Napoleon Bonaparte

Let's start with something like 35,000. For the purposes of this post, we'll say that's about how many men landed in Egypt with Napoleon Bonaparte in 1798. It's easy to say or type a number like that, but can you visualise or imagine how much that actually is?

Disclaimer: All numbers are approximate/within an estimated range. This post is more about the general idea of scale rather than super accurate numbers.

Now, it might just be the 'tism kicking in, but on occasion when reading about the Napoleonic Wars and other connected events, I have to just sit back for a moment and appreciate the gigantic scale of everything. Because 35,000 is already a lot, and it'll only get bigger.

So here's 35,000 visualised, as a starter:

It's already a lot. Each of those icons is a soldier with his own life, his own story, his own motivations, possibly with a family, who needs to be clothed, fed, treated if injured (well, in theory), trained, and so on. If you were to try to give each of these men 1km² of land in the modern-day Netherlands, you'd be 1,107km² short, assuming we only use land area and not the bits covered in water. Better get reclaiming more land from the sea. Alternatively, if you brought them all into line together, assuming that a 1,000-man infantry formation (though most of the time one could only dream of being at such a strength in a battalion) takes up 200m in line, the resulting formation would be 7km long. I encourage you to use this map radius generator to see how far that stretches from a place familiar to you, and probably a little further because this does not account for cavalry, artillery or baggage. An average runner who finishes a 5k in 40 minutes would need to run for nearly a complete hour just to go from one end of this line to the other.

Now let's move to something bigger.

130,000: for the purposes of this post, the strength of Napoleon's army at the Battle of Borodino. I mean, who can really imagine 130,000 of anything, let alone 130,000 living men all together descending upon a single battlefield?

In fact, Tumblr won't actually let me insert my image for this visualisation properly because it's too ridiculous. So kindly peruse this Imgur link instead, and note just how much scrolling it takes to get to the bottom. Each chunk is 1,300 men, and there are 100 of them. 30,000 of these men would be killed or wounded, which works out to about 23 of those chunks, or almost the entirety of the previous visualisation. Oh, and let's not forget the Russian forces, which are probably another copy of that image.

If you tried lining that army up in one line, using the same assumptions as before, you'd have a line 26km long. Again, find out how far that can get you from a familiar location, remembering that this is again an underestimate. The tallest mountain in the solar system is 27km tall. The line stood up would be about three times as tall as Mount Everest. Also, if we wanted to continue trying to give out 1km² of land per soldier, Greece would be 1,100km² short but Bangladesh would do.

So as you can see, it's rapidly becoming rather stupid, especially when you consider the carnage that is feeding, clothing, training, motivating and policing them all. Let us remember that for each uniform the materials need to be grown and collected, transported to be turned into fabric, the fabric sewn into uniform, the uniform transported and issued to the soldier, with some articles only intended to last a year or two after all that. Food has to be gotten from somewhere (no wonder there were such supply problems) and kept close enough to be useful. It is said that it took 3 months for a recruit to become a useful infantryman, longer for cavalry and other more skilled occupations.

Let's go a little bigger still.

500,000: We'll call it about the number of men that marched into Russia, and also a conservative estimate of the number of men involved in the Battle of Leipzig.

Visualising this number is so stupid that I broke Microsoft Paint, so I had to split it into multiple images for it to not corrupt the file. As above, peruse the Imgur link here. Again, there are 100 chunks (10 per image due to the above restriction), but this time each chunk has 5000 men.

If we speak of Leipzig, 100,000 of these men (20 chunks) would be casualties by the end of the battle. If we choose Russia, barely 120,000 would survive, leaving casualties of somewhere around 380,000 (76/100 chunks).

The line is now 100km long. The line of casualties in Russia is 76km long. On my map with a radius of 100km, I am rapidly approaching the borders of 3 countries. Continuing with our 1km² of land, the entire country of Spain is now insufficient and 1,020km² short. According to The Measure Of Things, that's about 60,000 times as long as Napoleon was tall. Do with that information what you will.

And biggest.

3,500,000: The lower end of the estimates of total casualties during the Napoleonic Wars.

You're going to need to zoom in quite a lot for this one, but I promise that the individual men are still there. These are the same 5,000-man chunks as last time, but now there are 700 of them (70 per image spread across 10 images due to restrictions). Peruse the Imgur here, but proceed with caution as I have had reports of this crashing browsers on older devices. Because it's just that much. We've really reached a pretty incomprehensible number of people at this point.

The hypothetical line is now 700km long. That's pretty ridiculous. It's longer than the Grand Canyon, half the length of the Rhine river, a quarter of the length of the Danube and one tenth of the length of the Amazon river. It's 100 times the earlier example of the Egyptian Campaign. The country of India is wildly insufficient for giving out land with a defecit of 526,810km², and the next largest country is Australia, which has plenty of space.

At this point my visualising has not only broken every art app I have, but also browsers on old devices, so I don't think I can go much further without some sort of supercomputer. So...

To conclude.

It's easy to write numbers without really understanding what they mean. As a physicist by education, I'm painfully familiar with the feeling. And there are many other factors of scale that one could go into, such as the size of warships and how much space battles actually took up, but for the sake of simplicity I have prioritised numbers of men here as they are a commonly given statistic.

Now that we've taken a little tour through scale, I'd like to engage in some contemplating.

Even with an understanding of the magnitude, it's difficult to comprehend just how significant 3.5 million casualties is, and it might just be me but I really have to sit there and think about the fact that that is 3.5 million people who lived and died or were wounded in the name of conflicts largely fuelled by human greed.

I know I've repeated this point a few times in this post, but I find it important to reiterate: each of those men, and indeed all of those in all of the examples here, and however many millions more, were their own person. Each had their own motivations, friends, family, lives before and potentially after the army. For each one the army had to source uniforms (which had to be made in the first place), weapons, horses for cavalry, guns for artillery, food to keep them alive (not that that was a given the whole time). Something that is often overlooked is the absolute logistical carnage necessary to keep such huge armies marching before they even meet the enemy. Behind the battles and the marches is a separate army in its own right: the baggage train, the suppliers, the couriers, everyone involved in the logistics of just making the whole thing exist. Without them, there would be no Grande Armée and no French Empire.

The numbers aren't just numbers. They're people, all of whom probably had an entirely different life and experience from everyone else. There's a solid chance that you, reader, are related to one (or more) of those icons in the images in some way. Just because we only have a handful of memoirs and life stories, most of them of people who are wealthy or privileged in some other way, recorded out of the millions of dots doesn't mean that the rest of them don't matter.