The Illustrious Dead

by Stephan Talty

  As the typhus expert Hans Zinsser has pointed out, disease and Christian culture had a curiously symbiotic relationship: When epidemics struck, huge numbers of Europeans flocked to the local churches and converted. Priests pointed to calamities as an example of God’s wrath for wickedness and disbelief, increasing the Church’s rolls and spreading its message far and wide. For its part, Christian doctrine’s aversion to basic hygiene gave diseases such as typhus a leg up in the race for their own converts. Each entity found a way to thrive in the other’s culture.

  ONE CONFLICT IN PARTICULAR, the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48), seeded the road to Russia with disaster, and in fact spread Rickettsia throughout the length and breadth of Europe two hundred years before Napoleon marched on Alexander. This mammoth conflict at the beginning of the seventeenth century perhaps did more to seal Napoleon’s fate than any stratagem he devised. Hans Zinsser called the conflict “the most gigantic natural experiment in epidemiology to which mankind has ever been subjected.”

  The armies marching to battle and then returning home to their far-flung lands carried Rickettsia prowazekii across Europe. Stragglers, hangers-on, deserters, and traders spread the pathogen to places that had no experience of typhus. Poland and Russia, where the disease had been well established since the mid-1500s, suffered from epidemics that entrenched the microbe even deeper into the native population. For the first time, the disease entered France with strength. Some 60,000 perished in Lyon alone, and even decades after the war ended, devastating epidemics would hit towns in Burgundy and elsewhere. It’s unlikely that these were the first instances of typhus in France, but the pathogen was spread widely in the population, where it would remain until the time of Napoleon.

  After typhus struck in the south of France in 1641, a poet described its impact and the confusion that followed in its wake:

  Throughout all the people of Burgundy and the cities which the slow-floating river Araris irrigates, broke out an unusual fever, which attacked the bodies with red spots (sad and incredible to say) …

  That same fever ruined the people of Italy …and raged across the whole of Europe. Some people blame it on the rain waters, and the fall, extremely humid for the blowing of the wind, which corrupts the air with its marshy blow, and generates the contagions of the spreading plague.

  Some others believe that spoiled food had produced the poison deadly to humans, which caused the noxious humor in the rotten veins with the attached disgrace. From there came the diseases, from there the massive devastation among the oppressed people and the military camps.

  This described the situation all over the Continent. Before the war, typhus was a minor regional power in several pockets of Europe, especially the Balkans. Afterward, it was an empire.

  In those it didn’t kill, Rickettsia prowazekii often lay dormant, occasionally flaring up in a mild condition known as Brill-Zinsser disease. This latent infection kept the pathogen alive, ready to pass from its host to a louse to fresh victims. If enough new hosts were available, the bacteria could spark a new epidemic—as was happening now in the Grande Armée.

  FROM 1529 ON, typhus was present in some degree at almost every major European conflict. It hamstrung armies and stopped offensives during the English Civil War (1642-51). It killed tens of thousands of soldiers during the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-48), and it would keep its potency into the Crimean War (1853-56), which pitted Russia against France, England, and the Ottoman Empire, where it wreaked havoc on the French army and killed hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians.

  The same agonizing symptoms that had attacked millions of Europeans for hundreds of years were being described in diary after diary of common soldiers and doctors marching toward Moscow. But Dr. Larrey and the upper reaches of the French military machine virtually ignored them as typhus swept through the ranks, killing wantonly. Now the cost was coming due.

  C H A P T E R 9

  At Borodino

  AS THE ARMY STREAMED PAST SMOLENSK AND ON TO AN uncertain future, the Hessian captain Roeder was sick but marching, every mile away from home increasing his ardor for lost things. He wrote in his diary to Mina, his dead wife: “Beloved, is it that I am soon to visit you among your airy clouds? Will our spirits soon fly to each other and embrace, or must we both dissolve forever? My body begins to waste away already.” But the Russian campaign wasn’t yet completely devoid of the pleasures of soldiering, not quite.

  Roeder wrote with relish of camping after a long day’s march, dropping onto the soft turf, wrapped in his warm cloak, and falling asleep under the stars to the sound of his horse contentedly munching on corn cut from nearby fields. He kissed a girl he met on the road and complimented her on her “fresh” appearance, recording the innocent encounter in his diary, which he sent to Sophie. She wasn’t a veteran military wife used to such flirtations and responded angrily. Roeder wrote back, full of regrets, with eleven florins for her to buy a new hat. But the campaign was wearing him down; he felt the first touch of a fever at the end of August, and others were suffering, too. “My former Lieutenant, Bechstatt, and my present Lieutenant, Pfaff, have both been ill for several days,” he reported. A major in the Württemberg corps told him that they had left home with 7,200 infantry soldiers but, although fighting just one engagement (Smolensk), were now down to 1,500. By September, according to typhus researcher Hans Zinsser, both typhus and dysentery were becoming “more and more intense.”

  The road to Moscow was broad. Artillery and supply wagons could ride two or three abreast, flanked on both sides by columns of infantry and, outside them, the cavalry. The fields they marched through were most often burned to the ground, and windstorms drove dust into their eyes. One soldier remarked that it seemed as if Mother Earth herself were rising up against the invaders. Some troops cut crude sunglasses out of bits of stained-glass window and wore them; others masked their faces with handkerchiefs or bits of cloth. The soldiers drank filthy water and horses’ urine.

  Many of the green youths who had signed up in Paris and elsewhere with such hopes of romance and glory, the boys who had caused the veterans to smile wanly, were now dead. The older campaigners, who were fitter and physically tougher, had survived in proportionately greater numbers. “You could make them out by the martial cast of their features and the way they talked,” wrote the general and historian Ségur. “War was the only thing they remembered and it was all they could look forward to.” Captain Roeder, who had nearly starved on a previous campaign, was eating less than he should have been on the way to Moscow, but he barely remarked on it in his journal.

  Napoleon put the best possible face on the damage wrought by typhus and the other obstacles. “This poor army is sadly depleted,” he told an aide-de-camp after Smolensk, “but what remains is good.” The remark contained a hidden barb: Napoleon, with his moral idea of disease resistance, perhaps believed that the dead had not been good enough, not determined enough, to survive.

  · · ·

  ON THE RUSSIAN SIDE, General Barclay sent reconnaissance squads ahead on the Moscow road to find a favorable spot for a battle. They reported back with two possibilities: one near the far bank of the Usha River, and the other close to the town of Gshatsk. Barclay arrived at the first spot on August 22 and ordered Bagration, whose Second Army had left Smolensk early to secure the Moscow road and had remained out in front of the First, to return for a climactic battle.

  Bagration, close to open mutiny, again refused. He got into a heated argument with Colonel Karl Friedrich von Toll, who had chosen the site for battle and threatened to put “a musket across your shoulders,” that is, have him demoted to a common infantry soldier. Clausewitz, the war strategist, wrote that Bagration was simply unhappy with the defensive possibilities of the position, but there may have been other, darker forces at work. Barclay knew that his constant retreating was interpreted as a slow treason by his fellow generals and a majority of the officers and troops, but he couldn’t know how deep the rancor went. The fe
rvent nationalist Bagration may have been avoiding battle to increase the pressure on Alexander to dismiss his commander and replace him with a “true” Russian. Bagration and his cohorts had been sending missives back to the tsar emphasizing the desire of the men to fight and the “foreign” plot led by Barclay that was preventing them from a glorious battle.

  With dissension clouding every decision, the same pantomime unfolded at the second position chosen by Colonel Toll. The Russians stopped, started digging in, and then fell backward.

  Finally, the two generals agreed on a battle position: Tsarevo-Zaimishche, a swamp only a hundred miles from the gates of Moscow. The two armies began to dig trenches and build fortifications on August 29, but politics intervened. A new general had arrived to take charge of the campaign, a true Slav, as the people demanded. General Mikhail Kutuzov would conduct the final showdown with Napoleon.

  Alexander possessed a gut dislike for the charismatic, lazy Kutuzov, a dislike complicated by history. Kutuzov had dined with the tsar’s father the night he was murdered, and the guilt-ridden Alexander suspected the general knew the truth of his own tacit involvement in his father’s assassination. And Austerlitz, where Kutuzov had acted as a military strategist for Alexander, still stung deeply. “I was young and inexperienced,” he told others. “Kutuzov should have advised me.” The general had advised him, to retreat, but the tsar pursued the opposite strategy and lost.

  The battle-scarred general had been elected by his genes more than anything else. Ensconced at his summer home on Kamenny Island, Alexander had done everything he could to avoid the general’s appointment. Like Lincoln before finding Ulysses S. Grant, the tsar needed for domestic political reasons as much as anything else to find a commander who would fight. Bagration, he felt, “has no idea” of military strategy, and Barclay, whom he had thought the lesser of two evils at the beginning, had forfeited command by “committing one stupidity after another at Smolensk.” The arrival in Moscow of refugees from that battle, which terrified the population, the letters from his brother Constantine, which vilified Barclay at every turn, and the “unanimous clamor” from the higher reaches of the Russian command down to the gossip in the street forced his hand. “I had no other course than to yield,” he wrote his sister.

  Kutuzov’s roots were deep in the Russian aristocracy; no other general could rival his claim to being a native son or his popularity with the people. His ancestors had served in the army of Alexander Nevsky, and his father had fought for Peter the Great. Kutuzov had the common touch, whored alongside his troops, and grew fat on endless meals. Russians put off by Barclay’s German reserve saw Kutuzov as everything their former commander wasn’t: a hedonist, suspicious of official bureaucracy, instinctual, charming but often deliberately coarse. An English diplomat once sketched the milieu he had emerged from:

  The nobility …live in the voluptuous magnificence of eastern satraps; after dinner they frequently retire to a vast rotunda, and sip their coffee, during a battle of dogs, wild bears, and wolves; from whence they go to their private theaters, where great dramatic skill is frequently displayed by their slaves…. The aristocracy enjoyed Molière and Racine in these private theaters, yet the best households would also keep dwarfs and cretins on their staff for knockabout amusements.

  A prejudiced portrait, but it speaks to the complexities that Kutuzov lived out. He was also far more practiced in conspiracy and subterfuge than was Barclay, skills that a Russian army career practically demanded.

  His daughter asked the general if he hoped to defeat Napoleon. “No,” he replied. “But I hope to deceive him.” Cunning had other uses than advancement through the ranks.

  IT WAS KUTUZOV’S PERFORMANCE during the Turkish wars in 1806-12 that had made his name. The commander had received a message from his general congratulating him on taking the fortress of Ismail, which stood at the top of a steep bank on the Danube River. It was a perverse incentive; in fact, the citadel was still held by the Turks and Kutuzov’s men were exhausted and terror-struck after wave after wave of assaults had left the fortress intact, producing horrendous casualties. Instead of correcting the messenger, Kutuzov had crossed himself, muttered “God help us!” and led a final charge on the bastion. His men smashed into the enemy lines, fighting a series of brutal close-range engagements. They finally overtopped the walls and bayoneted their Muslim enemies in a show of suicidal bravado. That is the kind of man the Russian soldier would follow to the death.

  When this native paragon became their leader, the troops were, in general, overjoyed. “The day was cloudy, but our hearts filled with light,” wrote one Russian soldier, A. A. Shcherbinin. His peers were less enthusiastic. General Benningsen, Bagration’s chief of staff, called Kutuzov “old, broken, and ill.” He and other staff officers considered Kutuzov to be gifted but incorrigibly lazy (Benningsen went so far as to say that the general was “disgusted” by hard work). His victories were attributed to his officers, while he was considered passive and timid when left to his own devices. Sir Robert Wilson, the British adviser to the Russian high command, saw him as a bon vivant more interested in diplomatic solutions than in fighting battles, especially now that he was sixty-seven years old. “Shrewd as a Greek” was Wilson’s estimation, who felt the general was the wrong man to drive Napoleon back over the Niemen River. Alexander himself never wavered in his opinion of Kutuzov as “a hatcher of intrigues and an immoral and thoroughly dangerous character,” hardly a vote of confidence in the man whom he had picked to save the motherland. Still, it hardly mattered. “The evil genius of the foreigners was exorcised by a true Russian,” noted Clausewitz dryly.

  Kutuzov didn’t disappoint his followers. Immediately after receiving command on August 20 in St. Petersburg, the general told his driver to head to Our Lady of Kazan Cathedral, an imposing stone cathedral in the shape of the Latin cross, designed by Russian architects and finished just the year before. Inside the church, he took the medals and decorations from his long career from around his neck and set them in front of the cathedral’s icon, a family heirloom of the Romanovs themselves, which was believed to work miracles. Fat and out of breath, he knelt on the marble flags, closed his eyes, and prayed for victory as the candles flickered and illuminated his bowed head. Word spread quickly to the nearby neighborhoods and Russians came running to see the nation’s last hope. When he finally got up, grunting from the effort, and made his way out of the church, the crowds raised their hands in the air in supplication and solidarity and cried out “Save us! Save us!” The general wept. It was an iconic moment, and so ingrained itself in the Russian memory that the church would become a repository for mementos and captured trophies of the 1812 campaign, a fitting monument to the union of faith in God and motherland that the war represented.

  Meanwhile, things were less sanguine in Moscow. Muscovites had been cheering along the Russian troops in their imaginary victories, but once the truth about the battle of Smolensk became widely known, the citizens panicked. Wagons and carriages appeared at front doors of mansions and servants began loading trunk after trunk into them. Those without vehicles to carry them began streaming out of the city on foot. Cash was king, as merchants and noble families sold jewelry and fine furnishings at fire-sale prices, fearing that whatever remained would be burned or pillaged by the French. Paranoia blossomed, and men clustered on the streets talked darkly of plots to sell Russia out. Anyone perceived as supporting the invasion stood in danger of losing his or her life: A Russian laborer who spoke of Napoleon as a liberator was beaten and then thrown in jail. Two months earlier such sentiments had been fairly common; now they were treasonous.

  On hearing the news from Smolensk, Fyodor Rostopchin, the military governor of Moscow, was “plunged in grief.” His fourteen-year-old daughter, Natalya, recalled finding the volatile count, his head bowed, considering the fate of his city. He stared gloomily at her, then directed her to take a dispatch from Barclay to his wife. “Smolensk has fallen,” he told her. “We shall soon h
ave the enemy at the gates of Moscow.”

  The nobles led the way out of the city, fleeing to their country dachas or to relatives farther east, taking with them carts heaped with tapestries, ancestral portraits, fine furniture, and other rarities. People began to hoard food and plan escape routes in case the enemy stormed the city. Neighborhoods filled with wooden structures were abandoned as the fear of a conflagration spread, and people took refuge in stone palaces that offered a fireproof sanctuary. Men escaping the city dressed up as women to avoid the insults of residents who had sworn to stay and fight, or who had nowhere to go and were venting their rage on the lucky rich. Governor Rostopchin organized a civic rescue project, carting off the city’s icons, gold scepters, rare manuscripts, and other cultural treasures from the city’s churches, museums, and convents. The distance between the tsar’s propaganda and the reports from eyewitnesses only increased the terror. Now every wild rumor had the feel of believability.