Read The Illustrious Dead for Free Online Page A

clothed only in tree leaves. The disease claimed more on the way and bodies could be seen heaped on the side of the road. Of the 5,000 who started the retreat, perhaps 200 arrived safely in the holy city; from there, some French troops were forced to walk all the way back to their native land.
    The effects unspooled for years. Spain dominated the Continent, King Francis was humiliated and France radically weakened. Pope Clement VII rejected Henry VIII’s petition for divorce as a direct result of the defeat. Infuriated, the king broke with Rome and led his country into the Church of England.
    Even today, a believer kneeling to pray in a High Anglican Church worships, at least partly, in a structure built by an invisible microbe.
    The conflict revealed crucial aspects of the epidemic disease: It seemed to need large groups of people to thrive. It left dark spots on the torsos of many of its victims, sparing the hands and face (making it harder to detect in men who wore full uniforms). It had a terrifying mortality rate, up to 95 percent, among the highest of any epidemic disease known to humankind. And it had a decided predilection for war. It was almost as if nature had invented a biological sleeping agent to combat the wishes of ambitious men.
    N EARLY THREE HUNDRED YEARS after the siege of Naples, Napoleon reclaimed Francis’s sword after conquering Spain and brought it back to Paris in glory. He’d revenged the monarch’s humiliation. And now Napoleon imagined he was about to embark on a war that would share in the same codes of war.
    The historian David Bell has argued persuasively that in the years 1792-1815, the modern concept of “total war” came into being, ushered in by Enlightenment ideas about the perfectibility of society and the political upheavals that followed the French Revolution. The “culture of war” was transformed so that the struggle between France and the successive coalitions against it became, in the words of one French supporter, “a war to the death, which we will fight so as to destroy and annihilate all who attack us, or be destroyed ourselves.”
    The description fits Alexander’s view of the coming battle. The transformation of national conflicts into all-out, apocalyptic duels, a notion that has come cleanly down to us as a clash of civilizations in which one side must win or die, would be realized on the road to Moscow. And there, as in the modern version, faith would play a huge role.
    Certainly Napoleon endorsed such an all-encompassing view of war, especially early in his career. Still, he genuinely imagined the coming invasion would have certain limitations, especially in the endgame. He believed Alexander was a nobleman who would fight, be measured on the battlefield, and then settle according to the results of arms, as had Francis I and Charles of Spain. The emperor had badly misjudged the situation in Russia.
    But his war machine made the error seem irrelevant. If ever there had been an armed force built for total, annihilating war, it was the Grande Armée. No divisions on earth, arrayed against it in a straight-ahead confrontation, had a remote chance of winning.
    Except if they had a hidden, undetectable ally in the fever that had burned at Naples.

C  H  A  P  T  E  R     3
    Drumbeat
    A S WAR APPROACHED, ADVISERS BEGAN TO WARN N APO leon. His statistical expert, a Captain Leclerc, looked at the demographics and resources of Russian society and told the emperor that, if he invaded, his army would be “annihilated.” Others recounted in detail the deprivations suffered by the last army to invade the Russian hinterland: that of the strapping and enigmatic Charles XII of Sweden, whose forces were almost completely wiped out by cold, Cossacks, and disease in 1709. Charles would come to haunt Napoleon, as he paged through Voltaire’s history of the campaign on his way to Moscow. But more and more a smashing victory seemed an answer to Napoleon’s problems.