Thousands of corpses of the foot soldiers who perished in Napoleon’s disastrous 1812 retreat from Moscow have been discovered in a mass grave in the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, offering a rich insight into the conditions and circumstances of history’s most tragic military march.
Lithuanian archaeologists and French experts in forensic exhumation are poring over the remains of 2 000 young men of the imperial Grand Army who died of cold, hunger, disease and Russian retribution following the collapse of Napoleon’s campaign on the scorched earth of Russia.
”This is a unique opportunity to prove some of the historical points about the retreat of the Grand Army,” said Professor Olivier Dutour, a Marseilles university anthropologist in charge of the exhumation project. ”We are looking directly at history.”
The mass grave was discovered almost a year ago when building workers laying telephone lines at a former Soviet military base in Vilnius stumbled upon piles of bones in a 100m2 ditch.
Because of the area’s association with the Red Army, it was instantly assumed that the corpses were of victims of communist or Nazi persecution from the 1940s or 1950s. But fragments of buttons, clothing and other artefacts soon revealed that the dead were from 190 years ago when tens of thousands of Bonapartist troops passed through Lithuania in their flight from the Russians in December 1812.
”Not all the uniforms were French. There were also Portuguese, Italian, maybe Swiss, soldiers of perhaps 20 nationalities,” said Olivier Poupard, charge d’affaires at the French embassy in Vilnius. ”It’s an exceptional discovery.”
The cold weather last winter delayed exhumation and examination, but in recent months French and Lithuanian researchers have been examining skeletons, teeth and bone remnants from what is believed to be the biggest mass grave from the Napoleonic wars yet found in Europe.
The anthropologists and archaeologists have recovered the skeletons of more than 1 700 males, mainly aged between 15 and 25. In total, there were about 2 000 bodies buried en masse in the trench that Napoleon’s men had dug themselves six months earlier, in June 1812, to fortify Vilnius as the emperor gathered an army of 614 000 men to invade Russia.
It was a decision Napoleon came to rue. That army was destroyed. Of more than 614 000, only 50 000 survived. As with Hitler 130 years later, the Russian campaign proved the turning point leading to defeat in Europe. From Borodino outside Moscow to Waterloo took three years. Within four years of invading Russia in 1941, the Nazis were routed.
Defeated by the Russians over several weeks, Napoleon abandoned his huge army and sped back to France escorted by a Lithuanian aide to whom he gave two pistols and ordered that he, Napoleon, should not be captured alive.
Ever since, historians have been divided over whether Napoleon made the weather an excuse for his defeat to cover up strategic and tactical blundering.
Dutour says the Vilnius discoveries vindicate the diminutive megalomaniac. ”The results confirm the extreme cold at this period. Napoleon claimed that he ordered the retreat because of the cold. And it’s clear that some of the corpses really were frozen solid when they died in temperatures of -40 degrees C. It was like being in a deep freeze.”
While the nationalities of the dead are not clear, it is assumed that the mass grave contained the remains of young men from all across Europe since the huge army assembled by Napoleon included Lithuanians as well as Poles, Germans, Austrians, Spanish and Croats.
But the pro-Napoleon hopes of the summer of 1812 quickly turned to despair, fear and panic by the winter. Contemporaneous accounts provide graphic detail of the death and horror stalking the city as the remnants of the Grand Army took the Baltic route west.
Robert Wilson, a British officer attached to the Russian general staff, described the scene at a French military hospital in Vilnius: ”The hospital presented the most awful and hideous sight: 7 500 bodies were piled up like pigs of lead over one another in the corridors. Carcasses were strewed about in every part; and all the broken windows and walls were stuffed with feet, legs, arms, hands, trunks and heads to fit the apertures and keep out the air from the yet living.”
The cold and hunger were exacerbated by the vengeance exacted by the Cossacks and Russian troops who harried the Napoleonic force.
The recovered remains are to be buried in a Vilnius cemetery, perhaps next month, although diplomatic and political considerations are delaying a decision. The French government is to supply a memorial. The researchers intend to excavate elsewhere in Vilnius, expecting to locate a further 10 000 corpses from Napoleon’s great defeat, although the French government does not look systematically for war dead from before 1870.
Analysis of the skeletons is providing much information on the diets, physical condition and illness at the beginning of the 19th century, says Dutour.
”This was not a French army. It was a European army,” he said. ”So it gives us a chance to look at the condition of the population of Europe at the beginning of the 19th century.” — (c) Guardian Newspapers 2002