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of their own land.

CHAPTER TEN
    The Fourth Coalition
    Alexander returned to St Petersburg to a rapturous reception from his people. Their little father was back and with the defeat of Austerlitz still unknown to most of them, he was still their hero.
    Only his wife, Elizabeth, his doctor and, to some extent his mother, Maria Feodorovna, knew of his mental agony as the images of those dreadful scenes of battle, and of what he now felt to be his own inadequacy as a commander, tortured his sensitive mind. Wylie, for his part, cursed his own failure to relieve the misery he found himself forced to witness. Medicine, even if forced on Alexander, would be useless and other remedies there were none. Sympathy and exhortation to try to put his troubles from his mind produced only outbursts of fury for which he invariably apologized with all of his endearing charm. Eventually, and as his doctor now knew inevitably, Alexander found some comfort in the arms of his Polish mistress, the vibrant, dark-haired Maria Naryshkina.
    Elizabeth, now largely estranged from Alexander, chose to ignore the reincarnation of this love affair, which she was powerless to prevent. Perhaps, like Wylie, she was grateful for anything that would lift him from the black cloud of misery which appeared to monopolize his mind. Resigned by now to his unfaithfulness, she had long become accustomed to his insatiable roving eye. Handsome and enormously attractive himself, he loved both the admiration and the company of pretty women. Foremost among them was the acknowledged beauty the Prussian Queen Louise, whose image in flickering candlelight lingered obsessively in his memory.
    It was on his return to Russia that the Emperor Alexander, the welfare of his soldiers lying heavily on his mind, ordered Wylie ‘to make out preventative and curative instructions for the Russian troops in Corfu and the other Greek islands threatened from their ‘‘situation’’ with yellow fever or the new American plague.’ 27 The result was Wylie’s book, On the Yellow American Fever . Dedicated to Alexander and printed in Russian, by the Medical Press at St Petersburg in 1805, it provides a short historical account, followed by a comprehensive discussion on the disease, with clear recommendations for its prevention and treatment.

    By then he must have already been working on his famous handbook on surgical operations, again written in Russian and the first to be printed in that language, which was published in 1806.
    James Wylie was also appointed Inspector-General of the Russian army board of health in 1806, a post he was to hold for nearly fifty years until 1854. In that same year, as the Fourth Coalition between Prussia, Russia, Saxony, Sweden and Britain was formed, at the request of King Frederick William, he was seconded as adviser to the Prussian medical staff.
    The commander-in-chief of the Prussian army was the Duke of Brunswick, Prince Friedrich Ludwig of Hohenlohe commanding the left wing. However, with little communication between the military leaders, the two parts of the Prussian army failed to co-operate successfully in a co-ordinated campaign.
    The town of Jena lies on the plateau west of the River Saale in today’s eastern Germany. It was here, on the evening of 14 October 1806, that Hohenlohe’s force of 38,000 – mostly newly conscripted men – was confronted by part of the French army under the command of Marshal Lannes.
    Jean Lannes, a strikingly handsome man, born the son of a blacksmith, had risen high in Napoleon’s estimation during previous campaigns. Realizing he was outnumbered, he immediately sent urgent requests for reinforcements. During the night new units joined him until, by the morning, he had approximately 50,000 men with the assurance that more were approaching.
    Knowing that he had the advantage of numbers, Lannes forced the Prussians onto open ground, where the cavalry could be most effectively employed. Hohenlohe, seeing his men mown