The Illustrious Dead (25 page)

Observers on the western bank could hear a constant bellowing, “like the distant roarings of a tempest at sea, cries, yells, wagons exploding, an undefinable uproar which filled us with terror.” The Imperial Guard began directing cannonades at the Russian batteries, and finally Marshal Victor and his IX Corps mounted an attack that pushed the guns out of range. They managed to hold their ground as night fell and the Russian fire lessened. The lanes leading to the bridge were cluttered with piles of cadavers and dead horses; Victor and his men had to cut a route through them with their sabers while military police pushed back the despairing mobs of stragglers who had failed to cross during the day. By six o’clock that night all of his troops were across except for some mounted troops and 200 soldiers bringing up the rear.

Astonishingly, although the bridges were now open, some of the hangers-on elected to spend another night on the eastern bank, despite the entreaties of IX Corps’ Marshal Victor and General Jean-Baptiste Eblé, who even went around the campfires warning the people that the bridge was about to be blown up to slow the Russian pursuit. The hopeless men and women simply looked at Eblé, past comprehension or caring. The general tramped back across the bridge and made ready the cache of combustibles that would destroy the crossing at seven a.m.

The next morning, Eblé waited on the western bank, watching the scene unfold across the river. After sleeping under the falling snow, the remaining soldiers had again rushed to the bridges’ entrances and clogged them as the Russians closed in. Men slashed their way through the mob with bayonets, and the roar resumed. Finally, as the Russian gunners began to find the range of the rear guard waiting to blow the bridge, Eblé ordered the fuses lit, and planks shot into the air as the western reaches of the bridges exploded. One soldier, miles away from the Berezina, remembered hearing a collective scream from the doomed multitudes when they saw the explosives ignite.

The last of the stragglers were tipped into the water and froze to death or were killed by the Russian grapeshot that kicked up sprays of water. The blue-lipped bodies of women and children, some of them newborns, floated downstream, a sight remembered by many of the retreating soldiers, and clotted masses of bodies were grouped along each shore. The Cossacks arrived on the river-bank and began stripping the bodies of the dead and the living. Many of the sick and wounded who had somehow managed to survive the ghastly trip from Borodino or Moscow never made it over the bridge.

Crossing the Berezina cost the Grande Armée and its followers about 25,000 dead, while the Russians lost some 15,000. The Russians took entire regiments prisoner, with Wittgenstein’s units capturing 13,000 men, leaving Napoleon with only about 40,000 men (his ranks having been swelled by garrisons, stragglers who had rejoined the march, and Victor’s and Marshal Gouvion Saint-Cyr’s men). Even with the scenes on the bridge that haunted many survivors’ memories more than any other aspect of the retreat, it’s still remembered as something of a miracle, a late, brilliant flashing-out of Napoleon’s genius. His maneuvering was clever, but it was now his men that were the vessels of his reputation. Without being whipped to it, his soldiers fought for him with something more than the robotic stupor of half-dead men guarding the only route to survival; they performed with an esprit de corps that transcended nationality and the ridiculous piling-on of misfortune. But the fact that such a nightmare is counted as a victory of the campaign shows the perilous state that the Napoleonic enterprise had reached by November 29.

“T
HE ARMY IS LARGE
, but in a state of terrible dissolution,” the emperor wrote on November 29, emphasizing that the troops needed to find plentiful supplies in Vilna in order to have a chance. “Food, food, food! Without that there is no atrocity that this undisciplined mob will not visit upon the city.” Napoleon was still considering some kind of garrison within Russian territory—Vilna was the last possibility—to be reinforced for a spring offensive. He was also beginning to think strategically about how to best present the disaster that had overcome his army to his allies and enemies in western Europe. He ordered all foreign diplomats out of Vilna, so they couldn’t report on the state of his troops, and instructed his commander there to proceed as if the retreat was orderly and the Grande Armée in robust health. But the emperor knew that word of his defeat must be spreading through the capitals of Europe.

On December 3, he issued the 29th Bulletin, the first in almost three weeks. For the first time, he revealed the “frightful calamity” that had occurred, and blamed it mostly on weather and the lack of food. There were hints that the dead had been at fault for dying so easily. “Those men, whom nature had not sufficiently steeled to be above all the chances of fate and fortune, appeared shook, lost their gaiety—their good humor, and dreamed but of misfortunes and catastrophes; those whom she has created superior to everything, preserved their gaiety, and their ordinary manners, and saw fresh glory in the different difficulties to be surmounted.” Napoleon famously ended the dispatch with the assurance that “His Majesty’s health has never been better.”

By December 5, Napoleon had decided to return to Paris. There he would raise a new army of 300,000 men and return to Russia to finish the war. The hardened survivors of 1812 would become the core of the offensive of 1813. He brought his marshals together and gave his final speech of the campaign, for the first time admitting his own culpability to his generals in apologizing (according to some present) for leaving Moscow too late. But he was still breathing the last fumes of his Russian dream, believing that the Polish population would rise up and attack the Cossacks besieging the garrison at Vilna, that the French army would triple in size once food and clothing was supplied to the survivors and reinforcements arrived, and that the Russians would find it hard to supply the forces around the city. He told the marshals that he felt he had stayed away from Paris as long as possible; if things turned for the worse, there could be another coup attempt or his fragile alliances with Austria and Prussia could collapse. Then as now, defeat in the military sphere meant a realignment of power elsewhere, especially in political relations with allies whose interests and ambitions ran counter to France’s. Disguised to avoid capture, the emperor departed at ten that night, with his former Russian ambassador, Caulaincourt, in a carriage guarded by mounted Neapolitan and Polish soldiers.

T
HE ARMY FAILED
to realize Napoleon’s vision of a miraculously revived force. Some 20,000 more men died on the road to Vilna, and troops began burning entire houses on the route to stave off the cold, which reached its nadir at -36 degrees. The remainder of the troops, looking like survivors of some medieval famine, surged into the sophisticated city of shops and stylishly dressed merchants, which was quickly looted and trashed by the half-crazed throngs. The thirteen-year-old son of a French surgeon described it as “nothing but a vast hospital, with men arriving sick with typhus and dysentery.” The floors of one hospital were covered with the feces of the soldiers, “dying there in great numbers.”

Some 20,000 troops entered Vilna; only 10,000 marched out. One parish reportedly had 8,000 dead dumped in its churchyard, the vast mound hurriedly disguised with snow.

By the time they reached Kovno in central Lithuania, the disappearing army was down to 7,000. And when they crossed the Niemen back into Germany, with the indestructible Ney the last man over the bridge before it was burned, there were only a few thousand left of Napoleon’s frontline troops (other reserve forces had crossed earlier), many of them infected with
Rickettsia
, journeying home as fatal messengers, only to infect the loved ones who had waited for them for so long.

EPILOGUE

Rendezvous in Germany

W
ord of the French defeat electrified Europe. When the diplomats and Polish officials and aristocrats
f
who had been herded into Vilna saw the emperor’s forces in person, the news could be held in no longer: Napoleon’s army had mostly vanished. In Germany, students and ragamuffins paraded through the town streets chanting a ditty that mocked the once-fearsome Grande Armée:

Drummers without drumsticks
    Cuirassiers in female garb,
    Knights without a sword,
    Riders without a horse!
    Man, nag and wagon
    Thus has God struck them down!

“It seems to me that the spell has been broken as far as Napoleon is concerned,” wrote the Dowager Empress Maria Fyodorovna. “He is no longer an idol, but has descended to the rank of men, and as such he can be fought by men.” The glamorous balls and state receptions that Napoleon initiated on his return to Paris couldn’t muffle the rumblings of disaster that emanated even from within his own ministries.

The emperor tried to sweep the details under the rug, claiming that only 400,000 of his troops had crossed the Niemen and that only half of those were French, which allowed him to peg his own casualties at an absurdly low 50,000. It was a fantasy, and few believed it.

As the survivors marched west and south, they were “shunned like lepers,” as word of the epidemic in their midst spread before them. Many of the troops were quarantined in the various towns they traveled through, and the locals often locked them in for the night so they couldn’t spread the contagion. When the German infantryman and diarist Jakob Walter caught typhus along with his brothers-in-arms, the good people of a small settlement near Stuttgart, Germany, escorted them to the town hall, then bolted the door. When the lads escaped and made their way to a local inn, alarm bells rang and the citizens threatened to call the local militia to bring them back to their quarters at gunpoint.

The men, no matter their nationality, were called “Russians” and “Moscow bums.” The diarist and Württemberg lieutenant H. A. Vossler remembered:

Wherever we went we were gaped at like freaks, for we were among the few who had escaped the universal disaster. Everywhere we were made to give, over and over again, an account of our own adventures, of the plight of the army, and of the appalling hardships we had suffered. Yet such is human nature that there were always some who felt our tale was not harrowing enough and argued that we could not therefore have experienced the campaign and the retreat in its entirety.

Dr. Larrey, who had, in one of the heartening scenes at the Berezina, been passed by hand over the heads of his cheering troops to the western bank, finally noted in his memoirs that contagious disease had impacted the Grande Armée. “Epidemic maladies successively attacked a great part of those who had escaped the foregoing catastrophe,” he wrote. Days later, he succumbed on the way back to Paris. “I had scarcely concluded my arrangements, when I was suddenly seized with symptoms of the catarrhal fever attendant on congelation, a species of typhus having the greatest analogy to hospital fevers…. This malady made rapid progress, and rendered in a very few days my situation extremely dangerous.” He barely survived. For other soldiers who came down with the disease, he prescribed leeches, cupping, bleeding from the jugular vein, and “application of the skin of an animal flayed alive.”

When he reached Leipzig, Larrey received a panicked letter from a commander from the Russian invasion who was alarmed at the rapid spread of typhus. His suggestions to combat the outbreak were rather shocking, as they came so late in the game. “My report…pointed out the hygienic measures to be adopted for impeding the development of this fever,” he wrote, “for arresting its progress, and preventing its contagious influence.”

Captain Roeder, the passionate widower whose diary mirrored the experience of so many men on the march, somehow survived the campaign. When he reached Vilna, he was astonished to still be alive. “It is morning and I have slept in a bed, completely undressed!” he wrote in his diary. “Great God! Is it possible I have survived all these hardships! …Father in Heaven, how I thank thee! Look, oh look in mercy on thy grateful son! Help me to reach the frontier. Let me see my own again!”

But typhus caught up with him and by February 6 he was writing his beloved Sophie a farewell note.

I feel that I shall not be able to recover from this sickness and that I cannot live another week unless my feeble constitution can perform another miracle, and how can one reckon upon that in a town where death is everywhere? So I must take leave of you, beloved Sophie; once I dreamed that I might have lived a few sweet years with you. But it is not God’s will. My life is reaching the last link of a terrible chain of misery, and indeed I am infinitely weary of it.

He survived, somehow, but to reach Sophie he had to run a gauntlet of spies, corrupt officials, smugglers, and murderous criminals. A Jewish innkeeper smuggled him across the Russian border into Poland, and he found himself packed into a doss-house full of peasants, one of whom repeatedly pointed a loaded gun at him for amusement. Escaping to Prussia (now under the control of Sweden after Napoleon’s defeat), he was thrown into prison as a spy and held for months.

Finally, in June, the captain was released and made his way back through a seething northern Germany that was now free of Napoleon’s control and on the verge of an uprising. “Matters have almost reached the point where they were in France at the outbreak of the rebellion,” he wrote nervously in the city of Bergen. On June 25, Roeder reached his home in Göttingen, one of a tiny number of survivors of what he now called “that accursed Russia.” He gave his overjoyed children all that was left of the immense bounty taken from Moscow: a silver ruble and a single Swedish krona. To his wife, Sophie, he records at the end of the diary that “to her all I had to give was myself.” He was an incomparably lucky man.

AS NAPOLEON HURRIED back to Paris, one of the last enigmas of the 1812 campaign unfolded. Riding in sleighs and carriages with Caulaincourt, the emperor had fluctuated in mood from pensive to jovial throughout the journey, but the closer he got to Paris the more buoyant he became. As he left the town of Glogau in a freezing sleigh and traveled across northern Germany on the night of December 13, Napoleon began wondering what would happen if they were captured, and he remembered the fate of a predecessor whose dreams were canceled by typhus. “If we are stopped,” he told Caulaincourt, “we shall be made prisoners of war, like Francis I.” He and Caulaincourt checked their pistols and kept them close by. Despite the danger, Napoleon’s mood soared: at times the walls of the sleigh echoed with the pair’s uncontrollable laughter.

The episode of the sleigh ride is justifiably famous, used by many camps in the field of Napoleonic studies, either as a testament to the emperor’s heartlessness or his mental instability, or as a leading example of Bonaparte as existentialist. Caulaincourt thought he was fully delusional at times. How could he be so giddy when his army lay shattered back in Vilna and his empire hung by a thread? But it’s impossible to reduce those hours to a single set of causes; they display the astonishing range of Napoleon’s character, his unparalleled response to life. One moment he was expressing deep bitterness at his betrayal by friends and allies, the next he was breathless with laughter at the thought of being displayed in a Prussian cage like a captured macaque. After months of being trapped in a traveling mausoleum, the emperor could feel life—a new army, fresh enemies, sex, Paris, challenges, and appetites— approaching with each freezing mile. Perhaps he was even thrilled at the thought that he was again the underdog, and would have to strain every fiber of his being to produce miracles with which to astonish the world. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that he had been bored on the Russian campaign. What was said of Junot— that his eye “no longer lit up at the sight of a battlefield”—was also true for the emperor. But now, he had to remake his legend over again. To the forty-three-year-old Napoleon, it must have tasted something like youth.

·   ·   ·

THE FINAL NUMBERS of the campaign of 1812: Between 550,000 and 600,000 members of the Grande Armée (including reinforcements) crossed the Niemen. About 100,000 were captured by the Russians, of whom only 20,000 eventually were repatriated to their home countries. The total number of dead among the Grande Armée can be conservatively put at 400,000 (although other estimates range as high as 540,000). Less than a quarter of them died as the result of enemy action. The rest of this magnificent force, the majority of Napoleon’s effectives, died of disease, cold, hunger, and thirst. Individual regiments and corps saw the majority of their members dead or missing. Incredibly, the cosseted Imperial Guard emerged from Poland with only 1,500 of its original 47,000 members.

As author Adam Zamoyski has pointed out, the losses were made more painful by the small populations of European countries at the time. A figure of 300,000 French casualties would be the equivalent of 700,000 today. The Polish losses of 75,000 would translate to 750,000 in modern terms, and one can extrapolate such terrible numbers for most of the nations that took part. The Russians lost an equivalent number of soldiers, slightly more of them in battle, and the death of civilians by disease, famine, and violence easily lifts the number of dead for the 1812 campaign well over the 1 million mark.

The Grande Armée didn’t keep precise statistics of the manners of death of its soldiers. It is impossible to pin down the number of typhus victims, but it’s clear that disease was the lead killer on the campaign, and typhus the most lethal disease present. And typhus had not only killed men outright. By encouraging Alexander to avoid a treaty (as he felt the French army was dying on the march), by hamstringing Napoleon at Borodino and Maloyaroslavets, and by greatly weakening the survivors, it had initiated a series of calamities that killed more men on the retreat.
Rickettsia
, not Kutuzov and not “General Winter,” had tripped the emperor’s army into its Russian grave.

Napoleon still had resources and talents to draw on for the battle for his empire he now knew was coming. But the invasion of Russia had given
Rickettsia
its greatest spurt of life in a thousand years, a dark flower of death spread across Europe. It wouldn’t release its hold on the continent, or the emperor, so easily.

THE DEBACLE IN RUSSIA acted as fresh oxygen on buried embers, especially in Germany, where militias sprang up and young Germans vowed to overthrow the French usurper. On March 13, 1813, the new alliance of Russia and Prussia declared war, and the losses in Russia echoed in France: many of Napoleon’s best officers and veteran soldiers were dead, and their green replacements couldn’t match their experience or hardiness. And to get those new recruits, Napoleon was forced to new extremes, including an April 3, 1813, edict that required each son of a noble family to recruit and equip his own unit of soldiers, which cost him crucial support among the richest families. Younger and younger boys were drafted, but
Rickettsia
and the Russian army had simply decreased the pool of eligible and willing troops. The emperor’s 1813 recruitment target was 650,000 men. He got 137,000. France’s appetite for war was sated.

Napoleon eventually cobbled together an invasion force of 200,000 and marched in April 1813. He managed two quick victories, a brilliant tour de force at Lützen and a difficult one at Bautzen in May. But typhus reappeared in the ranks almost immediately and carried away tens of thousands of men, again hobbling his forces.

His enemies united in the Sixth Coalition ultimately assembled 800,000 men to Napoleon’s eventual total forces of 650,000. An armistice was signed on June 4, and Napoleon was presented with terms that would have been unthinkable before Russia. The French Empire would be dissolved, and Napoleon would retreat to the nation’s pre-1792 borders, threatened on all sides by enemies. With 90,000 men on the sick list, Napoleon signed.

The downfall was swift. Sweden broke its alliance with France and then, on August 12, Napoleon’s most important ally, Austria, switched sides. Napoleon attacked the Russians and Austrians on August 26 and won a brilliant victory at Dresden. But two quick defeats followed, leading to the crucial Battle of Leipzig on October 16, where 500,000 troops fought outside the historic city, the largest single battle until the beginning of World War I. According to the military surgeon and scholar Von Linstow, by the time of the engagement Napoleon had lost 105,000 men on the campaign by forces of arms, but 219,000 to disease, chiefly typhus. Now he had to face an allied force of 320,000 men with half that number in his own ranks. On the 1813 campaign, Napoleon had occasionally equaled the verve and brilliance of his greatest battles, but
Rickettsia
again sapped him of vital strength.