Napoleon's Lost Army: The Soldiers Who Fell

Page 5 of 8

• 1. The discovery of a grave
• 2. Napoleon's strategy
• 3. Russian withdrawal
• 4. Disaster
• 5. Harrowing defeat
• 6. Aftermath
• 7. Tales from the grave
• 8. Find out more
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Harrowing defeat

Although Vilnius's 17 typhus-ridden monasteries had already been turned into makeshift hospitals, they lacked food or medicines, and many thousands of men died in them. On entering one such monastery-hospital, General Sir Robert Wilson (Britain's emissary to the Tsar), who had arrived in Vilnius with the Russians, saw thousands of bodies 'strewed [sic] about in every part... all the broken windows and walls were stuffed with feet, legs, arms, hands ...to fit the apertures, and keep out the air from the yet living.'

'...who arrived in January 1813 to see the frozen corpses piled up three-storeys high.'

In another account, Count Rochechouart, a French aristocrat in the Tsar's service, tells how he did his best to stop Russian soldiers flinging the 'yet living' out of upstairs windows to make room for their own wounded. And yet another description comes from the German writer Ernst Moritz Arndt, who arrived in January 1813 to see the frozen corpses piled up three-storeys high, and to hear them 'rattling' in the streets as sleighs went about collecting them.

Some he saw 'flung into the Vilia river' to float down to the Niemen and out into the Baltic where, he said, 'they'll make a meagre diet for the fishes.' Meanwhile, the glamorous French cavalry leader 'King' Joachim Murat (Napoleon's brother-in-law whom he had made King of Naples) was left in command at Vilnius. He, however, simply panicked and fled, declaring 'I'm not going to be trapped in this piss-pot'.

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