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Napoleonic soldiers who froze in retreat finally put to rest

Almost 200 years after they froze to death during the epic retreat from the gates of Moscow, some 3,000 soldiers from Napoleon's "grand army" were finally given a proper burial Sunday.

With the French tricolor fluttering over a Vilnius hillside while diplomats devoted speeches to the unification of Europe, the remains of the young men from all over Europe were laid to rest in a Lithuanian cemetery reserved for national heroes.

The remains were discovered by accident two years ago when building workers uncovered a 100m2 mass grave, the biggest such find in Europe from the Napoleonic wars, containing the bones and skulls of around 3,000 males, some as young as 15.

Vilnius, where Russians, Poles and Germans have joined battle for centuries, served as a base for the biggest army yet assembled when Napoleon embarked on his ill-fated Russian campaign in midsummer 1812.

An army at least 500,000 strong and gathered from the subjugated nations of Europe crossed from what was then the Duchy of Warsaw into Russian-held Lithuania in preparation for what Napoleon expected would be the Tsar's capitulation and a mighty blow to the defiant "nation of shopkeepers," the British empire.

The miscalculation was colossal. Of the 500,000 who sped into Lithuania that summer, 50,000 made it back as far as Vilnius the following winter. The Russian disaster was the war's turning point, as it was for Hitler 131 years later. Within three years, Napoleon had met his Waterloo.

The remains buried yesterday in white plastic bags were of some of the soldiers who reached Vilnius in December 1812, only to perish of cold and hunger. Anthropologists and archaeologists who have been examining the remains for the past 18 months found little evidence of wounds. Many of the dead were curled into the fetal position, indicating a slow death from exhaustion and cold.

It is believed that at least half of the dead were non-French, since the ranks of the grand army which invaded Russia included Portuguese and Poles, Croats and Germans, Spaniards -- and even Lithuanians, who welcomed Napoleon in Vilnius, hoping for deliverance from Russia.
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