The Illustrious Dead Read Online Free Page A

nothing, my son as not very much. I leave one place, I go to another. I leave St-Cloud and I go to Moscow, not out of inclination or to gratify myself, but out of dry calculation.” Dry calculation, of course, in the service of a fantastic ambition.
    L ETTERS FLEW BETWEEN Paris and Moscow in 1810 and 1811, the tone getting progressively colder and more threatening. War drew closer and Alexander knew it was going to be costly. “It is going to cause torrents of blood to flow,” he wrote. In addition to the disagreement over the blockade, Alexander fumed at Napoleon’s refusal to divvy up the Ottoman Empire as promised; his installation in 1810 of Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte as king of Sweden, which Alexander viewed as an aggressive French threat on his border; and France’s swallowing up of the Duchy of Oldenburg in northwest Germany, which was supposed to fall to Alexander’s brother-in-law. These actions inflamed age-old stereotypes of French arrogance and gave an increasingly hostile Alexander little room to maneuver with his nobles or military advisers. He felt that war was coming and that it would decide the fate of his empire.
    France was already at war with Spain and England on the Iberian Peninsula, a vicious, seesaw campaign that gave birth to the concept of the guerrilla war. Spain had included some brilliant successes, but over the course of three years it had shown Napoleon’s weakness as a political strategist: he repeatedly concluded that the revolt had been quashed when it hadn’t, never comprehended the nationalistic fervor of the rebels, and failed, crucially, to set up an adequate supply system for his 350,000 troops. His “live off the land” philosophy had worked in the emperor’s blitzkrieg victories, but when extended over time, it led to an embittered populace, fueling the resistance.
    The quagmire of Spain only made a fast victory in Russia seem more attractive. But this war would be different from all the other Continental campaigns Napoleon had fought: the musket cartridges that, as 1811 ended, were being packed into knapsacks from Brittany to Rome would be superseded by a force being carried to the battlefield by the soldiers themselves, secreted in the folds of their clothes. The killing agent that the scientists would discover two hundred years later in Vilnius was already present in the Grande Armée’s ranks.

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    A Portable Metropolis
    T HE ARMY THAT THE EMPEROR MOBILIZED TO THREATEN Russia was enormous: all told, 690,000 men were under arms, including reserves, of whom between 550,000 and 600,000 would actually cross the Niemen River into Russian territory. Over the corps of veterans had been layered green recruits, who would hopefully learn enough from their peers to make it to and then over the battlefields. It was a staggering collection of men from a dozen different nations and duchies and kingdoms, speaking a babel of languages, overseen by a legendary administration that could move semaphore signals at 120 miles per hour and staffed by veterans who had fed, clothed, and nursed Napoleon’s armies from Italy to Spain to Egypt.
    As it assembled, the army and its trail of approximately 50,000 wives, whores, sutlers, and attendants represented more people than lived in the entire city of Paris. (To accomplish that today would take over 2.1 million men.) It formed the fifth-largest city in the world, after Tokyo and before Istanbul. The Grande Armée had become a portable metropolis, with its own courts of justice, its own criminals, its own hospitals and patois. The small mercenary armies that had fought in Europe at the service of kings for centuries were gone, replaced by a behemoth.
    Most of the men were, unlike their mercenary predecessors, motivated to serve under Napoleon by more than compulsion or gold. It wasn’t a volunteer army by any means—Napoleon had sent teams to force French conscripts from their town halls and homes—but many