There is no campaign in the history of the world which has left such a deepimpression upon the heart of the people than that of Napoleon in Russia,Anno 1812.
Of the soldiers of other wars who had not come home it was reported wherethey had ended on the field of honor. Of the great majority of the 600thousand who had crossed the Niemen in the month of June Anno 1812, therewas recorded in the list of their regiments, in the archives “Disappearedduring the Retreat” and nothing else.
When the few who had come home, those hollow eyed specters with theirfrozen hands, were asked about these comrades who had disappeared duringthe retreat, they could give no information, but they would speak ofendless, of never-heard-of sufferings in the icy deserts of the north, ofthe cruelty of the Cossacks, of the atrocious acts of the Moushiks and thepeasants of Lithuania, and, worst of all, of the infernal acts of thepeople of Wilna. And it would break the heart of those who listened tothem.
There is a medical history of the hundreds of thousands who have perishedAnno 1812 in Russia from cold, hunger, fatigue or misery.
Such medical history cannot be intelligible without some details of thehistory of events causing and surrounding the deaths from cold and hungerand fatigue. And such a history I have attempted to write.
Casting a glance on the map on which the battle fields on the march to andfrom Moscow are marked, we notice that it was not a deep thrust which theattack of the French army had made into the colossus of Russia. From theNiemen to Mohilew, Ostrowno, Polotsk, Krasnoi, the first time, Smolensk,Walutina, Borodino, Conflagration of Moscow, and on the retreat the battlesof Winkonow, Jaroslawetz, Wiasma, Vop, Krasnoi, the second time, Beresina,Wilna, Kowno; this is not a great distance, says Paul Holzhausen in hisbook “Die Deutschen in Russland 1812” but a great piece of history.
Holzhausen, whose book has furnished the most valuable material of which Icould avail myself besides the dissertation of von Scherer, the book ofBeaupré and the report of Krantz, and numerous monographs, has brought tolight valuable papers of soldiers who had returned and had left theirre