The Illustrious Dead Read Online Free PDF Page B

intriguing that every general, sensing the chance to mold the tsar to his wishes, engaged in.
    The Russian army was divided into two forces. General Mikhail Barclay de Tolly led 160,000 men of the First Army in a line opposed to Napoleon’s northern positions. Barclay was an unspectacular but highly competent general, a straight-backed, balding, reserved man who suffered from several disadvantages in the position and historical moment he found himself in: He was descended from a Scottish clan and spoke German as his first language, deeply suspect credentials for a man defending a country that was whipping itself into a nationalist fervor. And although he had made his name in a thrilling battle during the 1809 Finnish war by marching his army over the frozen Gulf of Bothnia, an exploit worthy of the young Napoleon, he was conservative by nature.
    The man who would quickly emerge to be his closest rival was General Pyotr Bagration, a hot-tempered nationalist eager for a confrontation with Napoleon. Bagration commanded the 60,000 troops of the Second Army, which would face the French positions in the south. Four years younger than Barclay, he was a firebrand, tetchy, capable of plunging into ecstasies of despair or joy depending on the progress of the battle (and of his career). He was as ambitious for himself as he was for his nation, and in his deeply emotional responses to the progress of the war, he would prove to have an innate understanding of the Russian mind that the phlegmatic Barclay often lacked.
    Napoleon planned to drive between them east along the Orsha-Smolensk-Vitebsk land bridge, which would lead him almost directly due east toward Moscow, should he need to go that far. His plans were straightforward: keep the two armies separated; drive forward and encircle them separately; cut off their supply, communication, and reinforcement lines to the east; force them into a defensive posture near Grodno; and then annihilate them. Napoleon continued to believe that Alexander would sue for peace after a convincing French victory.

    But in one respect Napoleon had radically misjudged Alexander. He was thinking in terms of empire. Alexander was mobilizing his people for another kind of conflict entirely. The tsar was convinced he was facing an Antichrist, a millennial figure who would destroy Russia itself. For him, the coming war was a religious crusade.
    T WO ANCIENT WARS set the stage for the kind of conflicts the two men planned for and mark the vicious debut of the lethal pathogen that was already deeply embedded in the Grande Armée.
    In 1489 the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella fought a decisive battle with the Islamic forces of the Moors. The Moors had ruled Spain ever since crossing the Strait of Gibraltar in A.D. 711, leaving only a few lonely outposts of Christians in the north of Spain along the Bay of Biscay. The Christian warriors bided their time, taking advantage of dissension among the Muslim rulers, looking to the Crusades for inspiration in their slow war of toppling one Islamic stronghold after another. By the late 1400s, only the citadel of Granada was left.
    During the siege of the city in 1489, a third combatant entered the field: a “malignant spotted fever” began carrying off Spanish soldiers at a fast clip. When the Catholic forces mustered their soldiers in the early days of 1490 to regroup, their commanders were shocked to learn that 20,000 of their men had gone missing. Only 3,000 had fallen in battle with the Moors, meaning that a full 17,000 had died of the mysterious disease. In an age when small armies of 30,000 to 40,000 were the rule, that figure represented a devastating loss of fighting power.
    But this was the illness’s first foray into war, and it didn’t have the decision-changing impact it would later carry. The Spanish recruited more soldiers to replenish their ranks and returned to the campaign. On January 2, 1492, the last Muslim ruler of Granada, Abu ’abd Allah