Common lice

One of my many interests is history and I am always fascinated how sometimes the smallest things changed history. Who would think that the common louse could have defeated armies.

“Seen through an electron microscope (invented in Germany in 1939), a louse looks like pudgy long-horned devil with bulging eyes and six snaring arms. A military scourge in 1812, the bug vanquished Napolean’s Grande Armee en route to Moscow, a legend only recently confirmed by scientists. ‘We believe that louse-borne diseases caused much of the death of Napolean’s army’ Didleir Raout, of the Universite de la Medtierrannee in Marseille, reported in January 2005 issue of the Journal of Infectious Diseases, based on an analysis of tooth pulp from soldiers’ remains discovered in 2001 by construction workers in a mass grave near Vilnius, Lithuania. As body lice transmitted the agents of relapsing fever, trench fever, and epidemic typhus, Napolean’s Grand Army dropped from 500,000 to 3,000 mainly through pestilence. Friedrich Prinzing’s Epidemics Resulting from Wars, published in 1916, tells the same, and also points out that more men died from lice-borne diseases in the American Civil War than on its battlefields.”

From the Zookeeper’s Wife , by Diane Ackerman (I would highly recommend this book about Warsaw during WWII.

And all this time, I thought that the Russian winter and determination of the people defeated Napolean’s Grand Army.