The Illustrious Dead (10 page)

Were sentiments such as these fictions designed to shovel lower-class youths into the ranks of imperialistic armies? Certainly. Were men more expendable in the early 1800s, before the notion of individual rights and equality had fully taken hold? Yes. But much of the reverence for a courageous death was given freely by the men themselves. The notion that to die well was worthy of the highest effort was as palpable to the soldiers at Smolensk as it was to the Spartans over two thousand years before.

An aide watching Napoleon hand out medals thought he didn’t do it in the old, hearty way, but out of an “imperative need … to react against melancholy thoughts.” And away from the men, the emperor alternated between rage and depression. “Junot has let them escape,” Napoleon screamed at his advisers. “He is losing the campaign for me.” The inscrutable Junot would grow increasingly unstable and—some say haunted by his failure at Smolensk— would die a suicide a year later.

The strategist Clausewitz points to the failure to surround Barclay at Smolensk as Napoleon’s greatest error in the campaign. It meant that everything would now escalate rapidly: the length of the supply and communication lines; the distance his reinforcements back in Germany had to travel; and, especially, the number of sick. The war before Smolensk was almost reasonable; it resembled other campaigns Napoleon had fought. Had the Russians stood and fought, Napoleon’s strategy could have worked. After Smolensk, his approach became increasingly incoherent.

Napoleon’s troop totals were being reworked by another number: the mortality rate of epidemic typhus. “The terrible deprivations,” wrote Chamrey, a doctor on the Russian campaign, “the excessive heat, and the terrible smell from dead bodies everywhere around Smolensk causes an infectious disease which kills more men in a short time than the wounds of battle.”

A
LEXANDER CELEBRATED
S
MOLENSK
as a great victory and ordered a Te Deum to be sung at a cathedral in St. Petersburg. Rumors spread through Moscow that the French had lost 30,000 men, including 13,000 taken prisoner. The idea of a despotic invader repulsed by a heroic resistance was increasingly effective, as the French troops could attest, since they were encountering increasingly bitter and violent peasants in their marches. Napoleon was disgusted. “They lie to God as well as to men,” he remarked. Post-Smolensk, a note of panic crept into a Napoleon communiqué. He dashed off a set of orders to his chief of staff Berthier, blaming the loss of men on problems with the supply line. He wasn’t only worried, he was misinformed:

Write to the generals in command of army corps, and tell them that we are losing numbers of men every day, owing to the disorderly way in which foraging is conducted; that it is urgent that they should concert measures with the various corps commanders for ending a state of things which threatens to be fatal to the army…. You must write to the King of Naples [Murat] …that it is indispensable for the cavalry to give adequate protection to foragers and to secure the detachments on this duty from the attacks of Cossacks and enemy cavalry…. Finally you must inform the Duke of Elchingen [Ney] that he is losing more men in a day than if a battle was in progress.

Cossacks and villagers were certainly attacking foraging parties, but the main body of Russian troops was in full retreat and in no position to mount operations. These minor skirmishes were in no way as lethal to his men as sickness was, and one wonders at his information, or his interpretation of it. First Larrey had blamed rotten cognac. Now Napoleon blamed marauders, who were certainly killing his soldiers but not in the massive numbers that were actually being lost. Miscommunication was masking the real problem. The most virulent source of the unfolding tragedy was cloaked, invisible to the eyes of the army’s leaders.

The misdiagnosis was potentially significant. Mistakes in the foragers’ protection could be corrected: more squads sent out and discipline enforced on the distribution of the provisions. But an epidemic of typhus couldn’t be stopped by his medical authorities. Other armies in the past faced with the pathogen had retired from the field whenever possible and taken up the campaign when the epidemic had passed. Had Napoleon known (or acknowledged to himself) the true reason for the astonishing casualty rate, he might have considered a winter rest in Smolensk.

Considered and then probably plunged ahead anyway. There is little in Napoleon’s record to indicate he would have interrupted the invasion and then resumed the campaign the next year. Allowing disease to stop a campaign would have been particularly galling to him, as the experience of Egypt showed. To the emperor, it would have been succumbing to an unforgivable weakness. But, in Haiti when yellow fever had proved too lethal for his army, he withdrew and then promptly sold off the Louisiana Territory, believing it to be infected with the same microbe. And he did seriously consider the wintering option along the road to Moscow, a move Caulaincourt and others backed. A correct estimation of typhus’s rising strength would have certainly argued against a long march (228 miles as the crow flies, 310 miles by road) to Moscow.

Napoleon again hesitated in his pursuit of Barclay, telling Caulaincourt that he would rest the army at Smolensk, firm up his supply and communication lines, bring the reserve units stationed back at the Dvina River under his own command, and raise additional regiments in Poland. In the spring, his army would be even more formidable and he could choose between taking Moscow or St. Petersburg as a prelude to negotiations. Caulaincourt, his former Russian ambassador, who should have known better than to believe in the emperor’s cautious mood, was ecstatic. He told Napoleon that in stopping at Smolensk, he was refusing to play Alexander’s game of drawing the French into the interior and letting the climate and the distance eat up his battalions.

A captured Russian officer was sent back to the enemy lines with a message for the tsar: Napoleon desired peace. As grateful as he was for the repatriation, the officer still gave the emperor the thoroughly unwelcome opinion that he doubted there would be a treaty with the French still occupying Russia. Once the messenger was sent off, the by now supremely irritable Napoleon began to waver. Smolensk hadn’t changed anything in the strategic situation. The thousands of Russian dead would be replaced tenfold if he gave Alexander months to recover, and the tsar would very likely receive additional regiments from Moldavia and Finland. England could supply money and material to his enemy. The domestic situation back in Paris would grow more precarious without his presence, and the fragile chain of riders carrying his bulletins and orders to his ministers back home, so vital to a commander away from his seat of power, would become even more vulnerable.

Added to that, the infamous winter was only a matter of months away, and there were disturbing reports of Russian victories in the field. Throughout the advance, General Wittgenstein and his corps had been kept as an independent force able to attack the advancing Napoleon from the north, opening a second front. Napoleon had used his Bavarian corps to shield himself from those divisions. Now Wittgenstein and Count Alexander Tormasov had proved sharp adversaries in skirmishes and were toting up victories that worried the emperor.

Nevertheless, Napoleon snapped at anyone who spoke of retreating; when his long-suffering chief of staff, Berthier, mentioned the risks of advancing to Moscow, Napoleon lashed out, “Go back to France, I do not force anyone.” The emperor grasped at any news that indicated that a quick end to the nightmare was at hand. When Murat reported that the Russians were conducting a disciplined retreat, instead of a pell-mell rush, and even stated that Barclay was already preparing fortifications at a site only a day’s march away, he brightened. But the dashing Murat, eager for a fight, was as fanciful as his emperor. There were no fortifications. Still, Napoleon took the news to mean that Alexander was only searching for a more favorable spot for a climactic battle. “Once more the gauntlet was thrown down,” wrote Caulaincourt. “And the emperor was not the man to turn back.” Besides, the small momentum gained by Wittgenstein and Tormasov was reversed when the French dealt them quick defeats in the field. The emperor turned to the Russian lieutenant-general Nikolai Tuchkov, who had been captured after Smolensk, and asked him to write a letter to the tsar offering peace at almost any price. The letter went unanswered.

After wavering for days, Napoleon decided for Moscow. “The wine has been poured,” he told his marshals. “It must now be drunk.” The epigram was one of the fatalistic sayings he favored after having made a decision. It was as if he had exhausted his powers and now gave himself over to destiny. His reasoning mixed in fantasy with reckless optimism. “We have gone too far to turn back. Peace is in front of us; we are but ten days’ march from it. So near the goal, there is nothing more to consider. Let us march on Moscow!”

He left Smolensk on August 25, rushing his troops out at one in the morning, as if the morning light might cause him to reconsider. Caulaincourt was drained. “Once again we set off in pursuit of the glory, or rather the fatality,” he wrote, “which relentlessly prevented the Emperor from holding to his good intentions.” Leaving the city, his army was down to 149,000 men, less than a third of his original front line force. “The two armies converged toward the point of equalization,” wrote the German tactician Clausewitz. Napoleon’s bludgeon was gone, taken away by pathogens and hard Russian fighting.

I
F
N
APOLEON HAD NEVER
encountered an opponent quite like typhus, the opposite was also true. Many leaders would have looked at their losses at this point in the campaign and called the retreat. It was the only reasonable decision. The contest with Napoleon was different from almost any other the disease had found itself in during its long history. Other armies, such as those under King Francis, had almost all disintegrated or retired from the field in the face of the pathogen. It was a tribute to the hold that Napoleon had on his men that despite the ravages of typhus, the Grande Armée not only fought on but remained the aggressor.

It would be overstating the case to say a microbe revealed the emperor’s innermost drives. But the disease did expose how fanatical was Napoleon’s devotion to his mission, to his own glorification through conquest. Without typhus, his losses would have been acceptable, in line with past wars, and his army would have been in no real danger of vanishing. With it, he was being tested in a new, macabre fashion. Would he really sacrifice an entire army larger than the population of Paris to a sense of his own rightful destiny?

The emperor marched on.

C  H  A  P  T  E  R     8

Smoke

A
N AUTOPSY CONDUCTED ON A TYPHUS VICTIM IN THE LATE
1700s found the disease’s work everywhere: “… the blood vessels, turgid to an extraordinary degree, give an appearance of commencing gangrene …[and] are found to contain little or no red blood, the ventricles and all of the interstices are full of water, and the whole substance appears pale, and as if it were macerated [softened by immersion in a liquid]. The lungs …appear to be suffocated or oppressed, resembling a sponge filled with black blood; they also appear in some cases to be irregularly inflamed …spotted in the back parts.” The disease had run rampant through the vascular system, imploding the body’s delivery systems as it went.

The doctors of the Grande Armée had no time to perform autopsies on the thousands of men lying all the way back to Poland. But beneath their blue tunics and their mottled skin, the same damage would have been evident. Typhus (from the Greek word
typhos
, meaning “smoke” or “stupor”) was a highly consistent killer.

A
S THE DISEASE
appears center stage in the invasion, it warrants a deeper biography. To call the disease ancient is to insult its pedigree. “Ancient” in epidemiological terms summons up images of the Black Death of the 1340s or the Plague of Athens in 430 BC (a devastating epidemic for which typhus remains a suspect, though recent studies have favored typhoid fever, a different disease, as the culprit). The microbe that causes typhus—called
Rickettsia prowazekii—
is older than our understanding of disease allows. When it was born, the Europe that Napoleon had conquered didn’t exist as a landmass. To get a fix on its origins, one must think in terms of geological epochs.

Two billion years ago, the earth was cooling after its violent birth. Radioactive material had sunk and compressed to form the earth’s heavy core, along with vast deposits of iron oxide, leaving only traces that would be mined to make the Grande Armée’s muskets. Lighter material moved outward, forming layers of crust and mantle. Gases, in particular nitrogen and carbon dioxide, spewed from the hot core through the volcanoes that pocked the planet’s surface. The water vapor that had most likely arrived in our atmosphere from comets that smashed into the planet hung above its surface, before condensing and falling to earth, forming the oceans. Cratons, the protocontinents that would merge and then split into the landmasses we know today as Asia, Africa, and so on, had begun rooting themselves into the deep mantle. And the earliest forms of life were spilling out near the deep oceanic vents.

Among them was a simple organism that would give us a pair of intriguing offspring. Scientists haven’t yet identified this bacteria-like creature, but researchers know it existed because of its descendants. Sometime in the Proterozoic era, this microbe produced both the organelle known as the mitochondrion and the ancestor of the microbe we now call
Rickettsia prowazekii.
In terms of their effect on humankind, two more different progeny could hardly be imagined.

Mitochondria are often called the engines of cellular life; they use oxygen to produce the chemical energy called ATP (adenosine triphosphate), which allows cells to transfer energy during photosynthesis and cellular respiration. Without mitochondria, there would be no plant or animal life.

The other descendant of the mysterious organism was the tiny rod-shaped organism that causes epidemic typhus in humans.
Rickettsia
denotes the microbe’s genus, placing it in the bacteria family in the planet’s taxonomy; the name derives from the American pathologist Howard T. Ricketts, who studied—and succumbed to—typhus in 1910.
Prowazekii
pays tribute to the researcher Stanislaus von Prowazek, an Austrian bacteriologist who also died of typhus in 1915 while trying to unlock its secrets. The fact that the cellular power plant that generates life shares a common ancestor with the pathogen that has killed millions of humans points up how closely life and death are intertwined both in evolutionary history and in cellular biology.

Over time,
Rickettsia
came to rely on the host cells it invaded for most of the metabolic machinery necessary for life. The first scientists to look at its genome found it resembled “a molecular theater of war, with dead genes strewn among the living,” full of “junk” (or noncoding) genes that had slowly atrophied as the
Rickettsia
came to depend on its cellular victim. Twenty-four percent of the microbe’s genome consists of genes abandoned in favor of the host’s DNA, the largest percentage found in any microbial genome to date. This is called “reductive evolution,” and
Rickettsia
is one of its past masters.

Looking at the rickettsial genome, one of the most compact (meaning containing the fewest bits of DNA) known to science, one catches one’s breath. Here is a predator millions of years in the making. Before our ancestors were using fire or learning to hunt, the organism had become a conqueror, not killing its prey, but invading and feeding off it.
Rickettsia
shaped itself to function
only
as a hunter; and not only a hunter, but a hunter that had to study and mimic life in order to live. The creatures it would inhabit in modern times were countless mutations away from being born, so the pathogen would have to survive almost the entire span of Darwinian evolution even to have a chance of altering history beginning that day in 1812.

To look at it alongside its evolutionary cousin the mitochondrion, one may be forgiven for anthropomorphizing the two and thinking of Cain and Abel. One “father” who ushered two progeny into a new world, two very different fates for humans coded in their genes.

T
HE FINAL TEST
of a pathogen’s power is the ability to go epidemic: to infect large numbers of humans in short, intense spurts, where it radiates from a small initial infection to spread its life force over an entire city, continent, or planet. Only a handful of diseases have achieved this capability: influenza, plague, and smallpox are among them. To go epidemic, typhus would need an effective vector: it couldn’t “jump” from human to human by itself, and so it needed an agent to transport its genome.

It found its final vector in
Pediculus hutnanus corporis
, the six-legged common body louse. By choosing it,
Rickettsia
found a nearly universalized transport system. The mosquito that carried the yellow fever pathogen could only infect in its limited habitat. The rat, which transported bubonic plague, and the louse, which carried typhus, were despised but accepted presences in almost every human society, although the latter could travel places (such as the Arctic) where even the rat couldn’t survive. The tiny parasite was so common that it was practically invisible, and so made a perfect agent for
Rickettsia’s
spread.

Lice have been with humankind from our earliest history. In Exodus 8:16-19, when Moses threatens Pharaoh should he refuse to free the Jewish people, the parasites are the third plague unleashed on the Egyptians:

And the Lord said unto Moses, say unto Aaron, Stretch out thy rod, and smite the dust of the land, that it may become lice throughout all the land of Egypt.

And they did so; for Aaron stretched out his hand with his rod, and smote the dust of the earth, and it became lice in man, and in beast; all the dust of the land became lice throughout all the land of Egypt.

As repellent as the louse is, it is a miracle of perfect adaptation; it will starve to death before feeding on an unfamiliar host. Even its dislike of heat worked in
Rickettsia’s
favor. A rise of four or five degrees can be fatal to the louse, so when a patient infected with typhus runs a fever, lice move away from layers of clothing closest to the hot skin or migrate to men and women with cooler body temperatures. This exports
Rickettsia
to a fresh supply of carriers, a process that is repeated until all available human hosts are exhausted. The parasite even camouflages itself in the appropriate hue for world travel: the body louse in Africa is black, the North American Indian is bronzed, the Eskimo is a pale brown, and the European is gray-white. No other pest is as symbolic of humankind’s dominion over the world as this infinitely adaptable creature.

The louse isn’t a reservoir for
Rickettsia
, as the microbe is inevitably fatal to it. Lice become infected after feeding on a sick human, turn bright red, and then expire about five days later.
Rickettsia
thus has only 120 hours to transmit to humans or to another louse, but the fact that nineteenth-century humans often carried thousands of lice in their clothes, and only one infected one is needed to pass the pathogen on, made them highly effective carriers.

R
ICKETTSIA PROWAZEKII LIVES
in the cytoplasm of the louse, the semitransparent fluid outside a cell’s nucleus. Specifically, the microbe found a home in the epithelium that lines the stomach. Transmission to humans occurs in two ways. The first is through the louse feces, which can penetrate the skin, through an open wound. Or it can enter through scratching: when the louse bites (as a blood eater, it must feed several times a day) and the victim scrapes the skin, the infected contents of the louse’s system spill out and are rubbed into the open wound, pouring
Rickettsia prowazekii
into the bloodstream.

Once it enters the human bloodstream,
Rickettsia
incubates for four to fifteen days, churning out millions of copies of its DNA, replicating and then invading the endothelial cells that line the veins and capillaries through the entire body, in the same way the microbe parasitized its original one-celled hosts. The host cells swell with the infection, fluid leaks out, and the blood vessels begin to spill their contents into the surrounding tissue. In the brain, the attack often leads to encephalitis, which results in the swelling of the brain and causes excruciating headache, as well as stranger effects. “These thunders, sudden noises; these eclipses,” wrote the poet John Donne, who barely survived a bout of the illness in 1623, “this darkening of the senses; these blazing stars, sudden fiery exhalations; these rivers of blood.” As the swelling and inflammation of blood vessels in the brain continue, typhus can induce hallucinations, stupor, and, finally, a deep coma. The blood pressure drops, as the ravaged veins can no longer carry the same volume of nourishment to the organs.

The decreased oxygen carried by the blood turns the face dusky. The massive infection of the blood vessels and arterioles in the hands and feet causes them to blacken and rot with gangrene. The tiny spots that are the most famous of typhus’s symptoms are the outward markers of the vascular damage that riddles the patient’s interior.

Death can come in different ways:
Rickettsia
devastates the small blood vessels of the lungs, filling air pockets with fluid, and the patient dies of rickettsial pneumonia, his blood starved of oxygen. Or the comatose patient loses his gag reflex, allowing saliva filled with deadly bacteria to flow into the lungs, triggering pneumonia. The sieve-like veins left after a rickettsial attack can lose so much blood volume that the patient goes into hypotensive shock: the tissues and organs can’t get enough of the nourishing plasma and shut down. Comatose patients left unattended can simply die of dehydration. Or the heart, trying to pump blood through vessels that are perforated by a million holes, simply exhausts itself and fails.

A
S A PATHOGEN
,
Rickettsia
was attracted to great events: wars, migrations, and famines (due to the masses of people forced out of their homes in a search for food, giving infected lice a chance to spread). Throughout human history, it had a hundred faces and names reflecting the conditions during which it attacked. “Ship fever” attacked the men crowded onto unsanitary boats, and “jail fever” devastated prisons and courtrooms. “Hunger fever” struck when the crops failed; more Irish would die of typhus than of starvation during the Great Famine in 1845-49, earning the disease another name, “the Irish ague.”

It was in the Middle Ages that typhus arrived in Europe. Recent evidence points toward the New World as the source: For decades, scientists had believed that the explorers carried the louse and
Rickettsia
to the Americas. But the discovery of lice in 1,000-year-old mummies recently found in Peru reverses that migration; typhus was most likely not the explorers’ curse on the New World. Instead, it was America’s revenge on the Old World.

There had been possible sightings of the disease, especially a description of an outbreak of a mysterious illness in 1083 in the Spanish monastery of La Cava. “There spread a severe fever with peticuli and parotid swellings,” wrote a chronicler of the epidemic, remarking that the disease was “clearly different from the Pest,” or plague. During the Middle Ages, typhus most likely lurked in the background of more-famous illnesses, contributing its power to epidemics led by plague and other diseases. It was often unrecognized as a separate illness and classed instead with other “pestilential fevers” that seeded the length and breadth of Europe.