Bookreporter.com - THE ILLUSTRIOUS DEAD by Stephan Talty

THE ILLUSTRIOUS DEAD: The Terrifying Story of How Typhus Killed Napoleon's Greatest Army
Stephan Talty
Crown
History
ISBN: 9780307394040

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, who writes the "Northbound" blog at http://www.txreviews.com/blog.

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