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Updated: May 8, 2025
While the dissertation of von Scherer treats on the fate of the Wuerttembergian corps of Napoleon's grand army, a memoir of First Lieutenant von Borcke who served as adjutant of General von Ochs in the Westphalian corps relates the fate of the Westphalians in the grand army of 1812. The Westphalians, 23,747 men strong, left Cassel in the month of March, 1812, to unite with the French army.
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.
The Westphalian corps was in as precarious a condition as the Wuerttembergian, as in fact the whole army and the Westphalian battalions were already reduced to one-half their former number. Many soldiers had remained behind on account of sickness or exhaustion, and officers were sent back to bring them to the ranks again. The whole army would have dissolved if the march had not been interrupted.
In the hospital of Mergentheim eight necropsies were held on corpses of soldiers who had returned mentally affected in consequence of exposure to extreme cold. Similar conditions had presented themselves in all these cases. Surgeon General von Kohlreuter attended an infantry officer who had arrived at Inorawlow, in Poland, where the remainder of the Wuerttembergian corps had rallied.
By order of Napoleon entire squads of marauders were shot. Von Roos, chief physician of a Wuerttembergian regiment, has seen that before their execution they had to dig their own graves. In Wilna already Davout ordered the execution of 70, and in Minsk of 13 marauders.
Von Lossberg says that Christian people of Wilna have also taken part in the massacre, and only the Poles did not participate. The Cossacks began their bloody work early in the morning. Awful cries of the tortured were heard in the Wuerttembergian hospital, telling the sick who were lying there what they themselves had to expect from the entering enemies.
Some Wuerttembergian soldiers, who during the first days of July had been sent on requisition, had discovered large quantities of brandy in a nobleman's mansion, and had indulged in its immoderate use and died, like all dysentery patients who took too much alcohol.
As a matter of course under the circumstances impossibility of bodily cleanliness this vermin developed in a way which baffles description. Suckow, a Wuerttembergian first lieutenant, speaks of it as causing intolerable distress, disturbing the sleep at the campfire. Johann von Borcke became alarmed when he discovered that his whole body was eaten up by these insects.
The putrefying flesh spread a terrible stench." Yelin speaks of a hospital in which all the inmates had been murdered by the Cossacks. He himself was in a Wuerttembergian hospital and describes his experience: "Terrible was the moment when the door was burst open. The monsters came in and distributed themselves all over the house.
One of the Wuerttembergian officers, a man of considerable military knowledge and experience, was attacked, a few days before reaching Wilna, with so pronounced a loss of sensation that he only vegetated, moving along in the column like a machine.
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