctors knew that the lice soundlessly fleeing from the dead bodies in the middle of the night and climbing up the sleeves of uninfected men were the vectors for the blossoming epidemic. The cries of the grievously wounded and dying men they understood as part of the rigors of war. But the ranting men who gibbered to unseen faces in the fetid little hospital, or laughed uproariously for no reason, were no doubt odd and worrying.

Those who died were carted away and tossed in open graves or simply piled by the side of the road. The officers and the well-connected often received small gestures at their death. One soldier requested that his brother’s heart be cut out and placed in a small beaker of wine, to bring back to France as a keepsake for his family. The body itself was then placed in a coffin, escorted by twenty-five gunners, and entombed in a stone wall in the nearby town of Mozhaisk with the notation “The body of Ferdinand Gaston de Lariboisière, lieutenant of Carabiniers, killed at the Battle of the Moscowa, Sept. 1812. His father recommends his remains to the public piety.” But most corpses were left to molder.

The doctors would come again in the morning, and orderlies would bring food and water. In the hospitals at Borodino, one prayed to see the dawn.

C  H  A  P  T  E  R     12

The Last City

T
HE
F
RENCH SOLDIERS KNEW THEY HADN’T WON THE NEEDED
victory. “We had never suffered such heavy losses,” wrote Colonel Raymond de Montesquiou, who took charge of the 4th Regiment of the line after its commander had been killed. “Never had the Army’s morale been so damaged. I no longer found the soldiers’ old gaiety.” Instead of the songs that usually echoed around the campfires after even the most bruising engagements, Montesquiou heard only “gloomy silence.”

The Russian army was in perilous shape. On the night of September 7, Barclay sent Colonel Ludwig von Wolzogen to report to Kutuzov and receive any orders—in writing, as Kutuzov could be both wily and mentally lazy. On the way, Wolzogen met a lieutenant resting with 30 to 40 men behind the front line and ordered him to rejoin his regiment. “This
is
my regiment!” the man cried. He had lost approximately 1,250 men. Ironically, an almost identical exchange occurred on the other side of the lines, when Napoleon found an officer in charge of 60 to 80 men standing near the Schevardino Redoubt, well behind the front line. The emperor was annoyed that an officer was allowing his men to linger behind their unit. “Rejoin your regiment,” the emperor called. “It is here,” said the officer, pointing to the dead heaped around the fortifications. Confused, Napoleon shouted at him to catch up to his men. The officer spat out the same reply, and a junior officer had to explain to the commander that the six dozen soldiers were all that remained of the unit.

Colonel Wolzogen found Kutuzov on the Moscow road miles from the frontline troops, surrounded by aides and aristocratic scions who hadn’t come near the artillery barrages. He reported on the state of the battlefield: all the redoubts had been captured and the troops were “extremely tired and shattered.” Kutuzov’s reply showed how out of touch he had become during the course of the day.

With which low bitch of a sutler have you been getting drunk, that you come giving me such an absurd report? I am in the best position to know how the battle went! The French attacks have been successfully repulsed everywhere, and tomorrow I shall put myself at the head of the army to drive the enemy without more ado from the sacred soil of Russia!

But Colonel Toll went out to survey the ranks and soon returned with bad news: Wolzogen’s estimates had been accurate. In addition, the artillery was nearly out of shells and the guns themselves were battered, their carriages held together with rope. Kutuzov soon ordered a tactical retreat to a more defensible position. The fact that he could muster only 45,000 effective troops the next morning shows how badly the Russian forces had been mauled, and how close they were to breaking.

T
HE NEXT DAY
, the sun rose on thousands of corpses still covering the field of battle. Napoleon’s clerks were sent out to compile casualty reports. In one German regiment of the Grande Armée, they “used a dead horse as a writing table, and the orderlies even dragged up a few Russian corpses to act as chairs for the scribes.” The cadavers would still be there weeks later when the artist-soldier Faber du Faur marched through with his artillery regiment and sketched the mournful scene.

Both Napoleon and Kutuzov wrote home to their wives, claiming victory. The Russian commander, who the night before had contemplated a morning attack on the enemy, also wrote Alexander a letter filled with half-truths, saying that he had inflicted greater losses on the French than they had on the Russian forces and that “the enemy did not gain a single yard of ground.” Badly in need of reinforcements, he ordered a retreat of six miles to the town of Mozhaisk.

The Russians who had survived the battle were, on the whole, in high spirits. “Everyone was still in such a rapturous state of mind, they were all such recent witnesses of the bravery of our troops, that the thought of failure, or even only partial failure, would not enter our minds,” remembered Prince Piotr Viazemsky. These men had a very modest definition of success when facing the great Napoleon. Simply to have stood up to his legendary army was enough. They’d banished the image of the French as supermen and proved themselves at least their equals in terms of courage. The order to fall back was a blow, but nothing could dampen the enthusiasm of the ordinary troops.

As the Russians retreated toward Moscow, Napoleon followed. At Mozhaisk, Napoleon’s quartermasters found the emperor a just-built house, so new the doors hadn’t been installed. Here they established the imperial headquarters. Napoleon went to work, but his cold had now completely robbed him of his voice and he could only furiously scribble order after order to his aides, who struggled to decipher his handwriting while he raced on to the next directive, banging on his desk for the orderlies to collect the latest batch.

When the Grande Armée reached Mozhaisk, it found the city packed with Russian casualties and its heights commanded by the Russian rear guard and squads of Cossacks. The dashing Murat, now a favorite with the Cossacks because of his flamboyance and bravery, soon put the Russians to flight and the troops swarmed into the town. Bodies were stacked in the doorways of burned-out buildings or left lying in the ruins of collapsed buildings.

Many of the enemy wounded were tossed out of the makeshift hospitals to make room for the Grande Armée’s casualties. When the food ran out, desperate Russians left behind by their comrades resorted to cannibalism. Alexandre Bellot de Kergorre, a French commissary, remembered: “Six hundred wounded Russians had fallen in the gardens and here they lived on cauliflower stalks and human flesh. Of this there was no shortage!”

French commissaries struggled to keep 3,000 wounded men fed. Foraging parties headed out into the countryside, bringing back grain and corn to be milled and made into bread. Even fleeing townspeople and soldiers were stopped on the Moscow road and ordered to give up part of their provisions for the wounded.

Napoleon lingered in the town while the army lumbered slowly after the Russians, who were moving toward Moscow. The emperor now expected, and prayed for, yet another “climactic battle” at the gates of Moscow. The very name of the city seemed to have acquired a talismanic power for the emperor, and he repeated it at every turn. When the names of the generals killed at Borodino were read out, Napoleon stopped the recitation and cried, “One week of Moscow, and this will not matter any more!” To him, the idea that the Russians would fail to defend their capital was as unimaginable as Frenchmen abandoning Paris. Moscow was the sum of Russia, and taking it would mean that Alexander could no longer deny him victory.

In the week after Borodino, Kutuzov was still maintaining that he would make a stand in front of the capital. He sent General Benningsen, Bagration’s chief of staff, to survey the terrain for a suitable defensive position and, like Colonel Toll, the general found the available sites to be few and far between. He finally settled on Poklonnaya Hill, the two summits of which provide the highest elevation for miles around the capital. Barclay, who rose from his sickbed to survey the site, quickly saw that the uneven, fissured ground was a death trap for an army that might have to retreat quickly. The majority of Kutuzov’s generals and advisers agreed with the levelheaded Barclay, but the question of whether Moscow would be actually defended still hung in the air.

Kutuzov met with the bombastic governor of Moscow, Rostopchin, who would soon come to despise the general as a schemer. The Russian commander boasted that he was preparing to give battle to Napoleon on the ground under their feet. Rostopchin was astonished. He pointed out that the terrain was unfavorable, and that any breakthrough of the first line would leave nothing at the army’s back but a rolling slope into the streets of Moscow, precipitating a disastrous retreat. Even a military novice could see the speciousness of Kutuzov’s claims. On his way out of army headquarters, Rostopchin encountered Barclay, who did nothing to allay his fears. “You see what they want to do,” Barclay told him. “The only thing I desire is to be killed if we are mad enough to fight where we are.” The governor warned the generals that if the army abandoned Moscow, he would set it ablaze.

On September 13, Kutuzov called his commanders together to decide whether or not to make a stand. In a shabby peasant hut, the generals gathered around a table covered with maps. Kutuzov framed the matter in a way that told the others what he was thinking: “Is it proper to await the enemy’s attack in this disadvantageous position or to abandon Moscow to the enemy?” The staff was split, with Barclay, Toll, and others favoring retreat and General Benningsen putting forth the idea that the Russian army shouldn’t only turn and face Napoleon but attack his right flank, where Poniatowski’s Polish regiments had been decimated. It was an audacious proposal, indicative of how keen the Russian fighting spirit remained.

The debate was, as one might expect, heated. Kutuzov was most likely looking for political cover for the decision to abandon Moscow than real options for defending it. But the generals strained to change his mind. Benningsen argued that the sacrifices of Borodino would be meaningless if they didn’t defend the capital. Barclay, ever the voice of reason, pointed out the hard facts: the regiment-level leaders needed to lead an attack on the French lines were lying in the fields near the Raevsky Redoubt, as were many of the men needed to execute it.

Kutuzov dismissed his generals and mulled over the options. When he made his decision on the night of September 13, he phrased it in the best possible light. “Napoleon is like a torrent which we are still too weak to stem” was his famous justification. “Moscow is the sponge which will suck him in.” The order for a retreat went out, startling citizens and enraging the army. Kutuzov decided to head south, toward the rich farmlands around Kolmna, where his troops would find plenty of food. With a typical flourish, he presented the abandonment of the nation’s capital as an unorthodox offensive tactic, but he couldn’t disguise the fact that Russia was unable to protect its jeweled city.

Alexander, now ensconced in St. Petersburg, was oblivious to the unfolding debacle. He’d reacted to Kutuzov’s bulletin from Borodino and a second that claimed the Cossacks had pushed Napoleon’s rear guard seven miles from the battlefield—a complete lie—with an outpouring of honors: the general was awarded a marshal’s baton and 100,000 rubles. St. Petersburg was swept up in a patriotic ecstasy: the city echoed with the ringing of church bells, strangers embraced on the streets, residents pressed for a glimpse of the tsar at a celebratory mass at St. Alexander Nevsky and cried thanks to God for delivering them from the Antichrist.

Governor Rostopchin reacted to the final edict with despair. “The blood boils in my veins,” he wrote his wife. “I think I shall die of grief.” But he delayed only a few moments before issuing a blizzard of directives. The Muscovite police went through the taverns, puncturing the vats of vodka and spirits; the city’s 2,100 firemen prepared the city’s fire pumps for evacuation, so that the French wouldn’t be able to use them; wagons were arranged for the wounded who could be safely transported; and a stream of notables with a dizzying list of requests—to find a lost relative or for an escort through the mobs—were seen to.

The governor also assembled a crew of policemen, nationalists, and street thugs for committing mass arson once the French had occupied the city. Ironically, one of Kutuzov’s pet devices, the dirigible that was to fly over the Grande Armée and incinerate it in a massive fireball, figured in the plan. The unused fuses and combustibles that the builders had left behind would be used to set Moscow alight.

The residents who had stayed in Moscow and vowed to fight were horrified by the order to abandon the city. Rostopchin had pledged that Muscovites would form citizens’ brigades armed with pitchforks and old muskets at the back of the Russian army, but now burghers and peasants alike raced for the city gates.

The city’s population during peacetime fluctuated between 250,000 and 350,000 people, the latter number accounting for the aristocrats and their households returning to the city after their summers in the countryside. Now entire blocks emptied within hours. Soldiers weeping from shame and anger marched through the streets, abandoning the half-dug entrenchments they had been constructing to meet the French, while families rushed from sector to sector looking for loved ones who had been off on an errand when the news arrived. Criminals, easily recognizable by their half-shaven heads, were let out of their prison cells and joined the crowds, and the walking wounded streamed out of the hospitals, leaving their bedridden comrades behind, while inmates of the local insane asylums wandered about or gibbered on street corners. Looters broke the locks on basements and cellars and got drunk on the wine and vodka inside, even going as far as licking the paving stones dry of the liquor that had spilled from the vats. All joined in a roiling scrum, vengeful, despairing, and as eager for scapegoats as they were to reach safety.