The Illustrious Dead Read Online Free PDF

telling: Two-thirds of the troops were non-French. Napoleon had insisted that his allies bear a large share of the burden of his ambitions. That 80,000 were mounted on horseback indicated that Napoleon intended to strike fast and end the war quickly. (But with a sure hand—all the corps were commanded by French generals or marshals, apart from the Polish and Austrian forces.) The unprecedented size of the army meant not only that it would be a monumental task to keep it fed and organized, but that Napoleon, who had throughout his career maneuvered his regiments like an admiral commanding a fleet of highly maneuverable light cruisers, darting and speeding to arrive at an unexpected position at a crucial moment in time, was now at the helm of a massive and unwieldy ship.
    These figures make Napoleon’s uncanny relationship with his soldiers even more impressive. Most of his troops, it has to be emphasized, were from nations he had conquered by force. The emperor had humiliated Austria in war after war, and yet its men fought for him; he had forced Holland to accept his brother Louis as its king (later to remove him), but the Dutch would have enthralling moments in Russia. Certainly he had coerced their leaders, but most of his troops ought to have been sabotaging him at every turn, or performing only well enough to avoid being shot for desertion. But they would fight, for the most part, like lions. It was as if, in 1945, General Patton had convinced the conquered Germans to fight the Japanese in the South Pacific. Very few leaders throughout history could have done it.
    Some have suggested that the emperor’s army was, in fact, too large. Napoleon biographer Frank McLynn argues that Napoleon had become an expert in winning with armies of 100,000 troops, “which permitted the speed and flexibility that produced an Austerlitz.” McLynn suggests that Napoleon failed to do the correct math: increasing his army’s striking ability sixfold increased his command and supply problems not by a similar number but exponentially. “It was an impossible dream,” McLynn writes, “something impracticable before the advent of railways and telegraph.”
    But had Napoleon begun with one-quarter of the force he assembled and not won a quick and devastating battle, the killing agent that would turn up in those bones in Vilnius, and which was already filtering through his ranks, would have quickly whittled those numbers down to a pittance. Each strategy, in retrospect, had its risk.
    A LEXANDER’S FRONTLINE FORCES in the beginning numbered only about 162,000, giving the French a three-to-one advantage at the beginning of the war. His army was strong at the bottom, dissolute in the middle, and often chaotic at the top. The ordinary Russian soldier was typically poorly fed, poorly equipped, but decently trained and ferocious in battle, especially in a defensive posture. Nowhere else would Napoleonic troops encounter soldiers who fought as fanatically or bravely when defending a position; a famous epigram said that you not only had to kill the Russian soldier, you had to then push him over.
    The officer corps was a glaring weakness. Officers gambled, whored, and drank when they should have been drilling their men. Commanders weren’t held to account for the performance of their troops or junior officers. They treated the common soldiers more like automatons or serfs they had inherited than men to be inspired and led.
    And the Russian high command, although it contained some brilliant officers, was riven with dissension. “The headquarters of the Emperor were already overrun with distinguished idlers,” wrote Carl von Clausewitz, the brilliant German strategist attached to the Russian headquarters staff. Petty intrigues, nationalist posturing between the Russians and Germans and Austrian commanders, coteries and cliques all contributed to an atmosphere where decisions were made and unmade in hours. Alexander lacked the backbone to stop the