Study shows Napoleon's army was ravaged by lice

[Felix the Cat]

Study shows Napoleon's army was ravaged by lice (http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/study-shows-napoleons-army-was-ravaged-by-lice/2006/01/04/1136050476832.html)

The history books say that after reaching Moscow in 1812, Napoleon's army was laid low by the Russian winter and then finished off by hunger, battle wounds and low morale as it straggled back to France.

The truth, say scientists, is more intriguing but rather less poetic: the biggest destroyer of the Grande Armee was Pediculus humanus - the human louse.

A team led by Didier Raoult of France's National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) examined the remains of Napoleon's soldiers who had been buried in a mass grave in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, 800km west of Moscow.

Samples of earth, cloth and teeth recovered from the site suggest that more than 30 per cent of these troops were killed by bacterial fever transmitted by lice.

The parasites caused relapsing fever, through the bacterium Borrelia recurrentis; trench fever, a condition well known in the Western Front of World War I, caused by the germ Bartonella quintana; and typhus, caused by the Rickettsia prowazeki bacterium.

The evidence comes from remains of the fleas that were found in the common grave and in the soldiers' uniforms, and from the presence of Bartonella quintana in some of the fleas themselves.

In addition, seven teeth, among 35 that were examined, were found to have Bartonella quintana in the dental pulp while Rickettsia prowazeki was found in three other teeth.

The unusual research is found in the January issue of Journal of Infectious Diseases.

The mass grave, discovered in 2001, contains the remains of hundreds of fleeing Napoleonic soldiers.

[Sinclair]

This is NEWS? I thought that it was generally accepted that typhus and so on were really common among armies for a long time...

[Felix the Cat]

This mass grave is interesting. Many, many soldiers died in Vilnius during the retreat from Russia

Napoleon's Lost Army: The Soldiers Who Fell (http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/archaeology/napoleon_army_print.html)

The discovery of a grave

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/archaeology/images/napoleon_map.gif

***

The snow came down, men froze, and horses starved. The last lap of the almost two-month trek back to Vilnius, was the worst of all. The soldiers barely managed the crossing of the Berezina River - over two frail bridges - and there were perhaps as only as few as 50,000 half-stunned survivors of the Grand Army who, harried by Cossacks, tottered on through icy temperatures towards the town. Man after man 'did a bear', tumbling with his haggard face downwards into a snow-filled ditch, never to rise again.

On the icy morning of 9 December 1812, outside Vilnius's deep vaulted gate, Victor Dupuy (now a colonel) had to be prevented by his few surviving comrades from sitting down and dying, 'overcome by lassitude and drowsiness, gripped by the frost'. Another (Belgian) officer, Francois Dumonceau, had to lead his horse over:

'a veritable moving mountain, more than 2 metres deep, of dead and dying, pushing, shoving, hemmed in on all sides, at each step risking being thrown down by the convulsive spasms of those we were trampling underfoot.'

Some of these unfortunates certainly ended up in the mass grave discovered in 2002. And there are sure to be other graves, too, as yet undiscovered. Probably as many as a half of the starving survivors who had managed to reach Vilnius died once they got there. They may have over-eaten, in their desperation to assuage their hunger, or drunk themselves silly. Many had frost-bitten noses, toes or fingers, which turned gangrenous. Some died of exhaustion or cold almost on arrival. As for lodgings, 'the stronger drove out the weaker', so that many a soldier, especially those with no Moscow gold to pay with, froze to death on an inhospitable doorstep.

Others again simply refused to go on, or were captured by the Cossacks - who had harried them throughout their retreat, and had starved the army to death by keeping it to one narrow highway. The prisoners were driven naked all the way back again into Russia.

Harrowing defeat

Although Vilnius's 17 typhus-ridden monasteries had already been turned into makeshift hospitals, they lacked food or medicines, and many thousands of men died in them. On entering one such monastery-hospital, General Sir Robert Wilson (Britain's emissary to the Tsar), who had arrived in Vilnius with the Russians, saw thousands of bodies 'strewed [sic] about in every part... all the broken windows and walls were stuffed with feet, legs, arms, hands ...to fit the apertures, and keep out the air from the yet living.'

In another account, Count Rochechouart, a French aristocrat in the Tsar's service, tells how he did his best to stop Russian soldiers flinging the 'yet living' out of upstairs windows to make room for their own wounded. And yet another description comes from the German writer Ernst Moritz Arndt, who arrived in January 1813 to see the frozen corpses piled up three-storeys high, and to hear them 'rattling' in the streets as sleighs went about collecting them.

Some he saw 'flung into the Vilia river' to float down to the Niemen and out into the Baltic where, he said, 'they'll make a meagre diet for the fishes.' Meanwhile, the glamorous French cavalry leader 'King' Joachim Murat (Napoleon's brother-in-law whom he had made King of Naples) was left in command at Vilnius. He, however, simply panicked and fled, declaring 'I'm not going to be trapped in this piss-pot'.

Aftermath

The stunned, frozen and starving spectres who had managed to stagger to Vilnius, many of them to end their days there, had come from all over French-occupied Europe. Eventually, at most some 20,000 soldiers - of the 400,000 who'd marched into Russia at midsummer - finally recrossed the Niemen into Poland. They were meant to rejoin Napoleon, but he'd already gone ahead to Paris to give the news of the catastrophe, and to raise new armies. Men could easily be replaced, but not horses. Tens of thousands of soldiers had died in Russia, but it was because of his lack of cavalry that Napoleon was eventually defeated by Austria, Prussia, Sweden and Russia, in 1813.

***

Now, 183 years later, the splendid museum in Vilnius displays many objects relating to the Napoleonic adventure. What's this button, made of an alloy of copper and tin, stamped '61'? It comes from a blue uniform jacket, almost certainly that of a Dutchman. For the 61st Line Regiment was made up largely of (mostly unwilling) conscripts from the Netherlands.

This helmet plaque, with the remains of a tricolour cockade and an imperial eagle upon it, must be that of someone who fought at Borodino and got to Moscow - only to collapse and die in Vilnius. And this sleeve-button, stamped with a '29'? A relic of some recruit in Loison's ill-fated reserve division, which in December 1812 was brought up in far sub-zero temperatures, and in summer clothing, to save anything that could be saved of the doomed wreckage of Napoleon's army. Unfortunately these young men died too, almost to a man.

The Lithuanians have allowed some bones and teeth from the recovered bodies to be brought to the UK for lead isotope testing. The earliest water we drink as children leaves an indelible fingerprint in our teeth and bones, which means that isotope testing can tell Dr Mike Richards - the British pathologist involved in the analysis - what part of Europe the owner of a particular bone or tooth stemmed from, whether from the Po, the Elbe, or the Seine. The tests have also helped determine the cause of death of some of the victims, as well as what illnesses they suffered from. None of them seem to have died in battle.

This summer there's to be a solemn reinterment ceremony in Vilnius. It will be attended by ambassadors from every European Union country that once contributed, whether they liked it or not, to Napoleon's Grand Army of 1812.

[Kodos]

The correct way to take on Russia( this is academic now because we're in the nuclear age) is to creep in slowly and keep administering massive causalties while avoiding any catastrophes yourself. Thats how the German Imperial army did it.

[Felix the Cat]

http://www.balticsww.com/napoleon_riga.htm

As the French occupied Vilnius, fires raged and smoke billowed some 300 kilometers away in Riga, destroying vast tracts of the outlying city and leaving upwards of 10,000 Latvians homeless.

The thrust of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia ended up cutting through Lithuania, with Vilnius becoming the main staging platform for the attack. But Czarist generals believed Napoleon, instead of marching towards Moscow, intended to head north to St. Petersburg through Latvia and Estonia—part of the Russian empire for 100 years by that time. So in a preemptive move to deny the French shelter and food, they ordered that the outskirts of Riga be set alight. (Some historians say the order for troops to torch the buildings was given when a watchman atop Riga’s St. Peter’s church spotted a cloud of dust that was assumed to have been kicked up by French soldiers; it turned out, according to this account, to be from a herd of cows.)

One consequence of the burning of Riga’s outskirts by the Czarist forces was that Riga planners had to come up with a new layout of the city, which has contributed in making the city what it is today.

Historians say Napoleon, considered one of the most brilliant military strategists of all time, may well have considered striking Russia via Riga. But he apparently feared his 500,000-strong Grand Army might become hemmed in by the Baltic Sea, with no escape route back to France, if he attacked through Latvia and Estonia.

Major clashes nevertheless took place between French and Russian forces on the territory of present day Latvia. Marshall Etienne MacDonald (above portrait), a Frenchman of Scottish decent, laid siege to Riga with some 30,000 men starting in July of 1812. But while his multi-national corps occupied much of Courland for months, they never managed to take Riga.

In Latvia, as in Lithuania, many local residents at first believed Napoleon’s army would improve their lot. Rumors spread among Baltic peasants that Napoleon might abolish serfdom in areas under French occupation. But that never happened. Instead, the plight of local residents swiftly deteriorated as normal trade was disrupted by the war conditions.

MacDonald’s presence in Latvia at least ensured Russian forces couldn’t attack the Moscow-bound French force from the rear. Napoleon is said to have described Riga as a “suburb of London,” for its strong trade links with France’s arch enemy, the British; by trying to occupy the seaside Latvian city, he also hoped to disrupt lucrative Russian trade with Great Britain.

MacDonald wrote in his memoirs that he spent most of the next several months holding his position in Courland as Czarist troops attacked from time to time. He continuously received reports of the disaster that was unfolding with the main French force under Napoleon’s command. “I was informed of the daily trials they had to meet with,” he complained. “And although I offered my services, together with those of my inactive, well-fed and warmly-clad troops, I was left stationary.”

[Felix the Cat]

http://www.balticsww.com/napoleon_graves.htm

Anthropologist Arunas Barkus pokes at a leg bone in a pile of brittle skeletal remains tagged No. 151 and spread across an autopsy table at Vilnius University. At the touch of his fingers, dried marrow crumbles to the floor like snow.

What’s now clear, he explains, is that the remains of 2,000 men unearthed in a pool-sized grave in Vilnius last year were soldiers in Napoleon Bonaparte’s Grand Army that attacked Russia 190 years ago.

Less certain was just how they died and what that might reveal about one of history’s most horrific and consequential military adventures, one that became the stuff of epic legend in the intervening years.

When bulldozers accidentally uncovered the bones on the Northern Village housing development last year, many first believed they were victims of Soviet secret police. The area was once a Red Army base, a fact that spurred on this initial theory.

But as crowds gathered to behold the tangle of rib cages and skulls poking through the sand, coins and buttons stamped with Napoleon’s image appeared amid the debris; crucifixes, wedding rings, belt buckles, boots and shards of French uniforms were also found. It became clear that these were remnants of the ill-fated French force.

It was the first mass grave of soldiers from Napoleon’s Grand Army ever found, according to a recent edition of Archaeology Magazine. The U.S.-based scientific journal called it the most important discovery of its kind.

“It confirms how important a role Vilnius played in this big war.... It puts us on the map,” said Vilnius Mayor Arturas Zuokas, adding the find would draw France and Lithuania closer and could even prompt more French tourism.

His enthusiasm was, to say the least, shared at the nearby French Embassy.

“We’ve been very moved by this discovery...we were shocked, even,” said Deputy Ambassador Olivier Poupard, a blue, white and red French tricolor fluttering in bright sunshine outside his office window. “Suddenly, history was more vivid. You could see it with your own eyes.”

“It’s a history that’s so much a part of the collective French memory.”

Napoleon was in control of nearly all continental Europe when he invaded Russia in June, 1812. Marching into Lithuania bound for Moscow, his 500,000-man army—a sea of infantry, grenadiers and artillery cannons—seemed invincible. It was the largest single invasion force ever assembled.

One secret to Napoleon’s earlier triumphs was that his army could move much more quickly than opposing militaries—by carrying fewer provisions and by living off conquered territories as they went.

But the Russians had burned fields and villages in advance to deny the invaders food and shelter; they dumped horse carcasses down wells to poison the water. So the French began dying from the outset, though they technically never lost a single battle.

Like Germany’s Wehrmacht that attacked Russia around the same time of year in 1941, Napoleon’s troops were being sucked into a trap they didn’t see coming and from which most would never escape.

“The French army pushed on to Moscow, its goal, its impetus ever increasing as it neared its aim, as the velocity of a falling body increases as it approaches the ground,” wrote Leo Tolstoy in War and Peace, a novel revolving around the French attack and in which Vilnius, or Vilna, features prominently.

The Czar’s scorched-earth strategy took on unprecedented proportions when, just as the conquering French Emperor settled down smugly to dine within the Kremlin, Russian agents set Moscow itself alight—destroying two-thirds of it.

“Mountains of red, rolling flames, like immense waves,” as Napoleon himself described the scene later. “It was the most grand, the most sublime and the most terrifying sight the world has ever beheld.”

He remained in Moscow for five weeks waiting in vain for Czar Alexander I to agree to peace. The French only began their 900-kilometer retreat along the same route whence they’d come in November.

The delay proved fatal.

Thousands of troops, already sick and hungry, died each day in early winter weather. Czarist Cossacks, too, lashed at the flank of the increasingly unwieldy, panic-stricken French caravan as it dragged toward Lithuania.

“Our lips stuck together. Our nostrils froze,” remembered one soldier, probably not unlike the man whose bones Barkus cradled. “We seemed to be marching in a world of ice.” Some lost their ears or tongues to frostbite.

Survivors of what had turned into a death march were hopeful that Vilnius, the main French base during the invasion, would provide relief.

But when the Grand Army—now reduced to a mere 40,000 men—finally staggered into Vilnius, there was little food or shelter to be had.

Desperate soldiers are said to have raided medical schools to eat alcohol-preserved human organs. Others gnawed on leather in a bid for nourishment. There were reports that some cannibalized their fellow soldiers.

Lithuanians, subjugated by Russia just two decades before, had welcomed the French as liberators when they marched in six months earlier. But they now shrank from the crazed scavengers, bolting their doors; frightened residents also knew Czarist troops would enter the city within days.

Napoleon was said to be smitten by Lithuania’s ancient capital, saying, as legend has it, that he wanted to carry the city’s quaint Gothic Church of St. Anne’s back to Paris in the palm of his hand.

But when French soldiers came back to Vilnius in retreat, their commander was no longer with them. He had galloped to Paris days before to quash rumors that he’d been killed—talk that could have prompted a coup.

Napoleon vowed he wouldn’t be taken alive if intercepted. Around his neck, flanked by just two aides for the journey, he carried a leather pouch filled with poison.

With temperatures in Vilnius sinking to -30 C—colder than inside a contemporary kitchen freezer—half the troops died in days, their bodies littering the cobblestone streets. Corpses soon equaled or even surpassed the city’s 30,000 native population.

Makeshift hospitals were visions of hell.

“Some 7,500 bodies were piled up like (stacks) of lead over one another in the corridors,” recalled Robert Wilson, a British officer attached to Russia’s army. “The broken windows and walls were stuffed with feet, legs, arms, hands, trunks and heads to fit the apertures and keep out the air from the yet living.”

Another witness, a local countess, described similarly gruesome scenes in city-center squares: “Corpses... seated on the ground, leaning against walls, preserved by the cold, their limbs shrunken and stiff in the position in which Death had overtaken them.”

The reoccupying Russians spent three months removing bodies from the halls, from the streets and alleys of Vilnius. They couldn’t dig new graves because the frozen earth was as impenetrable as stone. They cremated some of the dead, but the smoke and stench of burning flesh hung in the air like fog and became intolerable.

It took the modern-day Lithuanian construction crews to solve the mystery of how the Russians had disposed of so many corpses: they’d stacked them, three-deep, in a V-shaped defensive trench made in the summer by the French themselves. In the grisly humor of fate, the French had unwittingly dug their own graves.

Barkus and a dozen other researchers spent months excavating the site, 2 kilometers from the Vilnius old town. They charted and tagged the skeletons—then carefully examined each to determine age, sex and possible cause of death.

The size and structure of skeleton No. 151 indicate it belonged to a male, said Barkus (photo); the unworn teeth and incoming third molar suggest he was about 20. He was tall—the petite Emperor apparently favoring height in elite units.

Several bones were of boys as young as 15, probably drummers used to signal commands. Dozens belonged to women, possibly laundresses, officers’ servants or even prostitutes.

From the unique wear of some teeth, specialists could even tell that some of the soldiers were avid pipe smokers.
Tellingly, virtually none of the bones showed signs of blunt trauma that could have come from cannon shrapnel, bullets or bayonet stabs, suggesting those buried in the trenches didn’t die of war wounds.

Many of the skeletons were found in a tight, curled-up posture, a poignant sign—even across two centuries—of the human suffering. People who die of exposure tend to assume a fetal position in their final minutes, according to Barkus.

“What killed these men was cold, starvation and disease,” he concluded.

And why did none have signs of battle wounds from recent engagements?

“The explanation’s quite simple really,” said Barkus. “Anyone who was wounded even slightly fighting the Russians died quickly en route from Moscow. Only the relatively healthy made it this far, then died here.”

An absence of obvious wounds also appears to discount some French accounts that blood-thirsty Cossacks swept upon the ailing soldiers, hacking them to death with their sabers.

DNA tests are being done to try to determine whether an unusually large proportion of the soldiers, as some historians contend, died of typhus—a lice-born disease that typically plagued armies of the age.

Upon his arrival in Paris, Napoleon told his Senate that “my army had some losses” but that this “was primarily due to the rigors of the season.”

While some historians have argued he exaggerated the winter’s severity as an excuse for sloppy planning, Archaeology Magazine concluded the evidence gleaned from the Vilnius graves “thus far seems to support Napoleon.”

Russians have also been wont to grant too much credit to General Winter, saying their historic victory was mainly due to ingenious strategy.

The debacle is widely viewed as the beginning of the end of Napoleon, whose veil of invincibility was now gone. The downfall of the most influential figure of the age was sealed at Waterloo, Belgium, in 1815.

During Napoleon’s 15-year reign, a million French soldiers had died under his command—nearly half of them during the disastrous Russian campaign alone.

While troops who marched on Russia were French soldiers, they weren’t necessarily French; at least half were conscripts from across Napoleon’s vast empire. So Deputy Ambassador Poupard said there was never a question of returning the remains to France.

“We have no idea which remains belong to a Pole, an Italian, a Dutchman, a German or over a dozen other nationalities who fought,” the French diplomat said. Thousands of Lithuanians also served in the Grand Army.

“In any case, this is part of Lithuanian history now. They belong here.”

A planned road was finally built over the initial grave site—the last remains having been removed. But archeologists recently found another bone-filled pit 100 meters away in the shadow a brand new apartment block. The over 2,000 sets of bones were in the same V-trench complex and in a similar condition as those found before. There may be over 20,000 other skeletons nearby.

Lithuania and France agreed the soldiers will be buried soon in Vilnius—in a ceremony that will include a gun salute by a Lithuanian honor guard. A monument paid for by France and designed by Lithuanians will be unveiled later.

“This is an occasion, especially with Lithuania on the verge of entering the European Union and the NATO alliance, to show reconciliation between former enemies that are now partners,” said the French official.

Mayor Zuokas added that the international attention the discovery is sure to generate will drive home just how connected Lithuania is to historical events that made Europe what it is today. Local tourism officials are already drawing up plans for what they call “Napoleon tours.”

Some 1,700 skeletons were already moved to a hilltop chapel in the city’s exclusive Antakalnis Cemetery, normally reserved for artists and independence heroes; the others, including unknown soldier No. 151, will arrive here soon.

Sets of bones in individual white mortuary bags crowd one wall of the garage-sized sanctuary, next to a groundkeeper’s rakes, a wheelbarrow and a small statue of an angel undergoing repairs.

The chapel’s oak door creaks open to a grove, shaded by pines, that will be the soldiers’ final resting-place.

[Larrikin]

The correct way to take on Russia( this is academic now because we're in the nuclear age) is to creep in slowly and keep administering massive causalties while avoiding any catastrophes yourself.

Hmmm.... isn't causing the enemy massive losses while preventing them on your own side generally a pretty good strategy in ANY war?

[Felix the Cat]

The French outnumbered their enemies but were defeated because they couldn't supply their armies, the German armies were well-supplied but were defeated because they were outnumbered

[cerberus]

I saw a programme about that mass grave - the soldiers were young , starved , frozen , they died a long with their women folk.