Haunting
Bones
Anthropologists Excited Over Discovery of Napoleonic
Army Remains
By Richard Gizbert
V I L N I U S, Lithuania, Dec. 22 |
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First, workers at a local building
site found one skeleton, then a few more and eventually hundreds —
and finally more than 3,000 sets of remains turned up in a mass grave.
The first idea was maybe we had found something from the Second World
War there," said Vilnius Mayor Arturas Zuokas.
But the theory that these remains were victims of Hitler, or even Stalin,
was off the mark by a century and a half.
When workers dusted off the evidence and brought out the metal detectors,
some buttons and coins starting turning up amid the bones. They bore
the mark of the French conqueror Napoleon.
It turns out the bones were those of soldiers who served with La Grande
Armee in Napoleon's disastrous attempt to conquer Russia nearly 200
years ago.
Horrible Deaths
The army that Napoleon marched through Vilnius on the way to Moscow
in the summer of 1812 was one of the largest ever assembled, 450,000
men. The army that retreated here the following winter was less than
a 10th of that size. Only 40,000 soldiers made it back to Vilnius, and
most of them died here.
Napoleon's Russia campaign is considered by historians to be one of
the biggest military blunders in history.
Anthropologists can see the horrible way the soldiers died in the position
of the bodies. Most were abandoned by Napoleon and froze to death in
a brutal winter with temperatures of minus 20 degrees Fahrenheit.
"Some bodies still were kept [in the] so-called embryo position,"
said Rimantas Jankauskas, an anthropology professor at the University
of Vilnius. "They were with bended arms and bended legs. A human
takes such a position when he is freezing, to get warmer."
Anthropological Gold Mine?
It's the largest mass grave ever found from the Napoleonic era, and
since only half his soldiers were French, with the rest from all over
Europe, it is a potential gold mine for anthropologists.
"This is like a cross-section of the young male population from
all Europe, from the very beginning of the 19th century," Jankauskas
said.
Among recently discovered remains of Napoleonic soldiers were the bones
of one who appeared to be about 15 years old when he died. (ABCNEWS.com)
The experts hope these skeletons can provide clues about the development
of diseases like tuberculosis and typhus. And they'll analyze the DNA,
which could help identify which family each soldier belonged to, including
one who appeared to be just 15 when he died.
"I think for him it was his first campaign and the last campaign,"
Jankauskas said.
The skeletons aren't all male. Three percent belonged
to women who served in La Grande Armee. They were cooks, seamstresses,
even prostitutes.
When Napoleon first brought his army to Vilnius, they were treated as
heroes, because Lithuanians saw the invaders from the west as their
best chance to escape their conquerors from the east, the Russian Empire.
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