The Illustrious Dead by Stephan Talty Read Free Book Online

with Russian phrases. When Alexander appeared on the Kremlin’s Red Steps, he was greeted by thousands of ordinary Russians shouting, “We will die or conquer!”
    In the early months of 1812, Napoleon’s armies began streaming toward the Polish border from France, Italy, Hungary, and other garrisons. Even the Austrians and Prussians were forced to contribute 30,000 and 20,000 men, respectively, to face their former ally. Napoleon had clearly made up his mind on war, though he kept his target a secret from the general public and even his own marshals.
    But Alexander stole a march on the emperor. In quick succession, he formed an alliance with his old adversaries the Swedes in the north and signed a peace treaty with the Ottoman Turks in the south, securing his most troublesome borders and eliminating the possible division of his armies for war on two fronts. Napoleon meanwhile dithered and made a halfhearted attempt to sign a treaty with the British in Spain, without, however, offering much of anything to end a disastrous war. The British sensibly refused. In the months before the Moscow campaign, it was Alexander who looked like the master political player and Napoleon who looked like a distracted novice.
    O N M AY 9, 1812, the emperor left Paris and began a processional through his client kingdoms, a display of his wealth and power that he’d remember as the happiest time of his life. He traveled with an army of 300 carriages filled with crystal, plate, tapestries, and his own personal furniture, sweeping into the king of Saxony’s castle and putting hundreds of chefs to work creating a Pan-European menu that was testament to his reach. Nobles, kings, and queens came to pay homage.
    The German poet Heinrich Heine remarked on how the army’s veterans, passing in review before the emperor, “glanced up at him with so awesome a devotion, so sympathetic an earnestness, with the pride of death.” The army itself was a pageant, gaily outfitted in all the colors of the peacock. Cuirassiers, the cavalrymen who were the successors of medieval knights, pranced on their chargers, their mirrorlike steel helmets capped by black horsehair manes. The carabiniers were dressed in crisp white jackets, while the lancers wore crimson shapkas with white plumes a foot and a half high. The rapid-response chasseurs wore kolbachs with green and blood-red feathers, while the hussars strutted in their tall peaked shakos topped with red feathers. Dragoons sported turbans cut out of tiger skin and brilliant red coats, and the grenadiers of Napoleon’s elite unit, the Imperial Guard, wore the traditional French blue uniform covered by great bearskins, the sun glinting off their gold earrings.
    A S MORE AND MORE units from the empire marched toward the Niemen River to assemble for the invasion, in Germany one of the millions who would be deeply affected by Napoleon’s decisions prepared to leave. Franz Roeder was a captain in the First Battalion of the Lifeguards of the Grand Duke of Hesse, a German principality. Roeder was typical of the soldiers who would form the core of any assault on Russia: he was non-French; experienced in battle, having nearly died in the Russo-Prussian War; and fiercely loyal to his men and his reputation, if not to the emperor. Roeder was handsome, with a long aquiline nose, an intense gaze, wavy hair that fell over his collar, and a mouth that seemed to be holding back some outrageous remark. He had entered the barracks after punching a schoolmaster as a boy and running from a flogging, never to return. And as war approached, he was trying to get on with his life despite the rumbles from Paris. The captain expressed as well as any soldier readying for battle what it would mean in the terms of a single life.
    For Roeder, the most pressing dilemmas were romantic: His beloved wife Mina, a direct descendant of Martin Luther, had died of consumption that year and he was left with two young children to care for. Still