The Illustrious Dead (7 page)

A
S THE
G
RANDE
A
RMÉE
marched east, the sun burned down during the day, with cold and thick fogs moving in at night. Rains drenched the roads, turning them into rivers of mud. Artillery guns had to be dragged through marshes and along rutted lanes. The marching became brutally hard, but nothing worse than Napoleon’s troops had seen crossing the Alps. The army’s horses were dying in greater numbers than its men: they needed almost twenty pounds of oats a day to survive and weren’t getting anything close to that. When their own supplies ran out, the cavalry and supply units substituted the local rye, which was green and unripe, causing the animals to die by the thousands. Their swollen bodies lined the route and threw off a noxious odor as they decomposed. It was a heavy blow for an army that depended on animal power to pull what supplies remained to the next camp and for the lightning cavalry charges that Napoleon expected to turn the tide in upcoming battles.

The French, growing desperate, often turned friendly locals into enemies within a matter of hours. Nobles who offered the troops the ancient welcome of bread and salt found that the troops had soon harvested and eaten their rye, stolen their cows and horses, and pillaged their homes for anything they could use. “The path of Attila in the age of barbarism cannot have been strewn with more horrible testimonies,” wrote one Polish officer. The mistake that Napoleon had made by not promising the Poles their freedom was compounded on the ground by men acting as if they were conquering territory instead of liberating it.

Captain Roeder, the diarist-soldier with the Hessian Lifeguards, was shocked by what he saw on the march. He passed bodies along the road and kites and vultures feasting on the eyes and entrails. The locals were poor to begin with, but the movable city that was the Grande Armée had taken everything they owned. “What misery prevails already in these wretched houses and hovels,” Roeder wrote in his diary. One day he came across a town swept by smallpox. “The parents were ready to tell the Lord God in secret how many children they wished Him to leave them,” Roeder recorded. “And looked upon it as a blessing if He took a few to Himself, especially in these hard times.” The soft-hearted captain gave out a few loaves of bread to the peasants and kept his men moving.

To his wife Sophie, he wrote about the extreme youth of those around him, so different from other campaigns, and told her that many of the eighteen-year-olds were already in the hospital. Roeder, despite his fearlessness in battle, was “obsessed by the fear of falling sick” (as his niece would later attest) ever since nearly dying during the 1807 Russo-Prussian War. “Beloved, it is so hard to be parted from you,” he wrote to Sophie from the road, “harder still not to know if it is only for a little while or if we have lost each other forever.”

The enemy took careful note of what was happening inside Napoleon’s ranks. Alexander’s spies and scouts reported on the thinning of the Grande Armée’s numbers. “This did not remain concealed from the Russians,” wrote the German strategist Clausewitz, who was close to the decision makers at headquarters. “General Schuwalow …returned to Widzy full of astonishment at the state of the route of the French army, which he found strewn with the carcasses of horses, and swarming with sick and stragglers.” French soldiers captured by Cossacks or peasants were questioned, and the reports hardened Alexander’s resolve to fight. Napoleon began to feel the mounting pressure. “I am already in Vilna and I don’t know what we’re fighting over,” he told a Russian emissary after arriving in the city on June 28.

In terms of sheer military momentum, Napoleon was succeeding brilliantly, driving his enemy before him. Epidemiologically, he was in mortal danger. A month after Sir Robert Wilson’s estimate of 30,000 deaths from sickness and desertion, Clausewitz wrote that already by the time he reached Vilna, less than a week into the campaign, Napoleon had lost 100,000 men, a full quarter of his frontline forces.

B
UT DISASTER FOR
the French represented an unprecedented success for the pathogen. It was fulfilling its own biological destiny.

Every epidemic disease from plague to cholera has its own patterns. Malaria is ancient and familiar, the tropical cliché, a carryover from the time of humankind’s ape relatives, limited by its heat-loving vector, the mosquito. Bubonic plague, with a top mortality rate of 75 percent—one of the few epidemics that can compete with typhus in sheer killing power—seems designed to terrorize, with its victims turned to a gangrenous pulp. Just as ruthless, typhus was now ready to join the ranks of the major pathogens.

It’s not inappropriate to talk about the “mind” of a contagious disease. Its habits, preferences, strategies, and alliances with the natural and human world result in a pattern that resembles strategic thought. Typhus favored chaos, deploring the stability of the towns and the nation-states that could enforce quarantines. It hated prosperity, for its ability to raise living and cleanliness standards, although it favored the movement of traders, which carried it to new population centers. The disease was enamored of mariners and seafarers, because they carried the bacillus around the world, truly founding its global empire but it despised learning, as its secrets were so obvious, so exposed, that it seemed that at any moment medical thinkers would discover the root of its power. Curiously, typhus formed an alliance with doctors, who tended to gather patients together with the uninfected, accelerating the pathogen’s spread, as was already happening on the road to Moscow.

Typhus was closely allied with the poor and criminals and the corrupt wardens that kept them in filthy hellholes that formed a reservoir where the disease could build its strength for mini-epidemics. It favored cold snaps, when people gathered in their hovels and wore layers of clothing, where its accomplices could burrow. It was fervently pro-religion, as religion was the spur to war after war, while priests and ministers lectured their followers that bathing was an indulgence and nakedness a mortal sin. If pressed, it favored Catholicism, which abhorred washing, over Protestantism. Politically, it was a monarchist to the core (there was really no other choice in the early nineteenth century) and favored corrupt kings who went to battle to replenish their coffers and drove their people to famine and misery. Typhus was, above all, a lover of war, the single greatest propagator of its survival and its rapid spread. The disease hungered for new territory. It had, in this way, the mind of a conqueror.

It’s also fair to say that typhus was inherently conservative, or at least pessimistic. It placed large bets on the belief that tradition counted: Men who made war on each other yesterday would continue to make war on each other tomorrow. They would continue to commit crimes punishable by prison terms and those terms would be served in filthy cells. Societies would fall victim to famine and the poor would always be with us. That humanity was basically incorrigible was a gamble written into its genetic code. If nations such as France made a head-spinning moral turn and stopped invading each other’s borders, and if men stopped committing felonies, typhus’s core constituencies would disappear.

Jails and ships and villages were the basis, in a way, of typhus’s domestic policy. There would always be a population there to infect and form a stable reservoir to keep the microbe alive. But those populations were unlikely to spread far enough to appreciably expand the microbe’s range. War and conquest, then, formed the center of its foreign policy. Along with shipborne trade, they were the most effective ways it could extend its reach to the corners of the earth.

By this quirk of the mind, the preference for attacking armies, typhus had acted as a check on great power. King Francis I’s mercenaries had been stopped by it in the plain that lay before Naples. Napoleon, however, was a different kind of ruler in a different time, driven by more audacious motives. Crucially, too, he led soldiers who would follow him anywhere, even into a raging epidemic.

But this was something typhus, in its very makeup, had wagered on: that war would prove irresistible to certain leaders. That insight was life itself to the microbe.

F
ROM THE MOMENT
the first soldier died of typhus, a clock began ticking. Now that the scourge had arrived, the question of the hour became: Would the pathogen leave Napoleon enough time to catch and destroy Alexander’s army?

C  H  A  P  T  E  R     6

Smolensk

A
T
V
ILNA
, N
APOLEON CALLED A HALT TO THE MARCH AND
began meeting with Polish emissaries looking for a promise of independence. At the same time, he mulled over Alexander’s intentions. “It was truly heartbreaking for him to have to give up all hope of a great battle before Vilna,” wrote his former ambassador to Russia, the perceptive Armand de Caulain-court. “He was anxious for trophies …and no one sent him any.” The first real doubts about the offensive had snaked into Napoleon’s mind by this time, but he wouldn’t allow himself to believe that he was engaged in a new kind of war.

Meanwhile, his southern forces under his youngest brother, Jérôme, king of Westphalia, along with three corps of Polish, Westphalian, and Saxon troops, were in pursuit of Russia’s Second Army under the hotheaded Bagration. The Russian commander on June 28 began moving north to link up with General Barclay, but a week later his scouts brought the information that the ever dependable Davout, the “Iron Marshal,” had dived south from Vilna and was moving southeast to force a battle.

Each was hoping to reach the Russian city of Minsk, approximately 110 miles southwest of Vilna, before the other. The French won the race. Bagration was now caught between Jérôme and Davout and faced the possibility of a pincer battle he was sure to lose. As the Second Army raced to escape, Jérôme failed to spring the trap, complaining to Napoleon that the roads were impassable and the weather brutal. Napoleon was furious with his brother, but many of the mistakes were his: Jérôme had started from a rear position and even on good roads couldn’t have been expected to march the hundred miles to stop Bagration’s retreat in the time given him. The emperor had also failed to coordinate the command structure between Jérôme and Davout, which resulted in conflicts between the two, wasting valuable hours. Bagration took advantage of the delay and ducked away south and out of the two-sided snare.

Napoleon blew up. “You know nothing, and not only do you consult nobody, you allow yourself to be guided by selfish motives,” he wrote his brother. The outraged Jérôme, who was commanding his first army in battle, turned around with his squad of guards and headed for home, abandoning the campaign on July 16.

The pattern was set for the first part of the war: French advances, minor clashes in which the Russians won as often as the French, and retreat of both Russian armies toward a unified stand deeper in the heartland. Napoleon’s decision to drive a wedge between Russia’s First and Second armies instead of herding them together against the Drissa River and then fighting a decisive battle had failed. And the Russians by mid-July had sussed out the French strategy, prompting Tsar Alexander to give orders for the two armies to withdraw to Vitebsk and unite there. Almost by accident, a Russian strategy had emerged: withdraw and suck the Grande Armée deeper and deeper into a ravaged landscape.

After Vilna, Napoleon headed northeast to try to outflank General Barclay, hoping to place himself between the two Russian armies and snap the First Army’s supply and communication lines to the country’s heartland. When the Russians fled from their fortified camp at Drissa, Murat and his cavalry turned south and then east again, hoping to cut them off before they reached Vitebsk. On July 25, the flamboyant, hard-charging marshal confronted the Russian rear guard of 12,000 men at Ostrovno. Dressed for battle in a powder blue coat laced with gold braid, cinched tightly at the waist by a silk cord, and a fetching hat covered with feathers over his lustrous black curls, Murat charged into the Russian lines, driving his horse forward with the enormous gold spurs he wore on his deerskin boots. The first real blooding of the campaign, the encounter left about 3,000 dead on each side. The French broke through the Russian line several times and captured Russian artillery pieces, but the bruising battle allowed Barclay to slip away toward Vitebsk.

As Napoleon approached that city on July 27, he was thrilled to see the First Army arrayed for battle. French advance elements sent ahead were met with volleys of musket balls in a series of skirmishes that broke out throughout the evening. Still not convinced of his ability to take on Napoleon, the cautious Barclay was anxiously waiting for word from Bagration and the Second Army, who he hoped would arrive just in time to reinforce his ranks. But that night Barclay received dispatches telling him that the Second Army, which had been hurrying north, had finally encountered Davout. The Iron Marshal wouldn’t let Bagration pass without a clash.

Davout, as loyal and competent as ever, had complied with Napoleon’s orders to engage the enemy wherever and whenever possible. Attempting to stop Bagration’s northward flight, he dug in on a high bank near the Dnieper River and waited for the Russians to attack. Already the depletion of the ranks by disease and other factors was telling: Davout’s original 70,000 men at the crossing of the Niemen had been reduced by illness—and a contingent of 28,000 men sent to Murat—to 30,000 by July 8. Now, as the fiery Bagration approached with about 45,000 men, the Iron Marshal was down to 17,000 soldiers, partly due to skirmishes and garrisoning towns along the way. But most of his losses had come from illness and desertion. “Each night of rest does extraordinary harm,” wrote one of his men, “and costs us many men sick and horses dead. Misery has brought on many suicides, and our column resembles more a transport of sick than of warriors.”

The Russians appeared at the Dnieper and Bagration sent one of his divisions smashing into Davout’s line, which crumpled in several places and then re-formed, beating the enemy back. Some 3,400 men fell on the French side to the Russians’ 2,400. Unwilling to test Davout further, Bagration looped south and then turned northeast toward Smolensk. The Iron Marshal had prevented the two Russian armies from linking up, but he had only delayed Bagration. He had failed to stop him or even significantly decrease his fighting power. With the men left to him, he could hardly have been expected to.

For the first time, typhus and the other diseases in the French ranks had a clear tactical impact on the battlefield and on the campaign. Without the troop strength to attack Bagration’s main body, Davout was unable to stop the Second Army from escaping. The Russians slipped away toward a rendezvous with the First Army.

With Bagration delayed, Barclay and his 80,000 men faced the prospect of a two-front battle against Napoleon in the west and Davout, who was now rushing toward Vitebsk from the south. It was a recipe for annihilation. After convincing Napoleon that July 28 would bring the long-awaited battle, Barclay slipped his forces out of Vitebsk during the night and stole eastward. As clear-minded as always, Barclay knew he faced impossible odds; the numbers were not with him.

Once again the Grande Armée was being drawn deeper into the Russian heartland. But the constant retreat was also fraying nerves on the Russian side, especially between the conservative Barclay and the firebrand Bagration, who wanted desperately to score a blow against the French invader, if only a symbolic one.

A
GRAPH OF THE
troop strength of both armies would have shown the French line, which had started at a very robust level, steadily diving, with the Russian line, which had commenced at a low point, rising weekly. Russia’s army was close to its supply depots and to an almost inexhaustible supply of reinforcements. Napoleon surely knew that the lines would have to cross eventually and his crushing numerical advantage would be gone.

Numbers hadn’t been crucial at the beginning of the campaign; with no major battle, it was the Grande Armée’s lack of maneuverability and Napoleon’s missed chances that let the Russians escape. But going ahead, that would change. “Nothing is more dangerous to us than a prolonged war,” Napoleon said. Total war demanded masses of men, and the French were hemorrhaging them at an alarming rate.

Suicides became more frequent, a result of the lack of food and the “terrifying” increase in the sick rolls, according to the Belgian doctor de Kerckhove. Those who couldn’t keep up with the main body of troops faced being left behind to the mercy of the Russian serfs. And that was a grim option.

The attitudes of the peasants toward the invaders were complex. Ninety percent of the population were serfs who could be beaten, killed, transported away from their family, or sold for a gambling debt or as collateral for a loan (a healthy male at the time would fetch between 200 and 500 rubles in the Moscow market; a good-looking young female, several times that). Before the invasion, Napoleon had threatened to free the serfs, but it was a ploy. He needed to make peace with the royal families of Europe, and igniting a social revolution in Russia would have deepened their hatred of him.

Any rabble-rousers among the serfs were routinely killed or imprisoned, but the prospect of an invasion by the forces of Revolutionary France inspired freedom-minded peasants to act. The historian Adam Zamoyski found records of sixty-seven minor uprisings across Russia in 1812, more than twice the average amount. Clearly, there was a deep reservoir of anger within the serf population, much of it directed at their masters.

But once the Grande Armée arrived to ransack the peasants’ hovels, steal their rye, and rape their women, that rage was increasingly vented on their supposed deliverers. The atrocities committed by the peasants on the French during the advance were trifling compared with what awaited them on the retreat, but no Frenchman wanted to be caught out along the road by a band of Cossacks or the local villagers.

Church officials, aristocrats, and Alexander himself painted the invasion as a desecration of the homeland, an attack by an Antichrist on the Orthodox Church and the religious traditions of Russia. One Bavarian officer recalled the reaction he got when he and some members of a cavalry regiment swept into a small village called Rouza. The peasants, armed with poles and scythes, were quickly scattered by volleys of musket fire, but the mayor of the town stood his ground. “How can I survive the dishonor of my country,” he cried. “Our altars are no more! Our empire is disgraced! Take my life, it is odious to me!” Armed only with a small dagger, he bellowed at the invaders to kill him.

The upper classes were firmly behind the tsar’s war policy. When Alexander, who remained far back from the front lines throughout the war, traveled to Moscow’s Sloboda Palace in late July to address the assemblies of nobles and merchants, the former pledged men— 10 percent of their serfs for the cause, as well as provisions to feed them, totaling 50,000 men—and the latter contributed huge sums of money. Fresh funds poured in: 2.4 million rubles were donated to the tsar’s coffers. Count Mamonov, whose father had risen rapidly in the military ranks due to his liaison with Catherine the Great, only to betray her with a sixteen-year-old, pledged 800,000 silver rubles and a cache of diamonds.

O
N
J
ULY
29, Napoleon marched into the recently abandoned Vitebsk, an ugly, depressing city partially redeemed by its beautiful churches. He delayed here, unable to make up his mind whether he should keep moving forward or stop for a time, allowing his food trains to catch up, knitting together his lines of communication, and giving his men a much-needed rest and the sick a chance to recover. The diplomat Caulaincourt, along with Murat and his other advisers, urged Napoleon to station the army in the city of Smolensk, sixty miles to the northeast, until the coming spring. His forces were simply too small and run-down after their harrowing in the field, and the prospect of wintering in Moscow, should he conquer it, gave him no strategic advantages against an army that could renew itself over a long winter.

The condition of the army was one of the main topics of debate, as it would be at each stop during the campaign. “War’s a game you’re good at,” the head of Napoleon’s commissariat snapped at the emperor. “But here we aren’t fighting men, we’re fighting nature.” “Nature” here refers to the lack of food, the weather, and distance—and disease, which emanated from the bogs and swamps.