The Illustrious Dead by Stephan Talty Read Free Book Online Page A

steeped in grief, he was nevertheless thinking of asking a young woman named Sophie, who lived in a city miles from his hometown, to marry him. His children needed a mother, and he, in his loneliness, needed someone to love. Letters and short visits added up to a courtship against the gathering clouds.
    As Napoleon rattled his saber, Roeder read the signs. “Nobody believes that it will really come to war,” he wrote in his diary. “This hope helps the good souls to overcome the pain of parting and obscures for them the danger which looms so close, which may well lead, not to long absence, but to parting forever.” One night, feeling a departure approaching, he rushed to the neighboring town where Sophie lived, pulled her out of the opera between the second and third acts, and asked her to marry him. He didn’t even have a ring to offer her, but she said yes. The veteran campaigner was relieved. At least the children, if he died, wouldn’t be orphans.
    B Y A PRIL , C APTAIN R OEDER was marching his 181 men through the roads of eastern Germany. In the bigger towns, his men were feted at balls, and Roeder, although just married to a new wife and haunted by a dead one, flirted with the local beauties. His men were mostly healthy but suffering from diarrhea, “which may be partly caused by the water,” he wrote from the German town of Doberan, “through which they frequently have to march up to the knees.” A more worrying case was that of his quartermaster, who, on May 21, died of “creeping nervous fever,” most likely an early sign of the approaching epidemic.
    But the general mood was good. “I share the thoughts of the whole army. It has never shown itself more impatient to run after fresh triumphs,” wrote Captain Louis-Florimond Fantin des Odoards, a veteran grenadier who had fought at Austerlitz and Friedland. “Its august leader has so accustomed it to fatigue, danger, and glory that a state of repose has become hateful. With such men we can conquer the world.” Roeder, too, despite his love for Sophie, relished being out with his men, throwing his cape under a tree and falling asleep under the stars. Many of the young recruits saw the 1812 campaign as the finale in a long link of adventures, the last chance for rapid advancement and glory. Some 10,000 wills were drawn up by Parisian notaries before the commencement of hostilities, and the famous coachbuilder Gros Jean churned out carriage after carriage for the marshals and generals.
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    N APOLEON PLANNED FOR a spring/summer offensive that would allow the fields to ripen with oats for his horses and wheat for his men. As he attended to the thousands of details necessary for a campaign involving half a million troops and more, he made a shocking discovery. His much-vaunted medical service was in disarray, with even the basic necessities for a campaign—dressings, linens, splints—in short supply. His surgeon in chief, the legendary Dr. Dominique-Jean Larrey, rushed from Paris to Mentz, Germany. But the forty-six-year-old surgeon was being sent “doctors” so inexperienced that he was forced to give them crash courses in battlefield medicine.
    Despite Larrey’s sterling reputation (“the worthiest man I know,” the emperor once said), Napoleon didn’t trust doctors. He could be progressive when it came to new techniques, such as Edward Jenner’s smallpox vaccine, discovered in 1796, which the emperor embraced, even having his two-month-old son inoculated and spearheading a vaccination campaign for the young and new army recruits. But for the most part he despised physicians, shouting at his guests “Medicine is the science of assassins!” during one memorable party. He was a fatalist when it came to epidemics. He believed that if one wasn’t strong enough to resist disease, it would claim you. Mental fortitude was the only remedy.
    These attitudes were rooted in Napoleon’s youth. At the age of twenty, while walking across the