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

The average rating for The Illustrious Dead: The Terrifying Story of How Typhus Killed Napoleon's Greatest Army based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-12-14 00:00:00 Cary Rappuhn I found this a very interesting look at what disease did to Napoleon's Army during his invasion of Russia in 1812. Starting with how the discovery of the mass graves in Vilnius in 2010 piqued his interest, Mr. Talty looks at how disease in general and typhus in particular affected Napoleon's army. In doing so, he takes on the common understanding that it was the cold of the Russian Winter that destroyed that army. His hypothesis is that disease had so weakened Napoleon's Army that the cold of the retreat simply finished the job. In addition to expounding on typhus, the author gives the reader a good overview of the Russian campaign itself. He looks at Napoleon's preparations, composition of the Army, it's commanders and their strengths and weaknesses, including Napoleon himself. He also does a good job of highlighting the battles of Smolensk and Borodino on the advance to Moscow as well as those on the retreat. His descriptions of the aftermath of the battles can be a little gruesome. This book is full of facts about typhus itself, ie how it evolved, how it is passed, what it does to the body, etc. In telling about the effects of the disease, the author states some amazing statistics. For example, one week after crossing the Neman, his army of 450,000 front line troops, with another 150-200,000 second line troops, had already lost 300 men to disease with another 700 on the sick lists. By the time he captured Smolensk his front line strength was down to 200,000 and at Borodino Napoleon had appox 135,000 front line troops left. The vast majority of the losses were due to typhus/dysentery not combat. When the decision was made to abandon Moscow the army was down to about 75,000 men, again most of the losses were mainly to disease, and the author does a good job of explaining how this limited Napoleon's options on routes to take on his retreat. Napoleon was felt he was so weak that he couldn't risk a major battle. As a result he retreated through the wasteland that the route he used on his advance to Moscow. Mr. Talty again does a good job explaining the results of this decision on what was left of the army. In describing the retreat, I felt the author did a good job of telling of the disintegration of the army and the effects of the cold on both men and the typhus bacteria. He also offers some gruesome insights to what happened to French prisoners - not a pleasant read. In summary, Mr. Talty tells his story on two tracks. The first is what typhus is and what it did to Napoleon's army. The second is a more conventional history of the invasion, ie what battles were fought, who fought them, the results of those battles and the political situation leading to and resulting from the invasion. I found this very fascinating read and rate it a solid 4 stars

Review # 2 was written on 2016-02-19 00:00:00 Richard Leach I did not enjoy this. Napoleon's invasion of Russia is very interesting and typhus is very interesting, but this book is under-reasoned and over-written. To start with "over-written": holy crap. Anthropomorphize typhus once, yeah sure fine whatever. But Talty writes endlessly and repeatedly about the bacteria "planning" and how clever it was to choose lice as a vector, so much so that I became convinced that he forgot that the bacteria didn't choose anything, they don't collude; they're bacteria. And on that note, Talty: Rickettsia prowazekii is a bacteria that causes the disease typhus. Humans don't die of R. prowazekii (or "Rickettsia" as Talty insists inappropriately on calling it), they die of typhus; and typhus isn't alive, it's an illness resulting from infection. It's hard to take anything that pretends to be factual seriously when the author can't seem to take the trouble to understand the concepts he's writing about. I have gotten side-tracked from the "over-written." There's a long setpiece after the Battle of Borodino about doctors performing amputations in field hospitals (which the author never bothers to link back to typhus), with descriptions of profiles being thrown onto walls by candlelight. Or at least, as Talty admits, they "would have been." ARGH. Don't make shit up just because you think it will sound cool! Go write a novel if that's what you wanted to do! (And, I haven't checked if this already exists, but someone should absolutely write a novel about Prussian soldier Captain Röder, who is basically the hero of an adventure yarn as it is: the dude seems tough as nails, intelligent, romantic, pining, and beset by incident.) As for reasoning, Talty admits that the French army surgeons didn't keep consistent records of the patients they treated, that they were unable to distinguish typhus from other febrile illnesses, that Napoleon didn't spend sufficient consideration on the extension of his supply lines so far into Russia, yet still somehow manages to attribute the death of everyone with a fever in Napoleon's army to typhus. After reading the book, I have the same conception of the situation that I had before: Napoleon's soldiers died of a lot of things in Russia, and one of them was typhus. Talty also is seriously down on Kutuzov for abandoning Moscow to Napoleon, which seems like a stupidly misplaced criticism to me: after going on and on about how the Russians were out-fought by the French, and how costly and bloody and gruesome the battles were, why would Talty want Kutuzov to fight another? Instead the Russians lost buildings instead of thousands of human lives, and the French were unable to pursue the Russian army and were forced to retreat. Kutuzov's decision effectively ended the war: Napoleon left Russia, at great cost to himself and without gaining anything. The... muddied logic? ignorance?... extends to the epilogue, which describes Charles Nicolle's work in Tunis where he identified the transmission method of typhus. Not to understate this enormous accomplishment, but that was all he did. He did not "isolate the pathogen" as Talty claims. I can't get over it. Talty describes Nicolle injecting a chimpanzee with blood from a human typhus patient, and then when the chimpanzee becomes ill, injecting a macaque with the chimpanzee's blood, and then when the macaque gets sick, Talty proclaims, "He had isolated the pathogen." Ugh. And then, when Nicolle injects two children with a mixture made of ground-up fleas from the macaque and the children fall ill but don't die, Talty announces, "The protocol was complete." ARGH. Ground-up fleas injected into two children are not a protocol! Charitably I assume Talty was eliding many steps in the process of medical research in order to make his story more digestible and, less forgivably, more dramatic, but this is a horrible thing to do; it's misleading at best, and dangerous when it convinces people to misunderstand vaccines or expect facile solutions to complex problems. And this was the point at which I finally realized, too late, that this is not a history book; it's sensationalist journalism spun out to hundreds of pages.