It was the hope of Russia and the fear of those Frenchmen who understood
the Russian climate that the campaign would drag into the winter.
Russians already told of the village blacksmith who laughed when he was
shown a French horseshoe which had been found on the road, and said: "Not
one of these horses will leave Russia if the army remains till frost sets
in!" The French horseshoes had neither pins nor barbed hooks, and it would
be impossible for horses thus shod to draw cannons and heavy wagons up and
down hill over frozen and slippery roads.
The annihilation of the Grand Army is not to be attributed to the cold and
the fearful conditions on the retreat from Moscow alone, the army was in
reality annihilated before it reached Russia, as we shall see by the
following description which I have taken from a Latin dissertation
(translated also into German) of the surgeon of a Wuerttembergian regiment,
Ch. Io. von Scherer, who had served through the whole campaign and in the
year 1820 had submitted this dissertation, "Historia Morborum, qui in
Expeditione Contra Russiam Anno 1812 Facta Legiones Wuerttembergicas
invaserunt, praesertim eorum qui frigore orti sunt," to the Medical
Faculty, presided over by F. G. Gmelin, to obtain the degree of doctor of
medicine.
The diseases which befell the soldiers in Russia extended over the whole
army. Von Scherer, however, gives his own observations only, which he had
made while serving in the Wuerttembergian corps of fourteen to fifteen
thousand men.
Pages:
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29