Thursday 30 July 2009

In 1812 Was Napoleon Defeated Before His March On Russia Was Ever Begun?

well it appears it could be so, according to author Stephan Talty, in his work "The Illustrious Dead: The Terrifying Story of How Typhus Killed Napoleon's Greatest Army." Talty carefully documents why 400,000 men never made it home, Ike few historians before him, he illuminates the critical role of a tiny enemy: the louse, even as the 600,000 strong army had set out men started to collapse at the roadside, but not as their officers thought, that they were drunk but of of "war plague" typhus, an easy to treat problem today but not so then, the investigation that began in 2001 with a gruesome discovery, a mass grave containing 2,000 corpses in the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, at first thought killed by the KGB, or were Jews killed during the German occupation, but by examining belt buckles and uniform buttons with regimental numbers on them, archaeologists unraveled the mystery, the dead, it turned out, were soldiers of Napoleon's Grand Army, DNA samples from the teeth of the dead men and further lab analysis revealed that many of the hastily-buried bodies carried pathogens consistent with what was known in Napoleon's era as "war plague." the rest as they say is history.

No comments: