The Illustrious Dead Read online

  A L S O BY S T E P H A N T A L T Y

  Empire of Blue Water

  Captain Morgan’s Great Pirate Army,

  the Epic Battle for the Americas,

  and the Catastrophe That Ended

  the Outlaws’ Bloody Reign

  Mulatto America

  At the Crossroads of Black and White Culture:

  A Social History

  For Asher and Delphine

  Note to the Reader

  In these pages you’ll find a handful of place-names and military terms specific to the Napoleonic era. If you’re unclear about any of these, please consult the short glossaries found at the back of this book.

  Contents

  Dramatis Personae:

  Command Structures and Coalitions

  Introduction: Old Bones

  1 Incarnate

  2 A Portable Metropolis

  3 Drumbeat

  4 Crossing

  5 Pursuit

  6 Smolensk

  7 The Sound of Flames

  8 Smoke

  9 At Borodino

  10 Clash

  11 The Hospital

  12 The Last City

  13 Decision

  14 Two Roads

  15 Graveyard Trees

  Epilogue: Rendezvous in Germany

  Author’s Note: The Doorway of the Hospital at Tunis

  Glossary

  Notes

  Sources

  Acknowledgments

  The Grande Armée

  Command Structure

  NAPOLEON

  BERTHIER

  Chief of staff

  The Russian Army

  Command Structure

  TSAR ALEXANDER I

  (Political head of Russia)

  GENERAL MIKHAIL BARCLAY DE TOLLY

  (Minister of War, acting head of army until August 20)

  FIELD MARSHAL PRINCE MIKHAIL ILARIONOVICH KUTUZOV

  (Commander in chief, appointed August 20)

  Coalitions Against France During the Napoleonic Era

  First Coalition (1792–97)

  AUSTRIA, PRUSSIA, GREAT BRITAIN, SPAIN, AND THE PIEDMONT

  Napoleon emerges from obscurity to conquer Italy. France gains Belgium, the Rhineland, a partitioned Venice, and most of Italy.

  Second Coalition (1798-1801)

  RUSSIA, GREAT BRITAIN, AUSTRIA, THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE, PORTUGAL, NAPLES, AND THE VATICAN

  Napoleon returns from Egypt to defeat the Austrians at the Battle of Marengo, France gains control of the Netherlands, and Austria accepts French domain over Italy and territories as far north as the Rhine.

  Third Coalition (1805)

  AUSTRIA, GREAT BRITAIN, RUSSIA, AND SWEDEN

  England smashes the French and Spanish fleets at Trafalgar and rules unchallenged over the waters. Napoleon triumphs at Austerlitz against Austria and Russia. The German states are organized into the Confederation of the Rhine as a redoubt around France.

  Fourth Coalition (1806–7)

  PRUSSIA, GREAT BRITAIN, SWEDEN, SAXONY, AND RUSSIA

  Napoleon crushes Prussia at the Battles of Jena and Auerstedt. The French fight the Russians to a draw at Eylau. France occupies Prussia, including Berlin. The Treaty of Tilsit gives France half of Prussia’s land as well as the Kingdom of Westphalia. The Grand Duchy of Warsaw, which includes most of modern-day Poland, is created.

  Fifth Coalition (1809)

  GREAT BRITAIN AND AUSTRIA

  Napoleon triumphs at the Battle of Wagram. Austria loses Carniola, Carinthia, and the Adriatic ports to France; Galicia to Poland; and Tyrol to Bavaria.

  Sixth Coalition (1813-14)

  GREAT BRITAIN AND RUSSIA, JOINED BY PRUSSIA, SWEDEN, AUSTRIA, AND THE GERMAN STATES

  France is driven out of Germany and the nation is occupied. Napoleon is exiled to Elba.

  Seventh Coalition (1815)

  GREAT BRITAIN, RUSSIA, PRUSSIA, SWEDEN, AUSTRIA, AND THE GERMAN STATES

  Napoleon returns from exile but is defeated at Waterloo and is exiled to St. Helena, where he dies in 1821.

  Introduction: Old Bones

  IN LITHUANIA, LATE IN THE WINTER OF 2001, CONSTRUCTION crews began clearing a piece of land in that part of the capital, Vilnius, known as Northern Town, digging trenches for phone lines and demolishing the old Soviet barracks that had stood on the land for decades. Vilnius was booming, with new money flooding in and decades of oppression under Moscow and Berlin seeming at last ready to vanish along with the last physical traces of imperialism. Real estate developers had snapped up the old troops’ quarters to be made into luxe new homes for the computer programmers and regional managers who would soon turn this forbidding collection of buildings into a sparkling hub of the new Europe.

  The work had gone smoothly until one bulldozer scraped up a layer of soil and uncovered something white underneath its blade. The operator looked down and saw bones, bones that were quite clearly human: femurs, ribs, skulls. One worker later told a reporter that the white things “wouldn’t stop coming out of the ground.” There were thousands of them.

  Word spread to nearby neighborhoods, and men and women came hurrying across the fields, their boots crunching in the hoarfrost and their breath blowing white. There had been whispers for years about this place, rumors that the KGB had used the barracks as torture chambers for political dissidents. Many believed that those who hadn’t survived the questioning had been buried in mass graves somewhere on the grounds. Eight years earlier, a grave filled with seven hundred KGB victims had been found a few hundred yards away. The local people looked down into the freshly dug hole, looking for missing lovers, sisters, or sons.

  Or perhaps these were the corpses of Jews murdered by the Nazis. Hitler’s bureaucrats had set up two ghettos in the city after occupying it in June 1941 and then slowly drained them of men, women, and children, eventually killing 95 percent of the country’s Jewish population.

  When archaeologists from the University of Vilnius arrived, they saw that the bodies had been stacked three-deep in a V-shaped trench and quickly realized that the men had been buried in the same pits they had dug to defend themselves. Clearly, the men were soldiers, not dissidents or civilians. And they were robust specimens, many of them tall and broad-shouldered, most between fifteen and twenty years old, with a few women mixed in—prostitutes was the early guess.

  As they excavated the 2,000 skeletons, the archaeologists found a plaque that had once adorned a helmet, decorated by an eagle and a cockade in faded red, blue, and white. There were curious belt buckles inscribed in several languages, buttons with regiment numbers such as “29” and “61.” And there were, crucially, 20-franc coins that dated from the early 1800s. The remains were too old to be the victims of either Stalin or Hitler.

  After quickly calling to mind the history of Vilnius, called “the city built on bones” because of its past as a minor bauble for conquerors and tyrants, the scientists realized they could only be looking at the remnants of one force: the Grande Armée. One hundred and eighty-nine years before, Napoleon had led 600,000 men into Russia in an attempt to conquer his last major opponent on the Continent. These corpses were the remnants of that invasion force.

  The dead were from every corner of Europe—Holland, Italy, Spain, Germany, Westphalia, and other duchies, kingdoms, and states. Napoleon had ruled all of them and had in 1812 been at the coruscating height of his power, leading an army unlike anything that had been seen since the days of the Persian conqueror Xerxes in the fifth century BC. The soldiers were the paragons of their time, and on their march to Moscow they had been considered unstoppable. But they had clearly encountered something beyond their power to overcome or outrun.

  What had killed these men? None of the remains had the
crushed skulls or telltale bullet holes of men who had been executed and dumped in mass graves. The bodies were curled into the fetal position, the normal human response to extreme cold, which had certainly played a part in their demise. Hunger, too, had ravaged the city in the winter of 1812. The archaeologists remembered the stories of Napoleon’s troops breaking into the local university and eating the human and animal specimens suspended in formaldehyde. Some of these men had starved to death.

  But something else had clearly been at play in that awful year. The soldiers had been physical specimens, the toughest of a gargantuan, battle-hardened army who had managed to escape the fate of their less determined or less robust comrades lying in roadside graves all the way to Moscow and back. These men were the survivors of something even more cataclysmic that had occurred many weeks earlier. In a sense, they were the lucky ones.

  The archaeologists drilled into the teeth of the corpses and extracted samples of dental pulp, placed it on slides, and slid them under microscopes. In the DNA of a number of the soldiers, they discovered the signs of the hidden killer that had done so much to bury not only the Grande Armée but also Napoleon’s hopes of world domination.

  Older than France or Europe or homo sapiens themselves, its causative agent had arisen millions of years ago. It had mystified— and slain—its scientific pursuers for centuries, complicating the race to understand and defeat it. And it had a past as fearsome as any of the mass killers of the twentieth century, only more illustrious and strange.

  C H A P T E R 1

  Incarnate

  IT WOULD BE A REMARKABLE THING TO LOOK AT A MAP OF THE world in 1811 and not be struck by how much of it was controlled by France and its forty-two-year-old leader, Napoleon Bonaparte. His writ ran from the Atlantic Ocean to the borders of Russia and from southern Spain to northern Germany. Some 45 million subjects lived under his rule. One exhausts superlatives in talking of his kingdom: He held sole command of a nation that was the richest and most powerful on earth. His empire was larger than the Roman emperors’ or Charlemagne’s, and it had every promise of expanding in the near future. And Napoleon commanded it with such rigor that no detail, down to the opening time of the opera in Paris, escaped him.

  The emperor had not only conquered territory, he had remade societies. Coming of age during the reign of Louis XVI, Napoleon and his generation grew disgusted with a nation where the accumulated layers of tradition and artifice clogged one’s path in life, and money and prestige flowed to the amoral and the cunning. They felt suffocated by the weight of the past, its irrationalities, its injustices. After taking power in France, Napoleon had streamlined the nation’s administration, rationalized its civic laws and its economy to free up long-suppressed energies, and exported these innovations to the satellite nations under his control. He’d famously declared that careers should be open to the most talented, and in many ways he’d succeeded in moving European societies toward a future where merit, brains, and hard work counted.

  When the young general took power, he was seen across much of Europe as a kind of mythological creature: half warrior, half idealist. For those with any progressive ideas whatsoever, he was the strong man who would give order and structure to the best instincts of the French Revolution. Emerging from the whirling blood feuds of the Terror, during which thousands were executed on the slightest pretext, when men ran through the streets hoisting the body parts of princesses stuck on pikes, Napoleon had saved the nation.

  Our politics today are divided between left and right, liberal and conservative. But those notions gain their heat and shape from Napoleon’s times. He came of age during the birth of those concepts: between the French Revolution’s insistence on individual dignity, rights, and freedoms, and the Anglo-American conservative response, inaugurated by Edmund Burke in his landmark Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), which stressed the value of tradition, caution, and social norms built up over time. The temperature of the early 1800s burned much hotter than that of the early 2000s: the eruption of the Revolution threatened to sweep away all accumulated notions of social place and long-held values and to leave in their place pure chaos. Rulers eyed their subjects nervously, and subjects eyed their kings with the new idea that they were hateful and unnecessary. Europe in Napoleon’s time seemed ready to fly apart.

  This goes a long way toward explaining why Napoleon aroused such intense admiration early on. Like George Washington, with whom he was often compared, he had taken a hot revolution and cooled it into a rational system without reverting to the abuses of the tyrant-kings. “Peoples of Italy!” the young general had cried after beating the Austrians there in 1796. “The French army comes to break your chains…. We shall wage war like generous enemies, for our only quarrel is with the tyrants who have enslaved you.” Words like that hadn’t been heard in Europe before the Revolution. Even some monarchists swooned, at first.

  Napoleon took power in a 1799 coup d’état, midstride in a series of wars that the French Republic claimed were fought to protect its borders and export freedom. For sixteen years he ran roughshod over opposing generals and kings. In 1797 the general had seized control of northern Italy from the Austrians. In 1800 he returned to Italy and defeated the Austrians; in 1802 he was named first consul for life; in 1804 he became emperor; in 1806 Napoleon faced the Fourth Coalition—Russia, Sweden, Great Britain, Saxony, and Prussia—and defeated them soundly; in 1807 he signed the Treaty of Tilsit with Tsar Alexander of Russia; in 1808 he invaded Spain; in 1809 he stumbled against the Austrians but stormed back with a punishing victory at Wagram.

  Napoleon’s conquest had pitted him in a battle to the death with the monarchies of Europe. But even the opponents who considered him an Antichrist saw him as an almost miraculous figure. “He wanted to put his gigantic self in the place of humankind,” wrote Madame de Staël, and even the young tsar of Russia, Alexander I, at first regarded Bonaparte with admiration bordering on a kind of worship.

  It wouldn’t last.

  THE EMPEROR’S GIFTS were numerous and mutually reinforcing: an exacting self-discipline; a memory that was close to photographic; an ability to read people and fit their unspoken desires to his aims; a gut-level genius for inspiring men and leading them in battle; an openness to new ideas so long as he could benefit from them; a farseeing, flexible, and often breathtakingly daring mind. His less appealing qualities were clear but not yet fatal: he was as superstitious as an old Corsican widow, petulant, headstrong, and, most of all, increasingly blind to the flaws in his thinking. His self-intoxication grew by the year.

  Napoleon had come to power through the military, and his career there was divided by a bright sharp line. There was before Italy and after Italy. His unexpected victories there in 1796 against the Austrian army as an obscure general had changed his idea of himself and launched him into a career where he could seemingly do anything he set his mind to.

  It hadn’t always been that way. Napoleon had emerged from his Corsican boyhood as a solitary, workaholic dreamer with immense, far-reaching gifts but a slim chance at greatness. He was also superstitious, tetchy, and prone to childish rages, a man who rated his natural abilities very highly and grew suicidal at the thought that, as an obscure gunner, he would never get the chance to realize them. But Italy changed that, confirming to him that he not only had genius but would be given a chance to display it. “From that moment, I foresaw what I might be,” he wrote later. “Already I felt the earth flee from beneath me, as if I were being carried into the sky.”

  Napoleon’s military capabilities began with a near-total knowledge of tactics used in past wars; he was a walking database on every major battle in history, and knew what had worked or failed and why. But the young Corsican also reimagined the standard tenets of military science. He constantly gathered intelligence and used it to formulate his plans. He honed his communications systems to give his divisions an edge in speed, and he specialized in flanking and enveloping maneuvers that concentrated overwhelming fi
repower on the enemy’s weakest point. Napoleon also organized his armies into independent corps that were designed to march against and defeat enemy forces three times their size, which they regularly did.

  The Grande Armée also had a technological edge, especially in the areas of infantry guns and lighter muskets. The French had long poured money into developing better big cannons that could be maneuvered into position more quickly and brought to bear on crucial zones on the battlefield. And the carbines carried by the Grande Armée’s sharpshooters, snipers, and forward skirmishers were state of the art (a relative term in relation to notoriously inaccurate muskets of the period), giving his units an advantage in marksmanship, especially in the early stages of the battle where, under the pall and roar of an artillery bombardment, Napoleon would send sharpshooters forward to take down officers and members of the first line poised for the attack.

  Napoleon’s classic approach to battle was kinetic and precise. He designed a battle as a watchmaker would a fine chronometer. One corps, usually heavily outnumbered so as to allow other units to execute the rest of Napoleon’s plan, would engage the main body of enemy troops, freezing them into position and often suffering horrible casualties. Then other divisions, in sequences timed down to the minute, would pin down the opponent from unexpected angles, isolating and cutting apart individual divisions while at the same time cloaking from view a hidden force that was marching rapidly to a weak flank or an exposed rear guard. Then, at a crucial moment, Napoleon would drop these unseen divisions into the battle, backed by cavalry and artillery, overwhelming the enemy and scattering its forces to the wind.

  To the outmatched generals who faced him, Napoleon’s armies always appeared larger than they actually were, because the emperor maneuvered them for maximum striking power on the battlefield. And they were ghostly, appearing from behind a hill or over a ridge at a time when they were supposed to be miles away.