Hi everyone – I know, I know! I disappear from blogging and then come back with a random historical post to entertain you all, but such is my life. I love history – the Regency period in particular – France (and England), writing, gardening to some extent, and cooking/ baking. And because historical writing has taken a greater significance in my life, it gets priority over everything else including my blog*. (I have the traditionally-published sequel to A Regrettable Proposal coming out in February and another self-published Regency coming out a month or two after that).
* Of course I don’t count God, friends, or family in the “everything else”
I was turned on to this book by a friend of mine in our church in Lyon. She is Putigny’s great (I’m not sure how many times) grand-daughter. Her uncle published this book from his ancestor’s hand-written memoir. “Le grognard” is what they called a soldier of Napoleon. So this is Le grognard Putigny.
Putigny was an illiterate peasant who went off to fight for Napoleon in 1792 at the time of the Revolution, and he remained with Napoleon’s troops through Waterloo in 1815. Twenty-three years with the emperor, 60 battles… he taught himself to read and write, was made a baron by Napoleon himself, and eventually married the cousin to Talleyrand (who went to the Congress of Vienna, though France was not invited, and managed to limit the sanctions against his country through diplomatic manoeuvers).
The following are excerpts from his first encounter with the English in the Dutch part of Belgium (I think) in 1793. It is poignant, full of incisive wit and an insight into the times, and in reading this book I feel as if Mr. Putigny has sprung up from the grave to tell us what he saw. I think he would have been glad to know it had been shared. (Translated imperfectly by me).
We learn from some of the prisoners that the English have disembarked at Ostende and are a league from us at Saint-Amand. They mock the Austrians, whom they treat as “little ladies”, swearing that the French will faint before them; as simple as that.
If these insults are done in jest, we receive them with the honor they deserve. We assemble under the leaves in a large alley, with guns, three cannons – and behind each – a battalion. Through a small opening in the plain, our attention is pulled toward a geometric mass of red — les “goddems”. (There is a footnote that indicates this was their nickname for the English). At an accelerated pace, and as orderly as you could wish for, they pass right by the Austrians with disdain – and with great care – step into the middle of our trap from which we fall back with good grace.
Our hidden cannons spit suddenly in their face, the battalions charge, ours in front, and the “goddems”, strong in number but overwhelmed, stupefied, are gunned down without mercy. After this carnage, their blood and their scarlet jackets create a portrait – the ground as red as the tip of my bayonet.
Many are horribly mutilated. An old English colonel, his limbs ground up by the artillery, still breathes. His son, who was able to escape, comes back as a prisoner to take care of him; but he was beaten to the task by our cook, the mother Moreau. She follows the battalion by devotion and heals the wounded under a deluge of bullets; friends or enemies, everyone has the right to her pity. She joins the Navarre-infantry, with another woman, the Martine, known as the laundry woman of our company. Ten years later, in the square of the Notre Dame of Paris, I see once again this mother Moreau, still with her good smile but limping because of a wound in her leg.
(some text not included)
Our rest did not last long. We had just formed up in the triangle of the village when the English take up their positions to encircle us. Our company commander, Mr. Gigot (this means leg of lamb in French and, with an amusing aside, Putigny adds in parentheses (and he is not tender), declares with conviction:
–If I’m going to be skewered, be sure that it will not be by the English.
He brings out two cannons and puts them at the entrance to the village. And with planks positioned across the swamp, we regain the main road to Cassel. Intrepid, the commander Gigot protects our rearguard.
We catch up to them with ease, five days afterwards, directed by a child of the country, Vandamme (there is a footnote that said he was born in Cassel in 1770 and he became a general at age 23) and we dislodge the English almost simultaneously from Wormhout and Skeilberg. A red coat and I take aim and fire at each other: Clak! His bullet shoots out and hits the bridge of my gun, which leaps from my hand. It’s lucky for me, but not for mother Moreau who, caring for a wounded right next to us, receives the bullet just above her heel.
A big part of the English troops are assembled under the Duke of York at Hondschoote – an advantageous position of defense on a plain which is cut up with hedges, pits and canals. We are, first of all, badly positioned, and hemmed against the shrubs. We fight back with courage; the English – of which a general bites the dust – rally behind their retrenchment. The foot soldiers of Paris, twice pushed back, come to charge the “goddems” and take them from the side. Before dawn, our three battalions of Navarre will follow a forced march along the canal of Bergue, and two or three hours later, will find ourselves under the walls of Dunkirk rejoining the other troops of the garrison who had gone out against the assailants. But just now in front of us there is nothing – nothing but desolation and an extraordinary disorder. On the ground, the cannons are dismounted and stuck, the crates are overturned, the bags, the piles of munition. The water of the canal is black with the gunpowder the “goddems” had just thrown.
They fainted in front of us!
The Duke of York lifted the siege quickly in order to avoid being cut off once Hondschoote was occupied by the French, and he pulls back to Furnes.
Our goal is therefore achieved; Dunkirk is delivered. Evidently, if the day before, the general Houchard had pursued the English, they – without a line of retreat – would have had no choice but either to be massacred or to capitulate.
The general is accused by Robespierre of mismanagement towards the enemy. Called back to Paris, his negligent strategy brings him to the scaffold and concludes with this philosophy:
Go fight for these idiots, and then they will guillotine you.
(new chapter and some text missing)
Of the recruits that are given to me, there is a young blond man with a lively air and polite tone. He does his service well and is particularly good at maneuvers.
During these exercises, soldiers are formally forbidden to leave the ranks. Men rest in place. And if they have any need — well! They piss standing up in place, taking care not to water the legs of their friend.
While this recruit, otherwise exemplary, persists in leaving the ranks, this lack of discipline cannot for long be attributed to modesty and astonishes us greatly. A lieutenant takes it upon himself to examine this maniac, believing him to have had an unavoidable illness that could be contagious.
Her infirmity comes from the fact that she has nothing to hide, this little one!
She vows everything to the Captain Gariot: her lover left for the Army without a word to anyone or leaving his address. Impatient, worried, she takes on the uniform and identity of one of her brothers, declares to the chief of the department that she came late because she had been ill. Her service once granted, she obtains her passport to go to the northern frontiers. She thinks, in her courageous woman’s head, to be able to find this friend of hers who’d taken flight, for whom she cherishes such a tender love.
Directed towards Dunkirk, she is incorporated into our battalion. For three months she lives our life, carries herself admirably during the marches, sleeps each night with her bedmate, without raising the slightest suspicion.
We need to send her back to her father. She carries our regrets with her, the congratulations of the general, and a small salary to reward her for her beautiful devotion.
For her adieux, blushing, she kisses each of her old comrades on the cheeks very sweetly.
The recruits reserve for us another surprise. In the middle of a firing exercise, one of them, after having charged his gun, forgets that he left the stick in the cannon. The instructor orders: weapons… to your cheeks… fire! The gun fires a blank – the stick also. Flinging itself out of the cannon, the stick pierces a window and rams into the thigh of a soldier, who had been resting on his bed. Awoken with a shock, nailed like a butterfly to a corkboard, the miserable one is stuck in place and swears like one possessed.
The earth sings with the joy of new birth, and we manifest our own joy in wandering about and playing leapfrog in the flowering prairie. The horror! I lost my wallet, all my fortune, 300 francs. Me, who was counting on it to buy a book and a silver watch! I search everywhere, ransack my lodging, the corner of the stairs, finish by vaguely suspecting the soldier Roussel who had stayed behind to make the soup. But 14 years later, on the banks of the Vistula river in Polond, at a dinner of officers, the conversation goes back to the good old days, the northern army. The old lieutenant, Drinks-Without-Thirst, speaks about Hondschoote where he picked up a wound and another time a wallet with Fr.300 on the road to Lesselle.
They drank to my health. But in telling me this, the ingrate did not dream of thanking me.
The Army also transformed itself in the spring of 1794. Gone were the camping tents. Military men of all grades were invited to address each other with the informal “tu”, and we were all given the name, “citizen” – a name written as long as the arm, posted everywhere on big signs above the doors, where we could read this honorable title.
But one thing, which was the most interesting and the most long-lasting in all this: the Goddess Victory had entered our ranks – and for a long number of years…
I hope you appreciated that excerpt. I’ll be back. I’m not sure when and with what, but I still love my little blog and I’ve been hankering to do some more recipes. Don’t forget to follow me on Instagram if you want to see some of my tourist photos (here) or sign up for my FB reader’s group if you’re at all interested in reading sweet (mostly historical) romance books. This month I turn fifty (!!) so I have book giveaways going on all month in the group.
A bientôt!
