After just six months, the army was forced to retreat in a tragic march through ice, hunger, and disease, and only tens of thousands of exhausted soldiers managed to return to France, according to the American newspaper CNN. This invasion is considered one of the most costly military campaigns in history; the deaths of hundreds of thousands of soldiers were attributed to the ferocity of the battles, the extreme cold, the lack of supplies, as well as the spread of a typhus epidemic that ravaged the army's ranks. However, researchers have finally discovered new genetic evidence in the DNA of the soldiers' remains, suggesting that the army may not have been weakened by a single disease, but by several deadly diseases at once, including two previously unknown types of bacteria. In the final years of his reign, French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte led an army of over half a million men to invade Russia in 1812. The results of this study were published on Friday in the scientific journal Current Biology. The lead researcher, Remy Barbieri, a former fellow at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Tartu, said: "We previously believed that only one infectious disease, typhus, had destroyed Napoleon's army, but we discovered what was not anticipated; this opens the door to the possibility of other infectious diseases that caused the soldiers' deaths." The research team was able to identify the two causes of the diseases—intestinal salmonella (Salmonella enterica) and recurrent borrelia (Borrelia recurrentis), two types of bacteria that cause typhoid and relapsing fever, respectively, by analyzing the teeth of soldiers whose remains were found in a mass grave discovered in 2001 in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. The study confirms that these results not only shed light on a tragic chapter in European military history but also highlight the extent of the scientific and technological progress that has enabled scientists to delve into the past and understand the health and historical conditions surrounding one of the worst human disasters in the history of modern warfare.
