Napoleon's 1812 Russian Campaign: Lost to Typhus Before the Snow Fell

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The legend says General Winter beat Napoleon in Russia, but most of the Grande Armée was gone before the first snow. The roots lay in 1807, when Napoleon and Tsar Alexander I allied and Russia joined the Continental System, a blockade of British trade that strangled Russian exports of timber, hemp and grain. By 1810 Alexander had withdrawn, and in June 1812 Napoleon crossed the Niemen with an army estimated at 450,000 to 685,000 men, about 150,000 horses and 25,000 supply wagons, built for the paved roads of central Europe.

Summer thunderstorms turned Russian dirt tracks into mud, wagons sank to their axles and horses died, while Napoleon pushed forced marches to catch an army that would not stand. Barclay de Tolly and Kutuzov retreated, burning crops and villages. At Borodino on 7 September about 70,000 fell, yet Napoleon held back the Imperial Guard. He entered Moscow on 14 September, governor Fyodor Rostopchin had it set ablaze, and Napoleon waited five weeks for a peace offer that never came. Blocked at Maloyaroslavets, the army retreated along its own devastated road into the winter.

Starving soldiers bled living horses and baked the blood with flour into a crude black pudding.
Typhus spread by body lice, with starvation and desertion, cost Napoleon half his combat strength before any major battle.
Farriers had brought no calked winter horseshoes, so horses fell on the ice and artillery and Moscow loot were abandoned.
Swiss engineers died of hypothermia building pontoon bridges over the Berezina.
After General Malet nearly seized Paris with forged news of his death, Napoleon left his army on 5 December and raced home by sled.

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