The Illustrious Dead (27 page)

In 1938, the USSR’s defense commissar warned that the Red Army stood ready to use typhus “against an aggressor on his own soil.” What nature had achieved spontaneously against Napoleon the Soviets were now ready to deploy as a man-made weapon. The United States responded by beginning its own biological weapons research at Fort Detrick in Maryland, under the leadership of George Merck of the famous pharmaceutical company.

We have no reliable evidence that the Russians ever used typhus on the Germans. But one group of Polish resistance guerrillas apparently did utilize the pathogen against the Nazis: in a report from the Polish Secret Army to the Combined Chiefs of Staff of the Allied Forces dated September 7, 1943, the liaison officer (using the wrong name for the pathogen) detailed under “Activities of retaliation” the use of “typhoid fever microbes and typhoid fever lice” in a “few hundred cases.” If true, the rickettsial weapon most likely came from Russian stockpiles.

For the Germans, typhus became a tool. The disease ran rampant in the concentration camps, where the Nazis deliberately used it as an instrument of genocidal germ warfare. Scholar Naomi Baumslag estimates that 1.5 million prisoners of the camps died of the disease, and it was at Bergen-Belsen that typhus would claim its most famous victim in five hundred years.

Anne Frank arrived at the concentration camp on October 28, 1944. She had barely escaped death at Auschwitz earlier in the fall, where, having just turned fifteen (the cutoff for immediate death), she was spared a trip to the gas chambers and was separated from her father. Her head was shaved, and she was stripped naked, disinfected, and tattooed with her camp number. When she was later transported to Bergen-Belsen, she arrived already ill and malnourished along with her sister Margot. Anne survived, working in the bullet factory and sleeping in the unheated, desperately crowded barracks, until March 1945, when just weeks before the Allied liberation of the camp, a typhus epidemic raged through the camp. About 1 in 5 of the 500 prisoners in her barracks caught the disease. Near the end, Anne told the barracks leader, Irma Sonnenberg Menkel, “I am very sick” and soon was unable to make the roll call. “She didn’t know that she was dying,” Menkel remembered. Anne soon fell into the coma-like stupor that marks the final stage of the disease. Along with Margot, she was among the approximately 17,000 men and women who perished in the epidemic.

TODAY, R
ICKETTSIA STILL
roams the poorest sectors of the Third World, claiming victims especially in the cold mountainous regions of South America and Africa, where infected lice burrow into the clothing of villagers too poor to afford decent medical care. It is now rare in the industrialized world, but in a startling development a new vector has been discovered for the pathogen:
Glaucomys volans
, the flying squirrel, common in the continental United States. Nesting in attics, these rodents are the only known vertebrate reservoir for
Rickettsia
other than humans, and they have caused small outbreaks of epidemic typhus across the country. The furry, nocturnal animal that can be seen gliding from tree to tree, especially in gloaming of Southern moonlight, has been for thousands of years humankind’s brother under the skin.

Typhus will never roam the planet as it once did. A plague of flying squirrels might be the plot of a B horror flick, but rickettsial hordes of them are unlikely to invade the real world. The only threat that typhus realistically still poses is as a weaponized biological agent. Defectors have reported that North Korean leader Kim Jong Il has experimented with
Rickettsia
, along with anthrax, cholera, and the bubonic plague, research conducted at the appropriately sinister-sounding Germ Research Institute of the General Logistics Bureau of the Armed Forces Ministry. Various intelligence services report that the North Koreans have even conducted live experiments with biological agents on islands off the country’s coast. One defector claimed that she was present at an experiment in which 50 inmates of the regime’s concentration camps were exposed to biological agents and died horrifying deaths.

If the stories of North Korean stockpiles are true, it’s a fitting end for
Rickettsia
, stored in the vaults of a tiny, grotesque dictator, a cut-rate Napoleon. The microbe has always encountered men with lurid ambitions. Emperors, kings, and generals found that their armies could conquer everything except this one last natural barrier to the thing they wanted most.

But things have reversed themselves.
Rickettsia’s
nemesis, science, which conquered the microbe after five hundred years of pursuit, has now saved it. The pathogen has been processed into powders and aerosols, uniting the ancient and the new, and giving
Rickettsia
its only hope for a return to the wider world. It waits for what it has always waited for. War. Disaster.

The organism that helped stop Napoleon on the road to the fabled capital of Russia now exists in the most neglected areas of the world, places so poor as to be hardly worth conquering. But it also sits, close to extinction, locked in dark, infrequently visited rooms, filling at the end of its life the opposite role that it played in 1812: not as a barrier to power but as a dazzling weapon, one dark day, to seize it. Its wager on the incurably violent human race hasn’t quite played out.

Glossary

boyar:
A member of the Russian nobility.

carabinier:
A cavalryman.

chasseur:
A rapid-reaction infantryman.

cuirassier:
A cavalry soldier wearing a cuirass, or breastplate armor.

droshky:
An open, four-wheeled carriage.

flèche:
An earthwork with angled walls in the front and an open back where troops could assemble.

flying ambulance:
A small, enclosed ambulance pulled by horses and designed to advance onto the battlefield for evacuating the wounded.

jaeger:
A sharpshooter or skirmisher often deployed in front of the main line of troops.

lazaret:
A hospital, especially one specializing in infectious cases.

pontoneer:
A member of the bridge-building corps of troops.

redan:
A V-shaped defensive earthwork.

sapper:
An explosives expert.

MAJOR PLACE-NAMES

Berezina:
A western tributary of the Dnieper River, now part of modern-day Belarus.

Dnieper:
A major Russian river that flows from a point 160 miles west of Moscow south to Odessa on the Black Sea.

Niemen:
A river that previously formed the border between Poland and Russian Lithuania and now bisects the southwestern corner of Lithuania.

Saxony:
A duchy and kingdom in the southeast region of modern-day Germany.

Smolensk:
A major city in western Russia, located on the Dnieper River.

Vilia:
An east-west tributary of the Niemen.

Vilna:
Modern-day Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania.

Vitebsk:
A city now located in Belarus, near the northeastern border with Russia.

Westphalia:
An early-nineteenth-century kingdom located between the Rhine and the Weser rivers in the north-central part of modern-day Germany.

Württemberg:
An early-nineteenth-century kingdom located in the southwestern part of modern-day Germany whose traditional capital was Stuttgart.

Notes

Introduction: Old Bones

3 “‘wouldn’t stop coming out of the ground’”: “Reading the Bones” by Eve Conant,
Newsweek
, September 9, 2002, p. 1. 3 “There had been whispers”: Ibid., p. 1.

3 “a grave filled”: Ibid., p. 2.

4 “Or perhaps these were the corpses”: Ibid. 4 “When archaeologists”: Ibid., p. 2.

4 “As they excavated”: “Napoleon’s Lost Army: The Soldiers Who Fell,” by Paul Britten-Austin,
www.bbc.co.uk/history
.

5 “None of the remains”: “Reading the Bones,” p. 2.

5 “Napoleon’s troops breaking into”: “Digging Napoleon’s Dead,” by Jarret A. Lobell,
Archaeology
, Sept/Oct. 2002.

Chapter One: Incarnate

8 “when men ran through”: Herold,
Age of Napoleon
, p. 37.

9 “‘He wanted to put’”: Quoted in Herold,
Mistress to an Age
, p. 214.

10 “‘From that moment’”: Quoted in Duggan, p. 11.

12 “‘The belief that they were invincible’”: Quoted in Zamoyski, p. 84.

13 “‘The genie of liberty’”: Quoted in Conklin, p. 11.

15 “Napoleon would say later”: Napoleon to Metternich, quoted in Troyat, p. 94.

16 “‘He is a truly handsome,’”: Quoted in Horne, p. 2.

16 “‘Love for the Tsar,’”: Quoted in Cronin, p. 305.

17 “French manufacturers”: McLynn, p. 495.

17 “even aristocratic families”: Horne, p. 233.

17 “‘In Hamburg’”: Ibid., p. 296.

18 “‘Sooner or later’”: Schom, p. 436.

18 “‘The world is clearly’”: Ibid., p. 475.

19 “‘I care nothing,’”: Quoted in McLynn, p. 499. 19 “‘torrents of blood’”: Quoted in Troyat, p. 139.

Chapter Two: A Portable Metropolis

21 “The army that the emperor”: The number of men encompassed in the invasion of Russia is the subject of perennial disputes. I have depended most heavily on the work of Adam Zamoyski in
Moscow 1812
for estimates of troops.

21 “semaphore signals”: McLynn, 344.

21 “It formed”: The number of Napoleon’s troops and hangers-on who crossed the Niemen is estimated at 600,000. The figures for Tokyo and Istanbul are circa 1800; Tokyo’s population was 685,000 and Constantinople’s total was 570,000. Chandler, Tertius.
Four Thousand Years of Urban Growth: An Historical Census.
New York: Edwin Mellen Press, Ceredigion, 1987.

22 “Each had to be able”: Horne, p. 98.

22 For an extended discussion of Napoleon’s marshals, see Chandler, David A.,
Napoleon’s Marshals.

25 For a discussion of unit sizes in Napoleon’s armies, see Muir.

26 “‘which permitted the speed’”: McLynn, p. 505.

27 “‘It was an impossible dream’”: Ibid., p. 506.

27 For a discussion of the Russian officer class, see Cate, p. 115.

27 “‘The headquarters of the Emperor’”: Clausewitz, p. 3.

30 “‘malignant spotted fever’”: Villalba, quoted in Zinsser, p. 243.

30 “Only 3,000”: Ibid.

31 “The conflict drew together”: This account draws mainly from Arfaioli’s
The Black Bands of Giovanni.

31 “‘Therefore I cannot but see’”: Quoted in Brandi, p. 220.

33 “Nearly three hundred years”: Seward, p. 136.

33 “The historian David Bell”: See Bell’s
The First Total War
for an explication of his ideas about the evolution in the culture of war.

34 “‘a war to the death’”: Ibid., p. 3.