Napoleons Campaign in Russia Anno 1812 - Medico-Historical | Page 6

He felt the extraordinary difficulty and great danger, he knew that at the moment of coming in contact with the enemy all the corps would be out of supplies in twenty or twenty-five days if there were no great reserves of bread, biscuit, rice, etc., closely following the army.
His system was that of requisition. To secure the needed supplies the commanders of the corps were ordered to seize in the country all the grain which could be found and at once to convert it into flour, with methodic activity.
Napoleon himself superintended and hastened the work. At twenty different places along the Vistula he had the grinding done unceasingly, distributing the flour thus obtained among the corps and expediting its transport by every possible means. He even invented new measures for this purpose, among which the well-known formation of battalions of cattle, an immense rolling stock destined to follow the columns to serve twofold: for transportation of provisions, and finally as food.
With the beginning of June these supreme preparations had been made or seemed to have been made. In the lands through which the troops were to march before they reached the Niemen, the spring had done its work; there was abundance of forage.
Napoleon had impatiently awaited this time during ten months of secret activity.
It was the hope of Russia and the fear of those Frenchmen who understood the Russian climate that the campaign would drag into the winter.
Russians already told of the village blacksmith who laughed when he was shown a French horseshoe which had been found on the road, and said: "Not one of these horses will leave Russia if the army remains till frost sets in!" The French horseshoes had neither pins nor barbed hooks, and it would be impossible for horses thus shod to draw cannons and heavy wagons up and down hill over frozen and slippery roads.
The annihilation of the Grand Army is not to be attributed to the cold and the fearful conditions on the retreat from Moscow alone, the army was in reality annihilated before it reached Russia, as we shall see by the following description which I have taken from a Latin dissertation (translated also into German) of the surgeon of a Wuerttembergian regiment, Ch. Io. von Scherer, who had served through the whole campaign and in the year 1820 had submitted this dissertation, "Historia Morborum, qui in Expeditione Contra Russiam Anno 1812 Facta Legiones Wuerttembergicas invaserunt, praesertim eorum qui frigore orti sunt," to the Medical Faculty, presided over by F. G. Gmelin, to obtain the degree of doctor of medicine.
The diseases which befell the soldiers in Russia extended over the whole army. Von Scherer, however, gives his own observations only, which he had made while serving in the Wuerttembergian corps of fourteen to fifteen thousand men.
The expedition into Russia in the year 1812 was divided into ten divisions, each of these numbering fifty to sixty thousand men, all healthy, robust, most of them hardened in war. The Wuerttembergians were commanded by General Count von Scheeler and the French General Marchand; the highest commander was Marshal Ney.
In the beginning of May, 1812, the great army of Napoleon arrived at the frontier of Poland, whence it proceeded by forced and most tiresome marches to the river Niemen, which forms the boundary between Lithuania and Poland, arriving at the borders of the river in the middle of June.
An immense body of soldiers (500,000) met near the city of Kowno, crossed the Niemen on pontoons, and formed, under the eyes of the Emperor, in endless battle line on the other side.
The forced march continued day and night over the sandy soil of Poland. The tropical heat during the day and the low temperature at night, the frequent rainstorms from the north, the camping on bare and often wet ground, the ever increasing want of pure water and fresh provisions, the immense masses of dust, which, cloudlike, hung over the marching columns--all these difficulties put together had sapped the strength of the soldiers already at the beginning of the campaign. Many were taken sick before they reached the Niemen.
The march through Lithuania was hastened as much as the march through Poland. Provisions became scarcer all the time, meat from cattle that had suffered from starvation and exhaustion was for a long time the soldiers' only food. The great heat, and the inhalation of sand and dust, dried the tissues of the body, and the thirsty soldiers longed in vain for a drink of water. Often there was no other opportunity to quench the thirst than the water afforded by the swamps. The officers were powerless to prevent the soldiers from kneeling down at stagnant pools and drinking the foul water without stint.
Thus the army, tired to the utmost from overexertion and privation, and disposed to sickness, entered