He had lost an average of 3,000 men every day of his campaign. The majority of those deaths, perhaps as many as 200,000, were from disease, with typhus the lead killer. One doctor called it a dying-off that “had scarcely a parallel in the history of the world.”The Grande Armée didn’t keep precise statistics of cause of death, so how can one be sure that typhus was responsible for so many casualties? By sifting through the various theories and comparing them with the descriptions given by the soldiers themselves, one can discern the main causes of death on the road to and from Moscow with some clarity.The response from the top ranks of the medical corps was confusion. Dr. Larrey noticed the men stumbling out of the ranks and falling down dead in the road, but in his memoirs, he makes a startling claim about what was killing them: not disease, Larrey claimed, but exposure, constant rains, and hard drinking. “These unfavorable circumstances,” Larrey wrote, “in conjunction with the immoderate use of chenaps (the brandy of the country), proved fatal to a large number of the conscripts of the junior guard.”
