The Illustrious Dead (20 page)

Finally, Napoleon ordered his administrators to begin preparing for a possible retreat: troops started to gather every wagon, carriage, and cart to move the thousands of sick and wounded who were now packed into makeshift Moscow hospitals, and on October 8 a massive harvest began of all the locally available produce, mostly cabbages and potatoes, to sustain the Grande Armée on its way back to the friendlier terrain of Lithuania and Germany.

Napoleon whiled away the days, tortured by indecision. Although he was used to rushing through his meals and then turning back to work, he now stretched his dinners out, overeating and lingering silently at the table. When General Georges Mouton tallied the latest troop strengths for the various corps, Napoleon refused to believe he had lost so many soldiers since Borodino and claimed the counts were off. His ability to focus exclusively on a problem now tormented him. The problem had no solution, but the emperor couldn’t stop turning it over in his mind.

There were frenetic bursts of activity. He wrote up a proclamation of freedom for the serfs early in October, though he never intended to actually enforce it. The edict was another probe into Alexander’s mind, as Napoleon hoped the threat of a social revolution would force him to the peace table. But St. Petersburg remained silent. On October 12, he suddenly decided on an excursion to Murat’s advance guard, then changed his mind, then reconsidered again and announced he would go in a few days and initiate a new attack on the Russians. The impulse drained away, however, and Napoleon stayed put. The arrival of the first real snowstorm on October 13 dampened his enthusiasm for maneuvers. Sleet and rain had pelted the capital for weeks, but now winter moved in. On October 15, three inches of snow fell, making it clear that a decision on the army’s plans had to be made and made quickly.

N
APOLEON HAD NEVER
lost a major campaign central to his reign. Egypt and Haiti were peripheral battles in the scheme of Continental power. Now he felt the world watching him for a single slip, when they would unite to crush him. He agonized to Count Daru: “What a frightful succession of perilous conflicts will begin with my first backward step! In affairs of state one must never retreat, never retrace one’s steps, never admit an error …”

The winter of 1812 would take on sinister forms in the French imagination, as a kind of Asiatic dervish. The French novelist Hilaire Belloc introduced the cold this way:

A thick fog descended. The sentries felt for the first time no longer discomfort even of that acute and gnawing sort which seems to those who read of it under civilian conditions to be a hell; what they felt as the night advanced was a thing new to them, and perfectly intolerable to humankind—a thing no Westerner among them had yet known—the winter advancing from out of Asia, from the frozen steppes.

Finally, Napoleon called his advisers in to announce the withdrawal from Moscow. In the spring, he believed, a refreshed and reinforced army could then storm northward and conquer St. Petersburg. The emperor issued a stream of orders: Lauriston was sent back to Kutuzov’s headquarters in the hopes that Alexander had agreed to receive him. General Baraguay d’Hilliers headed to Yelnya, fifty miles east of Smolensk, with directions to put together a supply base and garrison to support the retreat. The reinforcements heading toward Moscow on the Smolensk road were turned back to clear the route, and the sick and wounded in Mozhaisk were readied for travel. Those who couldn’t be moved were gathered at the Foundling Hospital, and Russian casualties were mixed in with them to afford them some protection.

On October 16, the Grande Armée marched out of Moscow. Napoleon pointed to the bright sky and told his aides that the sun was his star, shining the way to fresh conquests.

T
YPHUS HAD INITIATED
a cascading series of events and decisions that had crippled the 1812 campaign. The offensive was finished, even if the emperor clung to his illusion of fighting in the spring. Now, with only his reputation and a shockingly reduced army to threaten his enemies, he was beginning the battle to save his throne.

Napoleon had done remarkably well against his human opponents. He had outfought the best generals of Europe, outthought the military strategists, charmed enemy princesses into his bed, and won over soldiers who likely would have revolted if another general had put them through his campaigns. But with natural opponents he had a mixed record, and they had slashed the size of his empire.

In the south, his 1798 invasion of Egypt and Syria had been an outright disaster. He had been unable to bring the two Ottoman strongholds to heel during a chaotic campaign that, had all the details been fully known back in France, would have left his military reputation in tatters. And in the West, he had lost his grip on Haiti, and through it, the New World, after a disastrous 1803 campaign plagued by a different pathogen.

In Egypt plague had swept through the ranks of his army of 38,000 men, killing thousands and blunting the army’s effectiveness. The campaign was poorly planned, underequipped, and strategically incoherent, so the war would probably have failed without the microbe’s intervention. But Napoleon had further stained his reputation when he ordered the euthanasia of hundreds of the most seriously ill patients before the French abandoned the campaign. And when the emperor tried to blame the disease for his defeat in Egypt, his chief doctor on the campaign had reacted furiously, citing the cover-up as an example of Napoleon’s “oriental despotism” (the Chinese emperors being symbols of despotic rule in the French mind). The disease had hurried the Egyptian debacle to its close and almost buried Napoleon’s career with his unfortunate men. Only the political failings of the Directory in Paris, which opened the way for a coup, saved him.

One gesture in Egypt belied his cruelty there. The French leader had shown great bravery by entering the plague hospital set up by his doctors and touching the dying men, even helping to carry out a corpse. Touching plague victims was simply not done, except by medical professionals, as the disease was suspected to be extremely infectious. The incident had become an essential part of the Napoleonic mythos. Antoine-Jean Gros’s painting of the scene portrays Napoleon as a modern-day Jesus, with the ability to heal the sick with the touch of his finger.

In Haiti, the disease had been yellow fever and the effect was even more devastating. Spread by mosquitoes, yellow fever (also known as “yellow jack” and “the American plague”) is an acute viral disease noted for its ability to inflict pain, especially in the back and abdomen. The pathogen attacked the French forces and was quickly putting 30 to 50 men into the sick ward every day. “The mortality continues and makes fearful ravages,” wrote the twenty-nine-year-old commander to Bonaparte. The fact that the disease simultaneously hit units spread over different parts of the island, in different climates, and walking over different types of topographical features was especially terrifying. One staff officer wrote about the suspected causes. A soldier only had to:

…expose oneself at length to the hot sunshine, be caught in a draught when perspiring, neglect to change one’s rain-drenched clothes, undertake a taxing journey on foot or on horseback, breathe the burning air in churches during the great religious ceremonies, be bled needlessly, take excessive baths or drugs, be frightened, depressed, homesick, agitated by a passion such as rage or love or simply experience some strong stimulation .   .   .

In other words, one could get sick doing practically anything. One senses in the passage the paranoia that swept through the ranks as the fever vectored in from every direction.

The disease attacked the French from the beginning and grew in waves until it was said that troops went straight from their transport ships to the grave. Within a few months, 14,000 men were dead and the fighting had degenerated into terror on both sides. The French commander died of yellow fever in November 1802, and a year later the invasion had failed.

The defeat shocked Napoleon. Fearing that yellow fever was also endemic to the Mississippi Delta and surrounding regions, he sold France’s holdings of 530 million acres of land to Thomas Jefferson at the fire-sale price of under 3 cents an acre. For $15 million, the fledgling republic got Missouri, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Minnesota south of the Mississippi, and the bulk of North and South Dakota, along with parts of New Mexico, Texas, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and all of Louisiana, including the city of New Orleans. America had become a behemoth, while Napoleon had forsaken his best hope for a westward empire, all because of an obscure pathogen.

By 1812, the map of Napoleon’s ambitions had been circumscribed by disease: yellow fever in the far west, plague in the far south and now in the north, the most implacable sickness of all.

C  H  A  P  T  E  R     14

Two Roads

B
Y THE BEGINNING OF
N
OVEMBER
, N
APOLEON HAD ONLY
75,000 of his original 440,000 front line troops—365,000 troops had died in a little over four months. He had lost an average of 3,000 men every day of his campaign. The majority of those deaths, perhaps as many as 200,000, were from disease, with typhus the lead killer. One doctor called it a dying-off that “had scarcely a parallel in the history of the world.”

The Grande Armée didn’t keep precise statistics of cause of death, so how can one be sure that typhus was responsible for so many casualties? By sifting through the various theories and comparing them with the descriptions given by the soldiers themselves, one can discern the main causes of death on the road to and from Moscow with some clarity.

The response from the top ranks of the medical corps was confusion. Dr. Larrey noticed the men stumbling out of the ranks and falling down dead in the road, but in his memoirs, he makes a startling claim about what was killing them: not disease, Larrey claimed, but exposure, constant rains, and hard drinking. “These unfavorable circumstances,” Larrey wrote, “in conjunction with the immoderate use of chenaps (the brandy of the country), proved fatal to a large number of the conscripts of the junior guard.” As the diagnosis of the chief French medical authority, it deserves some investigation.

There is no question that some young recruits were getting blind drunk on the corn brandy that Polish peasants had left behind or were relieved of by French troops. But Larrey makes no case that a bad or poisoned batch was making the rounds, simply writing that the “stupefying power” of liquor was killing men by the score. That is, the men were dying from liquor that the peasants drank without any apparent harm to themselves. The surgeon in chief recorded the symptoms: loss of muscular movements, vertigo, drowsiness, half-closed eyes, lethargy, and even “gangrenous spots on the feet and legs.” All were consistent with late-stage typhus.

But perhaps there was a kernel of truth in Larrey’s diagnosis. It’s possible the brandy was interacting with disease to kill the men. A doctor on the campaign, Scherer, reported that three of his patients had found bottles of brandy in the hospital cellar and quickly downed them. Soon the men “fell down senseless” and began vomiting, crying nonstop, and suffering uncontrolled bowel movements. They were dead within six hours, and on their abdomens, necks and chests, and especially the feet there were gangrenous spots. Exactly as Larrey had reported. There is very little literature on the interaction of alcohol and typhus patients, but the liquor would most likely have worsened the condition of exhausted patients infected with
Rickettsia.
The rapid death of soldiers after drinking a pint of brandy might have suggested to onlookers that the liquor was the culprit, but the more likely explanation is that the alcohol only accelerated the progress of typhus or another disease.

Another theory mentioned in the accounts of several soldiers was exposure, or hypothermia. Hypothermia is caused by a drop in core body temperature, which renders the body unable to perform normal metabolic functions. The patient stumbles frequently and has trouble controlling his movement. Shaking becomes violent. The face, lips, toes, and fingers lose their natural color and may show tints of blue. The mind becomes clouded. In the final stages, the patient appears confused and drowsy; hallucinations and amnesia set in. The pulse drops, breathing slows dramatically, and the organs begin to fail. Death soon follows.

The staggering gait and blue skin match some of the descriptions of dying soldiers, but the conditions necessary for Stage 3 hypothermia simply didn’t exist in the early stages of the campaign. Most of the soldiers had access to blazing campfires at night; they had warm cloaks and overcoats; and the nights were described as “chilly” or “cool” but not downright arctic. Hypothermia can occur in temperatures above freezing, but those cases usually involve people dressed in light garments, with their skin exposed to the cold air. Some of the soldiers who had imbibed enough brandy could have lain out during the chilly nights without their overcoats, but unit cohesion was still strong within the Grande Armée and it was highly unlikely that entire units were left sprawled out half-dressed away from their mates and campfires long enough to expire from advanced hypothermia.

By blaming rotten liquor and exposure, Larrey may have been protecting his reputation. Death by poisoned chenaps could be attributed to incorrigible soldiers out on a spree and not to failures by the medical staff. The doctor was undoubtedly courageous on the field of battle and deeply concerned about the health and lives of his men—there was probably no more beloved figure among the ranks of the common soldiers—but he was also famously tetchy about his reputation and prone to exaggerate his own accomplishments.

The historian Jean Morvan compared Larrey’s surgical memoirs of various campaigns with the diaries of soldiers and found that the good doctor had consistently overlooked symptoms of illnesses racking the army and declared the men to be in good health when in fact many of them suffered from a variety of dangerous conditions. Throughout his career, Larrey regularly dismissed clear evidence of widespread illness.

·   ·   ·

T
HE
G
ERMAN ARTIST
and soldier Faber du Faur would survive the holocaust to come, one of only 100 soldiers of the Kingdom of Württemberg to return out of an original contingent of 15,000. His portraits in the beginning noted the rough beauty of the countryside, and the occasional skirmish, but on July 31 the tenor of his work changed.
On the Road between Beschenkovitschi and Ostrovno
shows two bootless soldiers collapsed on the ground, while four others dig a grave. The commentary by Faber du Faur and his collaborator, the officer Frederich von Kausler, emphasizes how common such scenes were: “The two days of march …presented an unforgettable glimpse of the shocking state of the army …exhausted soldiers oblivious to exhortations, threats or punishment. At each halt, each camp, we noticed that the number of effective troops had diminished. The vast majority of these exhausted soldiers soon turned into corpses.”

Laymen who recorded the deaths in their diaries and memoirs often attributed them to two causes: “want,” or hunger, and exhaustion. Hunger is mentioned again and again in memoirs of 1812. But is it possible that young and relatively fit men were actually starving to death on the road to Moscow? How long does it in fact take for a healthy man to die of malnutrition? The answer varies according to the person’s general health and reserves of body fat, but it would take several weeks before a reasonably fit and originally well-nourished soldier on the march would succumb.

Admittedly, food had become a pressing issue early in the campaign. The green, inexperienced troops gorged themselves on their rations; supplies meant to last four days were consumed in one. Again and again, the high command’s preparations proved inadequate or based on faulty information: The barges loaded with provisions found the Vilia River too shallow to navigate. Corrupt officials in charge of food distribution often withheld supplies from troops to sell them on the side for astronomical profits. One Westphalian officer wrote home to his wife that he was passing a detachment from Davout’s corps on July 29 when he saw soldiers execute a commissary who had been found selling off supplies meant for the troops. Fights broke out between commanders and their regiments competing for their daily rations, and carts full of wheat were dumped by the side of the road, as there were no horses or oxen to pull them.

This wasn’t unprecedented. Napoleon’s armies in Italy and Spain had never had adequate supplies pushed from Paris to fill their needs, and armies going back to Francis’s in the sixteenth century and beyond had extracted what they needed from local peasants. They lived off the land, by the ancient code of pillage. But Poland along the Smolensk road presented a bleak picture to the scavenger. It was filled with forests, swamps, and marshes, with few cultivated fields, and small villages with tiny stores where the local populace lived just above subsistence level. This wasn’t Italy, where family farmers tilled fields, raised cattle, and produced fresh cheese and wines. Invading that country, the emperor had promised his men “the most fertile plains on earth …rich provinces, wealthy towns.” In Russia the troops encountered miles of swamp, forest, and poor villages of hovels the lowliest French peasant would find unlivable. Napoleon had been warned about the scarcity of food along the route, but he had brushed the advice aside. Now he was paying dearly for his self-delusion.

What crops and stores did exist along the Smolensk road often lay smoking in ruins by the time the Grande Armée arrived. Barclay and Bagration had ordered their troops to destroy everything that could sustain the French: crops were set alight, food depots were ransacked and burned; cattle and horses were slaughtered; entire villages were put to the torch to deny Napoleon’s men basic shelter. The weather was so hot and the air so dry that Cossacks could ride by a hamlet, fire bullets into the thatched roofs, and start a blaze without even stopping.

The starving man goes through a long process of catabolism, where the body begins to break down the fat and muscle reserves and convert them to energy to keep the vital systems functioning. In the famous “starvation experiment” at the University of Minnesota in 1944-45, the food intake of the thirty-six volunteers (all fit young men, like the troops that made up most of Napoleon’s army) was reduced to about 1,500 calories per day, roughly half of what was needed to keep the men’s weight at preexperiment levels. The test subjects were slowly starved for twelve weeks. The volunteers lost fat and muscle, on average about 25 percent of their body weight. They became obsessed with food, highly irritable, and depressed (one volunteer, Number 20, even dropped a Packard on his hand and then amputated three fingers with the chop of an ax to get out of the study.) Their energy levels dropped precipitously. But none of them came close to dying, especially in the ways described in the memoirs: men stumbling and then suddenly keeling over dead, or never waking after a night’s sleep.

What most of the soldiers who left records of the campaign report is scarcity, not starvation. On the stretches of the road where supplies had become hard to find or had been gorged on by the lead troops, some would go a few days without a solid meal— gnawing on a biscuit or a handful of rye through the day—before they were able to forage or pillage a substantial amount of food. By the time the Grande Armée reached the Smolensk road in late July, the landscape had changed once more to ripe fields of wheat dotted by flocks of cattle (though it is true that the frontline regiments often ransacked these and left little for their comrades). There are few passages relating a
complete
absence of any food for weeks at a time, or the physical wasting-away of the body, the emaciation of the face and body, the intense irritability, the slow descent into a coma-like state, and the hysteria that characterize true starvation and would have been clearly evident to the sufferer’s comrades. Certainly men were weakened by the loss of a steady intake of protein, but there is almost no evidence of deaths purely from hunger on the advance to Moscow.

It’s far more likely that the conditions and the pace Napoleon was setting weakened the men’s constitution and gave an opening to disease. Typhus survivors had been known to succumb to even mild infections during their recovery, as their vascular systems and hearts had been so ravaged by the disease that they typically became susceptible to other “chronic disorders.” Even those it didn’t kill, typhus often fatally weakened.

Exhaustion is the other cause given by nonmedical men and physicians alike. But this diagnosis, too, fails to hold up to close scrutiny.

The recruits for the Grande Armée came from a mainly pastoral society, drawn from villages and farms, where outdoor work would have given most of them a vigorous, if occasionally malnourished, constitution, used to long days full of demanding work. As for the veterans, they were specimens: lean, rugged men who could march or ride for miles on end without complaint. Nor did those men who were suffering from hunger have to keep up with the intense marching that the army was experiencing; they could quite easily drop back to the mini-army of stragglers that had quite quickly appeared behind the main body of troops.

It is actually very hard to march men into their graves, even hungry, tired men, without complicating factors such as heatstroke, heart ailments, or extreme dehydration serving as the real cause of death. Dehydration would plague the troops later in the march, but as yet, it wasn’t a major factor, and the days were certainly hot, but no hotter than the army had experienced during Italian or Spanish summers.

Fatigue could certainly have weakened men suffering from an undiagnosed illness, but the assertion that large numbers of troops simply dropped dead from exhaustion is almost certainly false in the vast majority of cases. Something else was at work, something that would show up in the bones of the men who were lucky enough to reach Vilnius, 488 miles away.