Free The Illustrious Dead by Stephan Talty

many decades, and further breakthroughs in the areas of disease theory, to change history.
    In 1812, his theory was one among many. If Lind had found success with strict hygiene and quarantine, Dr. Larrey could point to his colleagues’ work that produced results through other methods (although he himself was not averse to keeping patients clean and their clothing disinfected). Standard practices for avoiding and treating diseases did exist, but they were far less ironclad than they are today, and a doctor was free to pick and choose among them. Medicine was still a bespoke pursuit, still decades away from being a true science.
    And even if Larrey, convinced that the Englishman was right, had come to Napoleon with a plan for defeating contagious diseases—which would have slowed the Grande Armée down and required a huge infrastructure and an infusion of money—he would have been dismissed out of hand. A century later the Russian army, knowing the cause of typhus, would be unable to stop it during World War I. Lind’s protocols were far easier to implement in a fleet of ships than in a massive, multinational army.
    So the pathogen that the English surgeon had successfully revealed and defeated was free to strike again.
    A ND NOW SOMETHING never noted by Dr. Lind was happening within the army. The massing of an unprecedented number of troops meant that typhus suddenly had an almost unlimited selection of potential hosts, and an easy way to infect them. The disease was spreading fast and becoming deadlier by the week.
    After millions of years, the fatal mechanism had found its most efficient form, its ideal expression.

C  H  A  P  T  E  R     5
    Pursuit
    W HEN THE ARMY CROSSED THE N IEMEN ON J UNE 24,1812, a shocked Alexander wrote Napoleon a hurried note as he scrambled to retreat. The tsar had been preparing for the possibility of war but still couldn’t quite believe Napoleon had initiated it. His note offered a solution: If the French turned around and retired behind the Niemen, the two sides would settle their problem amicably. “Alexander is laughing at me,” Napoleon said, astonished at the apparent mock-naïveté of the letter.
    The Grande Armée swept east. X Corps headed northeast to confront General Barclay, the German-speaking commander of all the tsar’s forces, while V and VII Corps, at the southernmost tip of Napoleon’s lines, moved east toward the Berezina River, chasing the Russian divisions under General Peter Wittgenstein, which were now in full retreat. Napoleon and the main body of troops headed for Vilna (modern-day Vilnius), where Alexander had attended a ball among the fountains and cultivated gardens of a country estate. The emperor arrived there on June 28 and found signs that the Russians had prepared to defend the city but then had left hastily, burning the bridge over the Vilia River as they retreated. The bridge was the first tangible evidence of Alexander’s evolving strategy of retreat-and-lay-waste, the first sign of total war. But Napoleon believed the withdrawal could be the prelude to a counterattack that would give him a chance at a quick, decisive victory. He had much to learn about the young campaign.

    The timing of the invasion had come as a surprise to Alexander, and his forces were too widely dispersed to mount a serious defense. Nor did he have accurate information on the numbers or positions of Napoleon’s forces. The analytical General Barclay, knowing that he would be annihilated if he attempted to stand and fight, ordered the hotheaded General Bagration in the south to fall back and avoid contact with the French, already causing friction with his rival. Napoleon’s forward units managed brief encounters with the fleeing troops, but anything resembling a decisive battle evaded Napoleon in the first weeks of the campaign.
    Alexander, whose words to his people during the campaign were consistently more effective and rousing than the French emperor’s,