Customer Reviews

The Illustrious Dead: The Terrifying Story of How Typhus Killed Napoleon's Greatest Army

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As other reviewers have pointed out, "The Illustrious Dead" is hard to put down. At one level, the book tells the military history of Napoleon's ill-fated invasion of Russia in 1812, from the June day when the Grand Armee crossed the Nieman River into Russia until the end of its catastrophic retreat from Moscow in December of the same year.

But Talty's book also tells the history of a disease that has been plaguing soldiers and civilians for thousands of years. Napoleon's deadliest enemy. Talty claims, was not "General Winter," or Tsar Alexander, or the Cossacks--it was the microbe Rickettsia prowazekii, which causes typhus, aided by the body louse. In Talty's version of events, Rickettsia began to kill before the Grand Armee even crossed the border, passing with body lice among the densely packed, unwashed body of men. By the time Napoleon began to engage Russian forces in earnest, his army was so depleted by the disease that he was no longer able to make the decisive maneuvers that might have forced the Russians to sue for peace. As it was, the Russians held on, suffering huge casulaties but denying Napoleon the knock out blow that might have changed history, ultimately forcing Napoleon to retreat. After Napoleon returned to Paris, it was only a matter of time before his enemies took advantage of the fact that typhus had deprived France of its most experienced and effective soldiers.

"The Illustrious Dead" is a gripping mix of narrative military history, science and detective story. Talty does an excellent job of weaving the broad story of the campaign with the words of the men who fought the battles and endured the hardships. He singles out Captain Franz Roeder, drawing often from Roeder's diaries and correspondence to personalize the experience of the invasion from beginning to bitter end.

I suspect that historians of the Napoleonic era may fault Talty for his focus on typhus, arguing that other factors, such as Tsar Alexander's "scorched earth" defense and the weather, were more important causes of Napoleon's defeat. Perhaps, but Talty's book is still well worth reading for its fresh perspective on an old story--it's a page turner and every bit as harrowing as its subtitle suggests.

If you enjoy well written military history you will enjoy this book. The writer does a superb job of putting you into Napoleon's (or Alexander's) army during the campaign into Russia. The information on typhus is also very interesting and delivered in a way that grabs the reader's attention. I would highly recommend this book to anyone.

Loved this book. It tells the story of how an epidemic devastated Napoleon's army just as he rose to the height of his powers. The author slowly reveals the true killer that was waiting for the French on the road to Moscow - and it was epidemic typhus, not winter or the Russian army. Great characters, intense battle scenes, beautifully paced.

This is the story of an army and a microbe. The microbe wins.

That's a bit of an understatement, like saying that Napoleon was somewhat short, or that Moscow gets a bit cold in the winter, or that book reviewers tend to be too fond of lame similes. The microbe went up against Napoleon's Grand Army --- the greatest assemblage of military might since antiquity --- and beat the living whey out of it, all the way to Moscow and all the way back.

On the surface, it looks like such a mismatch. Napoleon had put together nearly half a million front-line troopers, many of them hard-bitten veterans of his victorious Italian and Austrian campaigns, and had significant cavalry and artillery to boot. They had the best training of their times, and some of the best generalship, and were impressively well-organized for the pre-microchip era. And yet, the army, as grand as it was, was beaten overwhelmingly, thoroughly and comprehensively by something it couldn't even see, something without a brain, nothing more than a collection of a few strands of DNA, designed to do little more than survive --- and kill.

To be sure, the microbe had powerful allies in its campaign to stop the French in their drive into Russia, such as the Russian army (or at least the rank and file of that army, considering its poor leadership). Then there was the scorched-earth tactics that denied provender to Napoleon's polyglot army. There was Napoleon's own imperial hubris in starting the conflict in the first place, and his failure to plan for the Russian winter or the possibility of infectious disease. There were even other microbes in the mix --- dysentery and the like.

All of these factors combined to bog down Napoleon's advance to Moscow and complicate his retreat. Stephan Talty makes the convincing argument that it was typhus, not the winter or the tactics or any other factor, that was the primary agent that doomed Napoleon to defeat and eventual exile. To do this, he has to master two difficult disciplines --- military history and epidemiology --- and combine them, showing how one impacts the other.

For fans of military history, THE ILLUSTRIOUS DEAD contains plenty of tactical analysis, an in-depth discussion of the battles at Smolensk and Borodino (complete with lovely maps), stories from the diaries of the participants, and all the attendant blood and guts. For those on the medical side, there is a detailed treatise on the origins and history of typhus, a fascinating account of how the disease moves through populations, and an enlightening discourse on what Napoleonic doctors knew (or thought they knew) about typhus.

The combination of these two disciplines, in and of itself, would be reason enough to read and recommend the book. But the quality and depth of Talty's research serve primarily to complement the excellence of his writing. He manages the formidable job of exposition with relative ease, but his real strength is in the near-lyrical quality of his prose. Most good writers can write movingly and effectively about the beautiful and the sublime; it is Talty's gift to bring the horrible and miserable to vivid, compelling life. He delights in such outrages as the sacking of Moscow, the suffering of the Grand Army on the retreat, and the progressive horror of the onset of typhus symptoms on the vulnerable human body. Given Talty's talent in spinning prose from awfulness, the story of the Grand Army and the microbe must have been irresistible, just as THE ILLUSTRIOUS DEAD should be irresistible for readers.

--- Reviewed by Curtis Edmonds

This book totally grabbed me. Started reading it before bed and the next thing I knew it was 3 am. The way the story weaves in this killer microbe with Napoleon's invasion of Russia is incredibly intense. Couldn't put it down!

Competent military commanders have known for centuries that disease will take away more of their soldiers than cannonballs or bullets will. There was no truer case of this than that of Napoleon's Grande Armée, a multinational force of more than half a million men issuing from various nations in Europe with the mission of conquering Russia in 1812. Sure, most people know that the vicious Russian cold froze away any chance Napoleon had for victory, but his losses to typhus had cut his forces drastically long before the winter set in, and typhus kept killing. In _The Illustrious Dead: The Terrifying Story of How Typhus Killed Napoleon's Greatest Army_ (Crown), Stephen Talty has given the story of how the microbe conquered the army, within the larger story of the brutal and futile Russian campaign. Talty alternates military history and epidemiology, examining the battles but also looking into the command tent and the medical tents. His book contains battlefield descriptions that are often all the more ghoulish for being taken directly from the words of participants on the scene, and presents a vivid picture of the insanity of war.

Napoleon had little trust for his doctors, and the doctors were hindered by having little idea of the causes of disease. There was no germ theory, and no realization that it was a bad idea to put, say, wounded soldiers right next to infected ones, and no understanding that stripping the dead of their literally lousy uniforms for reuse was to send the disease to the next wearer. The agonizing disease caused by the microbe _Rickettsia prowazekii_ carried by lice was agonizing, causing multiple symptoms like blinding headache and nausea, incapacitating body pains, fever and chills, ravings, gangrene, and death after around ten days. Patients were in such agony that they begged someone to blow their brains out. It was the most deadly of the diseases the army carried. The descriptions of battle and the medical treatments of the time are not for the squeamish. Talty describes one battle after the other, and there are excellent battlefield diagrams to satisfy armchair tacticians who will enjoy the larger view of this particular campaign. He also shows Napoleon at his worst, overconfident and self-deluded. If there had been no typhus at play on the battlefields, our political world maps would now look completely different.

Talty winds up with the research of Frenchman Charles Nicolle, who in 1909 in Tunisia did classic experimentation to show that the common louse was the key carrier of the typhus microbe. He got the 1928 Nobel Prize for it, and confirmed what was only partially acknowledged in Napoleon's day: quarantine and hygiene were the defense against _Rickettsia_. Nowadays it is easily treated with antibiotics, but science works both ways. Talty winds up with the disclosure that a more powerful typhus germ may well be in military laboratories now, processed into powders or aerosols, ready to enter battlefields again, this time as a weapon.

Library shelves groan with loads of pop history books depicting all kinds of battles. But the ultra-modern writing quality of this narrowly focused tome makes it a real standout. Typhus defeated Napoleon in Russia in 1812, the book contends, not Alexander. Maybe so. Either way, your attention will be fixed by all the many details and grim scenes evoked in this account of how 19th century man experienced war amid a world of little to no scientific medical knowledge. Chilling, and grand, indeed.

As Talty notes near the end of the book, "General Winter" has stereotypically been assumed to have been the great wrecker of Napoleon's Grand Armee in Russia.

But, he makes a convincing case that the largest army assembled in modern history to that point, and probably ever, to that point, was an ideal vector for body lice to transmit typhus. And did so.

General Winter, and hunger, simply became opportunistic during the retreat, with possibly half or more of the troops battling the effects of typhus.

In turn, Talty looks at how Napoleon's decimated numbers may well have affected his strategy, above all at Borodino.

I thought this was a very good book about Napoleon's invasion of Russia. Before reading this I had no knowledge on this event in history. It was well written and kept me interested throughout. The problem is, I thought I was buying a book about Typhus destroying the army. Unfortunately the disease is rarely covered. It was almost as if occasionally the author would add the word "typhus" just because that is what he based his title on. Like I said, this is a good book, just a little misleading. Also, there are no notes throughout the book. I'd read a paragraph and wonder where the author got that information. There are notes in the back, but with no numbers or asterisks throughout it's hard to figure out. I wanted to give it 4 stars because I enjoyed it, but it really wasn't what I thought it would be.

Not all diseases that have spots and a fever are typhus and the quality of diagnostic medicine during the Napoleonic wars was suspect as best. Epidemic diarrhea, which would include a number of organisms other than Shigella was at least as serious a problem. Mortality of typhus increases with age hitting 50% for those of age fifty and beyond. Youngsters typically do far better. Consider that infectious disease still caused more casualties during the American Civil War than did wounds and included many diseases.

In discussing Napoleon's staff I think he doesn't do justice to the importance of Berthier who rather than a glorified secretary was Napoleon's Chief of Staff and was a perfect complement for Napoleon in coordinating the movements of the army. Some historians have suggested that it was his absence at Waterloo that was responsible for the shambles in communication of the French army.