This came up at dinner tonight. Imagine if the French had learned how to make zombies when they suppressed Toussaint L’ouverture’s revolution in Haiti. As a result, France becomes the only European power capable of fielding an undead army. So then, a few years later when Napoleon invades Russia, a large proportion of the Grande Armee consists of zombie troops instead of French conscripts.
Under those circumstances, could the invasion of Russia have succeeded?
It seems like having a zombie army would eliminate many of the problems that Napoleon had with supply and disease. On the other hand, how would zombies fare in the Russian winter? Would they still be an effective fighting force, or would they just freeze solid?
It’s besides the point, anyway - Cossak hit-and-run tactics would make short work of a lumbering zombie army.
Frankly, I’ve never been that impresses with zombie warfare. They’re slow, they lack initiative and they’re lousy with weapons. Any marginally competant military force could make short work of them. Not to mention the fact that any 1st-level cleric can turn them without breaking a sweat - all the Russians would have to do is place some Orthodox priests in the front line, and the enemy would crumble in minutes.
Maybe; zombies would be a lot harder to disable with the personal weapons of the time.
It depends on the zombies. Especially with magic powered ones that can ignore little things like the laws of nature. For an extreme case, there’s the super-zombie ghouls ( it’s never explicitly said they are zombies but it seems nearly certain in context ) in the Harry Dresden novel White Night. Even when downed by modern firepower, they just oozed back together like fleshy versions of the liquid metal Terminators. Good luck beating something like that with muskets.
There are fast zombies, smart zombies, hard-to-stop zombies; so the answer to the OP depends a lot on what kind of zombie. And magically controlled zombies do better in the initiative department just by having intelligent commanders. And as I recall the Napoleonic era didn’t really have snipers to take them out like we do now.
But no zombie knows how to duck.
Artillery, loaded with grape shot/cannister, would make Zombie Hash out of them.
Remember–Zombies have been known to “slip their leash”, & turn on the zombie master. The odds of mutiny of a Zombie Army would be far higher than in Napoleon’s regular troops, who had high morale.
In Napoleonic times, there were only slow, magically-controlled Zombies created by Afro-carribean voodoo priests. The fast zombies didn’t come along until the English Government started experimenting with the simian rage virus.
The problem they would have is transportation. You’d have to round them up and ship them from Haiti to the Eastern front. I think this would have been a bigger logistical nightmare than the Russian winter.
I am certainly not a mod but – Great Debates? Really?
Anyway, a vodou zonbi army would be of very limited use against an army of trained soldiers capable of independent thought, action, and speech. I suppose they could be useful as sort of robot drones, sent out en masse to distract fire from the troops doing the real work.
Even within Haitian folklore, there seem to be at least two zombie traditions. One is that zombies have actually been brought back from the dead. Since they’ve already died, merely killing them again might not be enough to stop them.
The other is that zombies are living people who have been drugged and/or enchanted to simulate death. These unfortunates would presumably be just as vulnerable to normal weapons as any other soldier. More so, in fact, since they wouldn’t have the will or the wit to avoid injury.
ETA: His Hamster Highness slipped in while I was typing. I see he describes the zombie forces as reanimated corpses, but the “zombie powder” reference seems to indicate people under the influence of drugs. Is it really necessary to drug a reanimated corpse? That seems like overkill.
Now if Napoleon could use something like a balloon to spread his zombie powder on the battlefield, thusly increasing the number of undead at his command…
Slow but good at using tools and hence good as soldiers. Remember how many plantations and farms operated on zombie labor at this time. The big problem is getting the command staff to accept zombie companies and regiments; that’s what stopped their use in WW I after all.
OK - those were Cambodian zombies if I remember correctly. But getting the military to accept zombies is tougher than getting them to accept women.
