Napoleon's Buttons
October 1812: the notoriously frigid Russian winter was approaching. Napoleon and his Grande Armée were in Moscow. Moscow was a ghost town when they arrived, but Russian patriots stayed behind to torment the invaders, setting fires the following morning. Now there was no chance that Napoleon and his men could spend the winter there. The Russians had seen to it that food would be in brutally short supply for the enemy by implementing a scorched-earth policy, dictating what Napoleon would do next, with temperatures steadily plummeting in the ghost town that was Moscow. Napoleon had decided to retreat from the city, but only after receiving word that there were supplies to be had at Kaluga, 150 kilometres to the southwest. He sent his handsome adopted son on ahead. There was no question that Eugène de Beauharnais, the handsome only son of Empress Joséphine would not have accompanied Napoleon to Russia, considering how heavily he was in his adoptive father's debt. Napoleon has made de Beauharnais one of the Imperial Family, a French prince, Viceroy of Italy, heir presumptive to the Kingdom of Italy and Prince de Venise. Napoleon even used his influence to have de Beauharnais named heir to the duchy of Frankfurt.
Dutifully, de Beauharnais led 15,000 southwest to clear the path for Napoleon and his troops. En route, he decided to take control of a bridge not far from Maloyaroslavets. Word of the Franco-Italian presence spread quickly; General Dmitri Dokhturov was sent by his superior with 20,000 men. The Battle of Maloyaroslavets was a bloody one, with losses in the thousands on both sides. While the troops under de Beauharnais won the battle, it was a Pyrrhic victory: there was no way to get to Kaluga, after all.
Eugène de Beauharnais, Viceroy of Italy, Prince of Venice, Grand Duke of Frankfurt, Duke of Leuchtenberg, Prince of Eichstätt by Andrea Appiani, 1800.
So Napoleon changed course, leading his troops west, to Borovsk, where the Grande Armée had artillery (but nothing to feed the troops or the horses worth mentioning). To make matters worse, trouble was brewing at home, the perfect excuse for Napoleon to leave Russia on a sleigh, designating his brother-in-law General Joachim Murat Commander-in-Chief.
Murat, in common with de Beauharnais, was deeply in Napoleon's debt. Married to his sister Caroline Bonaparte, Murat was never far from Napoleon's side. Now, with Napoleon on his way back to Paris, Murat found himself in charge of an army made up of men more dead than alive. French troops were surrendering to the enemy, alarmed by the cold, certain to get worse, and the prospect of no food. The situation was so bad that troops were known to eat any horse that collapsed; so ravenous were they that the soldiers did not always wait for the horse to die before butchering the helpless animal. No surprise rather than wait for les Generals Janvier and Fevrier to finish everyone off, the Grande Armée retreated just days after Napoleon left. Of 615,000 soldiers, only 110,000, emaciated and frostbitten, went home to France.
Napoleon's Russian campaign invasion was one of the worst military failures in Western history, a subject of debate over two centuries later, brought up again in 2003 when a book proposing that seventeen molecules changed the world was published. The authors maintained that consistently cold temperatures - such as those endured by Napoleon's troops - triggered a chemical reaction affecting the tin buttons worn by the Grande Armée, fastening officers' greatcoats and foot soldiers' trousers, affecting the outcome of the Russian campaign.
Tin has been mined since the beginning of the Bronze Age, circa 3000 B.C., mined in Cornwall from circa 2150 B.C. The Phoenicians controlled the tin trade; the Greeks believed tin came from the Cassiteredes, (Greek; κασσίτερος = kassíteros = tin) that seventeenth-century English historian William Camden identified as the Scilly Islands (Camden taught playwright Ben Jonson at Westminster School; he had a curious connection to colonial Virginia that you can read about here.) Herodotus mentioned the Cassiteredes in his Histories ('From where we are said to have our tin') The Sicilian-born Greek historian Diodorus Siculus wrote in Bibliotheca historica:
'They that inhabit the British promontory of Belerion [possibly Cornwall] by reason of their converse with strangers are more civilised and courteous to strangers than the rest are. These are the people that prepare the tin, which with a great deal of care and labour, they dig out of the ground, and that being done the metal is mixed with some veins of earth out of which they melt the metal and refine it. Then they cast it into regular blocks and carry it to a certain island near at hand called Ictis for, at low tide, all being dry between there and the island, tin in large quantities is brought over in carts.'
There is a persistent legend that the wealthy tin merchant Joseph of Arimathea went to Cornwall, possibly bringing a young Jesus with him to preach to the tin miners there.
Tin is an element, useful for its lightness and ductility. But consistent exposure to a temperature of 13.2 °C (about 56 °F) or below can trigger tin pest. Tin pest, tin blight, tin disease, even tin leprosy: deteriorating tin has been a problem for centuries. Pest is the German word for the plague and superstitious medieval churchgoers may have seen deteriorating tin organ pipes as a manifestation of it. Tin pest is the transformation of tin, an element, from one allotrope to another: white tin (or β-form tin/beta-form tin) into grey tin (or α-form tin/alpha-form tin) after consistent exposure to cold, its crystal structure changed, reducing metal into dust. But this is a slow process, taking up to eighteen months. (Unless you're in a hurry - and have a lab - and expose a pure tin ingot to a temperature of - 40.0 C for the better part of a day; see the video above).
Paul Delaroche: 'Napoleon at Fontainebleau 31 March 1814'. (One of three versions; all painted 1840s.) Osborne House; acquired by Queen Victoria as a present for Prince Albert in 1848; first recorded at Osborne House in 1873.
What remained of Napoleon's Grande Armée retreated from Russia in mid-December 1812. Did the temperature drop below 13.2 C? Of course, it did. But the soldiers were not subjected to this brutal weather (or even merely cold weather) non-stop for eighteen months. And the buttons were not pure tin (the ingots tested were) but made of a tin alloy.
So why would buttons that were not made of pure tin, and were not consistently exposed to weather cold enough to produce the allotropic reaction mentioned above for eighteen months decompose? It is questionable if any fell apart, much less turned to dust. But it is a story tens of thousands of new chemistry students are told every year in the United States alone.
While eyewitnesses reported that Napoleon's soldiers were wrapping themselves in blankets, even the odd carpet to keep warm does not mean their buttons had blown away with the wind. And there was a pertinent discovery made in Vilnius in 2002. Workers digging trenches to lay telecommunications cables in unearthed bones. At first, no one was quite certain as to why there were bones beneath a city street. Professor Rimantas Jankauskas of Vilnius University, an anthropologist at the Faculty of Medicine there, directed the excavation with a team of French anthropologists led by anthropologist Olivier Dutour of the Faculty of Medicine at Marseille University.
While eyewitnesses reported that Napoleon's soldiers were wrapping themselves in blankets, even the odd carpet to keep warm does not mean their buttons had blown away with the wind. And there was a pertinent discovery made in Vilnius in 2002. Workers digging trenches to lay telecommunications cables in unearthed bones. At first, no one was quite certain as to why there were bones beneath a city street. Professor Rimantas Jankauskas of Vilnius University, an anthropologist at the Faculty of Medicine there, directed the excavation with a team of French anthropologists led by anthropologist Olivier Dutour of the Faculty of Medicine at Marseille University.
As Professor Jankauskas recalled:
'Initially, we did not know what it was. We thought it might be a legal case. The first finds were therefore transported to the forensic medicine institute. But later on, together with bones, buttons [were uncovered]. After some historical analysis, it turned out that these were French military buttons. And it became clear that the site might be a mass grave for French soldiers. And the only [occurrence] when the French army came to Lithuania was during Napoleon's campaign in 1812.'
'French military buttons'. French military buttons that had not disintegrated. French military buttons that helped identify the bones. So much for tin pest altering the course of European history...
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