Free The Illustrious Dead by Stephan Talty Page B

officers to be sick. The true figure was probably double this.” Clausewitz, on the Russian side, was also hearing disturbing reports about the French forces. “The French, in the first weeks of their march,” he wrote, “had undergone an enormous loss in sick and stragglers, and were in a state of privation which gave early warning of their rapid consumption.” The Bavarian soldiers of VI Corps, to choose one element of Napoleon’s forces, were hit hard: one colonel reported a “terrible epidemic” had swept through their ranks, infecting almost every last recruit and killing thousands.
    When the normally imperturbable Marshal Ney of III Corps reviewed his infantry, which had yet to fire a shot, he was shocked to find that half the effective troops had vanished. Sir Robert Wilson, a British soldier of fortune who had been expelled from Russia for spying, only to return to fight against Napoleon in the 1812 invasion, wrote that in late June, the Grande Armée “was already stricken with a calamity which seemed to be a prelude to its future catastrophe.” He estimated that 30,000 men had already fallen out of their ranks after “numbers fell sick.” Nor was this a matter of leaving garrisons along the route they had passed, as the French had “scarcely made” any such arrangements.
    Soon after crossing the Niemen, the Belgian surgeon de Kerckhove reported that a crowd of soldiers had separated from their regiments and, unable to keep up with the blistering pace, “dragged themselves behind” the main group. By Vilna, nunneries and churches were converted into makeshift hospitals, without bedding or adequate supplies or basic provisions. Napoleon was losing 4,000 to 6,000 soldiers a day, and 30,000 sick packed every inch of space in the converted sick houses, which were really staging grounds for fresh infection. Another 30,000 men (and possibly many more) had deserted the ranks.
    Based on journals of the army doctors, memoirs of the soldiers themselves, and epidemiologists’ subsequent analysis of the campaign, the Grande Armée was clearly under attack from a host of pathogens. By July it had become a vast petri dish in which microbes competed for supremacy. Pleurisy, jaundice, diarrhea, hepatitis, enteritis, and other ailments all preyed on the tired, hungry men. But it was dysentery and “nerve fever” (fièvre nerveuse) , as typhus was often called by the French doctors, that rose to epidemic conditions during the summer. “Under these circumstances,” wrote one lieutenant, H. A. Vossler of the Würrtemburg Chasseurs, “it wasn’t surprising that within two or three days of crossing the Niemen the army and in particular the infantry was being ravaged by a variety of diseases, chief among them dysentery, ague, and typhus.”
    Dysentery ruled for the first weeks, with 80,000 sick by the beginning of August. The bloody diarrhea that the men suffered from was causing “the most horrible infection in our hospitals,” as the men were packed so closely together, with little available cloth to wash them or keep them clean. Epidemic dysentery is caused by a bacterium, Shigella dysenteriae type 1, which enters the system through contaminated food or via contact with an infected person. Its telltale symptom is bloody diarrhea, with rectal pain, fever, and abdominal cramps also frequently present. But even at its deadliest, dysentery most often has a mortality rate of 5 to 15 percent (although recent outbreaks in Africa have found that raised to 30 to 40 percent), which doesn’t match up with the huge numbers of sick who were dying on the march. And one of the most common symptoms mentioned in diaries and memoirs of soldiers on the road to Moscow—extreme exhaustion and stupor—is not common to the illness.
    Dysentery certainly killed men early on. Johannes von Scherer, a surgeon with the Württemberg regiments, would later write his doctorate on the 1812 campaign and included details of the diseases racking