The Illustrious Dead (2 page)

Introduction: Old Bones

I
N LITHUANIA, LATE IN THE WINTER OF 2001, CONSTRUCTION crews began clearing a piece of land in that part of the capital, Vilnius, known as Northern Town, digging trenches for phone lines and demolishing the old Soviet barracks that had stood on the land for decades. Vilnius was booming, with new money flooding in and decades of oppression under Moscow and Berlin seeming at last ready to vanish along with the last physical traces of imperialism. Real estate developers had snapped up the old troops’ quarters to be made into luxe new homes for the computer programmers and regional managers who would soon turn this forbidding collection of buildings into a sparkling hub of the new Europe.

The work had gone smoothly until one bulldozer scraped up a layer of soil and uncovered something white underneath its blade. The operator looked down and saw bones, bones that were quite clearly human: femurs, ribs, skulls. One worker later told a reporter that the white things “wouldn’t stop coming out of the ground.” There were thousands of them.

Word spread to nearby neighborhoods, and men and women came hurrying across the fields, their boots crunching in the hoarfrost and their breath blowing white. There had been whispers for years about this place, rumors that the KGB had used the barracks as torture chambers for political dissidents. Many believed that those who hadn’t survived the questioning had been buried in mass graves somewhere on the grounds. Eight years earlier, a grave filled with seven hundred KGB victims had been found a few hundred yards away. The local people looked down into the freshly dug hole, looking for missing lovers, sisters, or sons.

Or perhaps these were the corpses of Jews murdered by the Nazis. Hitler’s bureaucrats had set up two ghettos in the city after occupying it in June 1941 and then slowly drained them of men, women, and children, eventually killing
95
percent of the country’s Jewish population.

When archaeologists from the University of Vilnius arrived, they saw that the bodies had been stacked three-deep in a V-shaped trench and quickly realized that the men had been buried in the same pits they had dug to defend themselves. Clearly, the men were soldiers, not dissidents or civilians. And they were robust specimens, many of them tall and broad-shouldered, most between fifteen and twenty years old, with a few women mixed in—prostitutes was the early guess.

As they excavated the 2,000 skeletons, the archaeologists found a plaque that had once adorned a helmet, decorated by an eagle and a cockade in faded red, blue, and white. There were curious belt buckles inscribed in several languages, buttons with regiment numbers such as “29” and “61.” And there were, crucially, 20-franc coins that dated from the early 1800s. The remains were too old to be the victims of either Stalin or Hitler.

After quickly calling to mind the history of Vilnius, called “the city built on bones” because of its past as a minor bauble for conquerors and tyrants, the scientists realized they could only be looking at the remnants of one force: the Grande Armée. One hundred and eighty-nine years before, Napoleon had led 600,000 men into Russia in an attempt to conquer his last major opponent on the Continent. These corpses were the remnants of that invasion force.

The dead were from every corner of Europe—Holland, Italy, Spain, Germany, Westphalia, and other duchies, kingdoms, and states. Napoleon had ruled all of them and had in 1812 been at the coruscating height of his power, leading an army unlike anything that had been seen since the days of the Persian conqueror Xerxes in the fifth century BC. The soldiers were the paragons of their time, and on their march to Moscow they had been considered unstoppable. But they had clearly encountered something beyond their power to overcome or outrun.

What had killed these men? None of the remains had the crushed skulls or telltale bullet holes of men who had been executed and dumped in mass graves. The bodies were curled into the fetal position, the normal human response to extreme cold, which had certainly played a part in their demise. Hunger, too, had ravaged the city in the winter of 1812. The archaeologists remembered the stories of Napoleon’s troops breaking into the local university and eating the human and animal specimens suspended in formaldehyde. Some of these men had starved to death.

But something else had clearly been at play in that awful year. The soldiers had been physical specimens, the toughest of a gargantuan, battle-hardened army who had managed to escape the fate of their less determined or less robust comrades lying in roadside graves all the way to Moscow and back. These men were the
survivors
of something even more cataclysmic that had occurred many weeks earlier. In a sense, they were the lucky ones.

The archaeologists drilled into the teeth of the corpses and extracted samples of dental pulp, placed it on slides, and slid them under microscopes. In the DNA of a number of the soldiers, they discovered the signs of the hidden killer that had done so much to bury not only the Grande Armée but also Napoleon’s hopes of world domination.

Older than France or Europe or
homo sapiens
themselves, its causative agent had arisen millions of years ago. It had mystified— and slain—its scientific pursuers for centuries, complicating the race to understand and defeat it. And it had a past as fearsome as any of the mass killers of the twentieth century, only more illustrious and strange.

C  H  A  P  T  E  R     1

Incarnate

I
T WOULD BE A REMARKABLE THING TO LOOK AT A MAP OF THE
world in 1811 and not be struck by how much of it was controlled by France and its forty-two-year-old leader, Napoleon Bonaparte. His writ ran from the Atlantic Ocean to the borders of Russia and from southern Spain to northern Germany. Some 45 million subjects lived under his rule. One exhausts superlatives in talking of his kingdom: He held sole command of a nation that was the richest and most powerful on earth. His empire was larger than the Roman emperors’ or Charlemagne’s, and it had every promise of expanding in the near future. And Napoleon commanded it with such rigor that no detail, down to the opening time of the opera in Paris, escaped him.

The emperor had not only conquered territory, he had remade societies. Coming of age during the reign of Louis XVI, Napoleon and his generation grew disgusted with a nation where the accumulated layers of tradition and artifice clogged one’s path in life, and money and prestige flowed to the amoral and the cunning. They felt suffocated by the weight of the past, its irrationalities, its injustices. After taking power in France, Napoleon had streamlined the nation’s administration, rationalized its civic laws and its economy to free up long-suppressed energies, and exported these innovations to the satellite nations under his control. He’d famously declared that careers should be open to the most talented, and in many ways he’d succeeded in moving European societies toward a future where merit, brains, and hard work counted.

When the young general took power, he was seen across much of Europe as a kind of mythological creature: half warrior, half idealist. For those with any progressive ideas whatsoever, he was the strong man who would give order and structure to the best instincts of the French Revolution. Emerging from the whirling blood feuds of the Terror, during which thousands were executed on the slightest pretext, when men ran through the streets hoisting the body parts of princesses stuck on pikes, Napoleon had saved the nation.

Our politics today are divided between left and right, liberal and conservative. But those notions gain their heat and shape from Napoleon’s times. He came of age during the birth of those concepts: between the French Revolution’s insistence on individual dignity, rights, and freedoms, and the Anglo-American conservative response, inaugurated by Edmund Burke in his landmark
Reflections on the Revolution in France
(1790), which stressed the value of tradition, caution, and social norms built up over time. The temperature of the early 1800s burned much hotter than that of the early 2000s: the eruption of the Revolution threatened to sweep away all accumulated notions of social place and long-held values and to leave in their place pure chaos. Rulers eyed their subjects nervously, and subjects eyed their kings with the new idea that they were hateful and unnecessary. Europe in Napoleon’s time seemed ready to fly apart.

This goes a long way toward explaining why Napoleon aroused such intense admiration early on. Like George Washington, with whom he was often compared, he had taken a hot revolution and cooled it into a rational system without reverting to the abuses of the tyrant-kings. “Peoples of Italy!” the young general had cried after beating the Austrians there in 1796. “The French army comes to break your chains…. We shall wage war like generous enemies, for our only quarrel is with the tyrants who have enslaved you.” Words like that hadn’t been heard in Europe before the Revolution. Even some monarchists swooned, at first.

Napoleon took power in a 1799 coup d’état, midstride in a series of wars that the French Republic claimed were fought to protect its borders and export freedom. For sixteen years he ran roughshod over opposing generals and kings. In 1797 the general had seized control of northern Italy from the Austrians. In 1800 he returned to Italy and defeated the Austrians; in 1802 he was named first consul for life; in 1804 he became emperor; in 1806 Napoleon faced the Fourth Coalition—Russia, Sweden, Great Britain, Saxony, and Prussia—and defeated them soundly; in 1807 he signed the Treaty of Tilsit with Tsar Alexander of Russia; in 1808 he invaded Spain; in 1809 he stumbled against the Austrians but stormed back with a punishing victory at Wagram.

Napoleon’s conquest had pitted him in a battle to the death with the monarchies of Europe. But even the opponents who considered him an Antichrist saw him as an almost miraculous figure. “He wanted to put his gigantic self in the place of humankind,” wrote Madame de Staël, and even the young tsar of Russia, Alexander I, at first regarded Bonaparte with admiration bordering on a kind of worship.

It wouldn’t last.

T
HE EMPEROR’S GIFTS
were numerous and mutually reinforcing: an exacting self-discipline; a memory that was close to photographic; an ability to read people and fit their unspoken desires to his aims; a gut-level genius for inspiring men and leading them in battle; an openness to new ideas so long as he could benefit from them; a farseeing, flexible, and often breathtakingly daring mind. His less appealing qualities were clear but not yet fatal: he was as superstitious as an old Corsican widow, petulant, headstrong, and, most of all, increasingly blind to the flaws in his thinking. His self-intoxication grew by the year.

Napoleon had come to power through the military, and his career there was divided by a bright sharp line. There was before Italy and after Italy. His unexpected victories there in 1796 against the Austrian army as an obscure general had changed his idea of himself and launched him into a career where he could seemingly do anything he set his mind to.

It hadn’t always been that way. Napoleon had emerged from his Corsican boyhood as a solitary, workaholic dreamer with immense, far-reaching gifts but a slim chance at greatness. He was also superstitious, tetchy, and prone to childish rages, a man who rated his natural abilities very highly and grew suicidal at the thought that, as an obscure gunner, he would never get the chance to realize them. But Italy changed that, confirming to him that he not only had genius but would be given a chance to display it. “From that moment, I foresaw what I might be,” he wrote later. “Already I felt the earth flee from beneath me, as if I were being carried into the sky.”

Napoleon’s military capabilities began with a near-total knowledge of tactics used in past wars; he was a walking database on every major battle in history, and knew what had worked or failed and why. But the young Corsican also reimagined the standard tenets of military science. He constantly gathered intelligence and used it to formulate his plans. He honed his communications systems to give his divisions an edge in speed, and he specialized in flanking and enveloping maneuvers that concentrated overwhelming firepower on the enemy’s weakest point. Napoleon also organized his armies into independent corps that were designed to march against and defeat enemy forces three times their size, which they regularly did.

The Grande Armée also had a technological edge, especially in the areas of infantry guns and lighter muskets. The French had long poured money into developing better big cannons that could be maneuvered into position more quickly and brought to bear on crucial zones on the battlefield. And the carbines carried by the Grande Armée’s sharpshooters, snipers, and forward skirmishers were state of the art (a relative term in relation to notoriously inaccurate muskets of the period), giving his units an advantage in marksmanship, especially in the early stages of the battle where, under the pall and roar of an artillery bombardment, Napoleon would send sharpshooters forward to take down officers and members of the first line poised for the attack.

Napoleon’s classic approach to battle was kinetic and precise. He designed a battle as a watchmaker would a fine chronometer. One corps, usually heavily outnumbered so as to allow other units to execute the rest of Napoleon’s plan, would engage the main body of enemy troops, freezing them into position and often suffering horrible casualties. Then other divisions, in sequences timed down to the minute, would pin down the opponent from unexpected angles, isolating and cutting apart individual divisions while at the same time cloaking from view a hidden force that was marching rapidly to a weak flank or an exposed rear guard. Then, at a crucial moment, Napoleon would drop these unseen divisions into the battle, backed by cavalry and artillery, overwhelming the enemy and scattering its forces to the wind.

To the outmatched generals who faced him, Napoleon’s armies always appeared larger than they actually were, because the emperor maneuvered them for maximum striking power on the battlefield. And they were ghostly, appearing from behind a hill or over a ridge at a time when they were supposed to be miles away.

Napoleon’s debut was a perfect illustration of his tactical brilliance as a force multiplier. In the first Italian campaign, he took a demoralized, ill-equipped collection of 100,000 soldiers and led them on a breathtaking series of victories, cutting the Piedmontese-Austrian enemy into its component parts and then chasing, catching, and defeating each segment in turn. He captured 160,000 men, 500 cannon, 39 ships, and wagon-trains worth of booty, including Michelangelos and Titians. Like many geniuses, he seemed to have no apprenticeship. General Napoleon emerged onto the world stage fully formed.

A
S HE REVOLUTIONIZED THE
big-picture aspect of war, Napoleon became a master at motivating the individual soldier. “You must speak to his soul in order to electrify him,” he famously said. But his attention went deeper than oratory. He remembered hundreds and hundreds of his troops’ names, tweaked their ears and joked with them during reviews, led them brilliantly, and promoted and rewarded them on the spot for acts of bravery that would have gone unnoticed under another general.

Stoked by a feeling of personal devotion to their leader, his soldiers did things that no other men in modern European warfare had done, things that modern Navy SEALs would struggle to equal. “The belief that they were invincible made them invincible,” remarked Karl von Funck, a German officer on Napoleon’s staff. “Just as the belief that they were sure to be beaten in the end paralyzed the enemy’s sprits and efforts.” During a stretch of four days during the first Italian campaign, one division under the former cabin boy André Messéna, the son of a tanner risen to general, fought three brutal pitched battles on successive days, marched nearly sixty miles through darkness and snow, and killed or captured thousands of the enemy. Messéna’s division helped Napoleon turn a competent Austrian force of 48,000 men into a terrified mob of 13,000 in a matter of 120 hours. This was not an isolated incident: Napoleon raised the standard of individual performance in the Grande Armée to levels thought unachievable before he arrived.

.   .   .

B
Y 1811 THE EMPEROR
was the undisputed master of the Continent, with only the Portuguese, the Spanish rebels, and the old bugbear of England still providing outright resistance to his dominion. By that time, too, the patina of his early rhetoric had been rubbed through and now what Europe saw, by and large, was bright steel: Napoleon’s promise to free those he conquered had gone unfulfilled. He was more and more a traditional conqueror.

By seeking further territories, Napoleon was reverting to a native form. From the days of the illustrious “Sun King,” Louis XIV, in the late seventeenth century, the French army was considered to be the vanguard of a progressive society conquering backward nations in order to bring them freedom, art, and science. For over a hundred years before the ascent of Napoleon, France had seen itself as the citadel of civilization. As expansionists and Christian visionaries would claim throughout American history, empire building was more than an economic good. It was a duty.

The makers of the French Revolution called a pause in the acquisition of colonies and satellites, asking for an end to all “wars of conquest.” But Napoleon, driven by a new utopian ardor, rampaging personal ambition, and the need to safeguard his borders, reignited the drive to empire. “The genie of liberty,” Napoleon wrote, “which has rendered the Republic since its birth, the arbiter of all Europe, wishes to see it mistress of faraway seas and foreign lands.” The 1798 invasion of Egypt had been disguised as a scientific mission to rediscover the secrets of the ancient world. But by 1812 the hostile response of many of the recipients of their “liberation” had hardened French attitudes into something far older and more recognizable: what one historian called “egotistical nationalism.” Success had proved to the French that they were better and stronger than their rivals, and that they deserved whatever they could take. By the time they headed for Russia, the banner of intellectual and cultural progress was faded and torn.

·   ·   ·

T
HE NORMATIVE NINETEENTH
-century leader of a European empire would have been more than satisfied with Napoleon’s achievements. His enemies were chastened and his empire at least reasonably secure. Napoleon saw things differently. Five-eighths of the world’s surface—the oceans—was controlled by his enemy, England, whose navy outmatched France’s in every way. His ally, Russia, “the barbarian North,” was slipping outside of his sphere, having recently broken its agreement to stop English ships from entering its harbors and trading with its merchants, a key defection in Napoleon’s intent to strangle England commercially before defeating it militarily.