an attack on Russia, had for months been full to bursting with troops waiting to know if it would be war or not. In his diary, Captain Roeder, the veteran Hessian soldier with a new wife back home, wrote how he was drinking in a restaurant when a passing Frenchman cried out on seeing him. They had tried to kill each other five years before at the Napoleonic Battle of Altenkirchen, when they were fighting on different sides. But the emperor’s reach was now so all-encompassing that ancient enemies marched shoulder to shoulder. The two men fell into each other’s arms.
In the noise and billowing clouds of dust and the percussive tramping of thousands of horses’ hooves, the shouts and orders in a half-dozen different languages, the men who staggered out of the ranks and collapsed by the roadside were hardly noticed. A few remarked on the bodies. No one was unduly alarmed. Napoleon was already ensconced in his richly appointed carriage, pulled by six horses and equipped with volumes of history and literature, scores of maps, a writing table, and candles for reading.
The deaths could easily be attributed to exhaustion or bad alcohol. The Grande Armée had swelled enormously beyond its core of veterans for the attack on Russia, and the new recruits weren’t as well conditioned as the survivors of Austerlitz and other campaigns. Cossacks, long distances, the Russian winter: these were the things that worried the men, if they worried at all. Supremely confident in its leader, the army bore down on its enemy.
For the sick, falling behind and watching their regiments disappear into a cloud of dust, the disease announced itself in various, even contradictory ways. Some victims felt at first a brush of giddiness; they became dizzy and light-headed with an almost pleasant sensation, as if they had taken a quick drink of schnapps after a long march. But this was often followed by “a very uncommon feeling …which is impossible to describe,” as if the pit of the stomach had dropped suddenly and the heart had stopped for a few seconds, then began vibrating instead of beating. Afterward, the symptoms could disappear for hours at a time, and the person would feel perfectly healthy and perhaps dismiss the episode as a spell of heatstroke or something equally benign. But the sickness was only gathering strength, and when it returned, as it always did, its wounding and malignant nature was impossible to miss.
A blinding headache shut the men’s eyes tight. Nausea and chills racked the entire body, soon followed by “universal pain,” body aches so excruciating, especially in the back muscles, that they could drop a man to the ground. Heat followed cold, as after three or four days a “river of fire” spread from the stomach upward across the chest and then shot along the pectoral muscles to the fingertips. The heat pulsated like a bonfire onto which fresh timber was being thrown every few hours or so; dying down, it was replaced by chills that could cause the teeth to knock together, then the river of fire would flame up again. A fever arrived and the temperature rose quickly to 105 degrees or higher (109 was recorded), where it would stay for days. Some patients grew so weak that they could barely move their head or stick out their tongue when asked by a physician. Others raved or laughed uproariously.
The army’s doctors could do little for the men. The disease was feared, but little understood. The best the physicians could offer was bleeding and folk cures such as bark or other herbs. The men were carried to hospitals along the route or put up in houses of local peasants, so filthy that they shocked even the poor French farm boys who had enlisted for adventure or a chance at an army career. In their beds, the symptoms appeared, disappeared, mutated, reversed into new areas of the body, drawing on a seemingly unlimited repertoire of agonies. Sunlight caused knifelike jabs in the eyes; “flying, wandering, or shooting
In the noise and billowing clouds of dust and the percussive tramping of thousands of horses’ hooves, the shouts and orders in a half-dozen different languages, the men who staggered out of the ranks and collapsed by the roadside were hardly noticed. A few remarked on the bodies. No one was unduly alarmed. Napoleon was already ensconced in his richly appointed carriage, pulled by six horses and equipped with volumes of history and literature, scores of maps, a writing table, and candles for reading.
The deaths could easily be attributed to exhaustion or bad alcohol. The Grande Armée had swelled enormously beyond its core of veterans for the attack on Russia, and the new recruits weren’t as well conditioned as the survivors of Austerlitz and other campaigns. Cossacks, long distances, the Russian winter: these were the things that worried the men, if they worried at all. Supremely confident in its leader, the army bore down on its enemy.
For the sick, falling behind and watching their regiments disappear into a cloud of dust, the disease announced itself in various, even contradictory ways. Some victims felt at first a brush of giddiness; they became dizzy and light-headed with an almost pleasant sensation, as if they had taken a quick drink of schnapps after a long march. But this was often followed by “a very uncommon feeling …which is impossible to describe,” as if the pit of the stomach had dropped suddenly and the heart had stopped for a few seconds, then began vibrating instead of beating. Afterward, the symptoms could disappear for hours at a time, and the person would feel perfectly healthy and perhaps dismiss the episode as a spell of heatstroke or something equally benign. But the sickness was only gathering strength, and when it returned, as it always did, its wounding and malignant nature was impossible to miss.
A blinding headache shut the men’s eyes tight. Nausea and chills racked the entire body, soon followed by “universal pain,” body aches so excruciating, especially in the back muscles, that they could drop a man to the ground. Heat followed cold, as after three or four days a “river of fire” spread from the stomach upward across the chest and then shot along the pectoral muscles to the fingertips. The heat pulsated like a bonfire onto which fresh timber was being thrown every few hours or so; dying down, it was replaced by chills that could cause the teeth to knock together, then the river of fire would flame up again. A fever arrived and the temperature rose quickly to 105 degrees or higher (109 was recorded), where it would stay for days. Some patients grew so weak that they could barely move their head or stick out their tongue when asked by a physician. Others raved or laughed uproariously.
The army’s doctors could do little for the men. The disease was feared, but little understood. The best the physicians could offer was bleeding and folk cures such as bark or other herbs. The men were carried to hospitals along the route or put up in houses of local peasants, so filthy that they shocked even the poor French farm boys who had enlisted for adventure or a chance at an army career. In their beds, the symptoms appeared, disappeared, mutated, reversed into new areas of the body, drawing on a seemingly unlimited repertoire of agonies. Sunlight caused knifelike jabs in the eyes; “flying, wandering, or shooting
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