I think the cold thing would be a serious problem. Zombies have no body heat, so below freezing, they’re going to freeze up and the Russians can just pile them up and set em on fire.
Les loup garou* were more of a French thing; Wellington was an Irishman, which means he’d most likely employ banshees, pookahs and the Wild Hunt.
Leprecauns may be employed in a logistical capacity.
Too much fluid content to burn.
They’d just thaw out.
We are talking about ‘real’ zombies here I presume…i.e ‘zombies’ who are basically drugged people who are under psychological control due to a combination of drugs and psychological conditioning. If we are talking about fictional zombies then…well, that’s another matter.
I don’t see how it would have helped. The zombies would still need to eat, and if they didn’t notice the cold they would still be effected by it. Disease too. They might not feel pain or complain about the effects of cold, starvation or disease, but they would still die from it. And in the end that’s what killed nearly all of the French troops.
I don’t see how, unless we are talking about fictional zombies like in the movies or World War Z or something along those lines. If we are talking about supposed ‘real’ zombies a la voodoo, then I don’t see how it would help.
Now…if you had a zombie army at, say, Waterloo, then you could simply keep attacking the English on the high ground until they were over run…or until you ran out of zombies. Once the Imperial Guard routed (in the real world) it demoralized the rest of the army, and they fled. If you had zombies though, you wouldn’t have a morale problem, so you could just keep attacking until you ran out of troops.
What you might want though is a zombie Napoleon, since one of the things that delayed the French (and possibly cost them the battle) was that Napoleon was sick before and during the battle, so the attack didn’t start even close to on time. You might want a zombie Ney too, since his charge was totally idiotic…perhaps if he’d been a zombie he wouldn’t have done something so rash.
I presume they would fight until they keeled over from the effects of the cold, starvation and disease. The thing is, France didn’t lose in Russia because the troops couldn’t fight…they lost because the troops were dieing in job lots DUE to the cold, disease and starvation. Zombies would fare no better than the actual troops wrt this…they would just complain less.
-XT
The Czar would have offered a fortune nobody could resist to learn the secrets of making zombies. Once done, he’d have raised the Russian dead and the fields would be the same as before, except there’d be lots of zombies.
How do you drill or discipline a zombie brigade into following (or understanding) orders I wonder.
I was at the battlefield of Chickamauga this weekend and the car ahead of mine (it’s a driving tour) had a “South’s Gonna Do It Again” bumper sticker with the (erroneous) Confederate flag. It made me think of zombie rebs and zombie Yanks clawing through the (quite pretty) foliage and reenacting each night, all new meaning to “The South Rises Again”. (“Plug that gap boys… no, I mean the one in his face!”)
Just in case anyone’s taking this seriously, “real” zombies are as fictional as the magical kind. The “scientific” explanation of zombism stems mostly from the work of Wade Davis, who wrote “The Serpent and the Rainbow.” From a relevant article. Although the author is a bit more credulous than he should be, he does hit on some important points: Davis’ methods were highly questionable and his hypothesis has been bitterly disputed by other scientists. The notion that voodoo practitioners administer powerful pharmacological with the necessary precision to convincingly simulate death without actually causing death, and use another drug to keep their victims in trance-like states for years at a time without killing them, and maintain hordes of zombie slaves on a densely populated island without being discovered would require extraordinary evidence. None has ever been presented.
Of course France did fight the Haitians during the Napoleonic era, from 1791-1804. Did the Haitians deploy zombie auxillaries? A fascinating possibility. But bear in mind the French used thousands of Polish troops.
Zombies vs Polocks…
I think sethness would be leading it the way he’s been resurrecting threads lately.
It just occurred to me that Napoleon conquered Egypt as well. So in addition to Haitian zombie-tech, he might also have gained access to Egyptian mummy-tech.
Would mummy grenadiers add anything to the equation?
I think that’s important. They’d do better in warmer climates, or after the invention of heated vehicles.
I now have this image of WWI-II being fought with zombie guided weaponry. Reuse your fallen as zombie kamikazes. Remove everything but the head and an arm or two to save weight and use them as primitive guidance systems. Zombie guided missiles and torpedoes.
I also note that experimental submarines were built well before the Napoleonic era. Zombie crewed submarines would have become practical much earlier than subs did in real life, given that zombies don’t need to breathe. Napoleon’s naval forces with a zombie monopoly could have been much more effective than they were in real life. England could have been in trouble.
Another thought; how are the zombies controlled? If it’s “mutter a magic spell and they obey”, you’ve just handed Napoleon something nearly equivalent to a monopoly on radio.