The Illustrious Dead

by Stephan Talty

  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

  Word 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, th
e 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.

  Napoleon lost 46,000 men at Leipzig in a horrendous defeat and retreated across the Rhine with only a rump force of 40,000. Paris fell on March 31, 1814, and six days later Napoleon abdicated the throne, which was returned to the Bourbons in the form of the gout-afflicted, thoroughly unimpressive Louis XVIII. The disgraced Corsican was sent into exile on Elba. His 1815 return to power ended on June 18 at Waterloo, where he was defeated by the Duke of Wellington in his long-sought confrontation with the British, and he was again exiled, this time to St. Helena.

  His last days were spent in sickness. His aide recalled the former emperor, weak and feverish, days before his death:

  Tears came into my eyes when I saw this man—who had been so feared, who had so proudly commanded, so absolutely—beg for a spoonful of coffee, ask for permission to have it…. At present, he was as docile as a little child.

  Despite several rescue efforts, including one launched from Texas, Napoleon died on May 5, 1821, most likely from stomach cancer. On St. Helena, the emperor had been working on his memoirs, but he hadn’t yet reached the year 1812.

  WHAT IF THE CAMPAIGN of 1812 had been typhus-free? If Napoleon had utterly destroyed the Russians at Borodino and Alexander had capitulated?

  The consequences would have radiated out through time and territory. Napoleon would have marched back to Paris at the head of a triumphant army of several hundred thousand men. Russia would have been neutralized as a threat for a number of years and his Continental enemies—Prussia, Portugal, Spain—would have been cowed into submission. There would have been no Sixth Coalition to face him in 1813 and Napoleon’s grip over Europe would have been firm.

  On his return to Paris, Napoleon’s attention would have turned to the rebellion in Spain and to his ultimate nemesis: England. Certainly his ego would have expanded to gargantuan dimensions and ambitious plans would have consumed him. Eventually, a showdown with England was inevitable, but Napoleon would have been in far better shape than he was at Waterloo, a battle he should have won. He could conceivably have finally defeated his nemesis and marched into London, utterly changing the face of nineteenth-century world affairs.

  No doubt, he wouldn’t have stopped there. In 1813, Napoleon had eight more years to live and with England and Russia in his grasp—two nettlesome captives, to be sure—he would have looked west and east for new conquests. An expedition to India would not have been out of the question, nor would an invasion of South America. Napoleon’s claim that he wanted nothing more than to sit peacefully at Versailles and administer his existing empire peacefully should not be taken seriously.

  Hubris and self-willed blindness played a huge part in Napoleon’s debacle in Russia, and it’s possible that they could have led him into fresh disasters. The English occupation would have made the Spanish one seem tame. German nationalism would have bubbled
to the surface, and Prussia would not have stayed quiet forever. The emperor would have had a contentious eight years, but there’s little doubt that, with his major enemies vanquished, Napoleon would have reshaped European history in his remaining time.

  As for Russia, a defeat would have spooled out a rich carpet of new patterns and shapes. If Alexander had signed a treaty with Napoleon, he could very well have been overthrown, either in a coup led by members of the aristocracy and military elite, or—the cataclysmic option—in a true peasant uprising. With his military in disarray, the tsar would have been powerless to prevent it and he would most likely have suffered the same fate as his hated father. The freeing of the serfs and the toppling of the imperial system could have arrived a hundred years before they finally did, and Lenin and Stalin could have been born into a nation already transformed by revolution from below.

  This is pure speculation, a few possible outcomes among hundreds that could have proceeded from a typhus-free invasion of Russia. Napoleon’s all-in approach to the campaign made it a high-stakes historical moment, and guaranteed that the results of the war would unroll for decades. But there is no question that the emperor’s defeat altered history in a thousand ways. And so there can be no doubt that Rickettsia, in helping to achieve it, shaped our modern world.

  THE EPIDEMIOLOGICAL LEGACY of the Russian campaign resonated for years. As the army had swept through Lithuania and Russia, it had acted both as fresh material for the spread of typhus and as a conduit, a multiplier, spreading the disease to previously uninfected hamlets and cities along the way. The civilian epidemic began in the summer of 1812, and by the time Napoleon turned and began his retreat, it was advancing through populations near the French route. Russians would bury or incinerate 243,612 corpses during the early part of 1813.