Author: Hrothsige Frithowulf

Vivandières, cantinières, washerwoman, prostitutes… Women were fully part of the Grande Armée. Incorporated into units or offering their services to passing troops, these women improved the well-being of soldiers who were far away from their families. Some of them even became prominent figures in the Napoleonic epic, known for their heroism, courage, and, in certain cases, for their unique careers as soldiers!

Cantinières: Vivandières, and Laundresses

The cantinier was a man, usually a non-commissioned officer, but it was generally accepted that he could have a woman with him to help in the kitchen (one per battalion). These women had the sole mission of preparing meals, although, in practice, they sometimes competed with the vivandières.

Two types of women were officially allowed to follow the Imperial army: laundresses and vivandières. Their numbers were strictly regulated, with a maximum of four per battalion and two per squadron, army headquarters, or division. Laundresses took care of the soldiers’ laundry, and under the 1809 regulations, they were permitted to have a packhorse to carry their supplies. These were typically soldiers’ wives, and as non-combatant military personnel, they were entitled to a security card (which confirmed their role), lodging, and bread.

Vivandières, on the other hand, sold food, drink, and sometimes small items to the soldiers. They were allowed to have a cart pulled by two horses. Comparable to a modern army’s canteen service, they essentially ran a mobile shop. Their numbers were limited in the same way as the laundresses. They did not receive any salary but were still officially part of the military personnel: they needed a security card issued by military authorities, had the right to use military hospitals during wartime, and had to be present for roll calls conducted by column commanders.

Discipline was strict. Laundresses and vivandières who missed a roll call faced fines for the first offense, imprisonment for the second, and confiscation of their horses and cart for the third. Worse, if one was accused of looting or facilitating looting (vivandières were sometimes involved in hiding stolen goods to sell for themselves), her cart would be burned along with all her belongings, and the woman, dressed in black, would be paraded through the camp and expelled.

But that was not the most humiliating punishment. During the Spanish campaign, the penalty for a woman following the army without authorization was severe: she would be stripped, shaved all over, covered in shoe polish, forced to march in front of the troops, and sent to the rear.

Nevertheless, vivandières were among the iconic figures of the Grande Armée. During marches, they were relatively protected, with their carts placed at the rear of the convoy between the column and the rear guard. The vivandière became a symbol in the historiography of the Imperial army, improving the soldiers’ daily lives with her goods and small cask of brandy, and sometimes coming to the aid of the wounded on the battlefield. The vivandière is one of the few female figures in a predominantly male institution. In the 19th-century romantic imagination, she also came to represent a kind of substitute mother for younger conscripts.

Among the best-known vivandières was one nicknamed Marie Tête-de-Bois. Marie married a grenadier in 1805, who was killed in Paris in 1814. That same year, their son was killed at the Battle of Montmirail, and Marie herself was wounded while retrieving his body. Having served in seventeen campaigns, Marie Tête-de-Bois was with the Guard during the Hundred Days in 1815. It was in this final campaign of the Empire that she met her death, struck by a bullet that pierced her cask. As she crawled among the dead, a second bullet is said to have hit her face. A dying grenadier reportedly joked that she wasn’t very pretty like that, to which she supposedly replied that she could still boast of having been a daughter, wife, mother, and widow of soldiers.

Catherine Balland, from the 95th Line Infantry Regiment, was honored by the painter Lejeune, who depicted her in his painting of the Battle of Chiclana. She was awarded the Legion of Honour in 1813.

Prostitutes and Campaign Loves

The Grande Armée never had an official or semi-official brothel, as was later the case in the French army. Nevertheless, prostitutes (often referred to as “grisettes”) closely followed the troops to offer their services. They inevitably became the main vectors of venereal diseases, which greatly occupied military doctors. Some prostitutes even approached soldiers directly, as evidenced by General Friant’s order on September 18, 1811, instructing to “arrest the runners who sneak into the camps.”

The Grognards also took advantage of the services of local prostitutes in the cities they passed through, both in France and abroad. These women were either professionals or poor souls driven to prostitution by the misery caused by war. In 1806, Berlin women prostituted themselves for a bit of bread, and in 1812, well-off Moscow women, starving, were forced into prostitution, even offering their daughters to the French soldiers.

In addition to professional sex workers, the soldiers of the Grande Armée also engaged in relationships with local women during their campaigns, though these relationships were often fleeting. Upon the imperial army’s departure from Berlin in 1806, it was estimated that 2,000 women were pregnant.

However, some of these campaign relationships did lead to marriages. Starting in 1808, soldiers had to obtain permission from the administrative council of their regiment to marry their chosen partner (officers had to seek authorization from the Minister of War). Despite this new status, it did not change their military situation. In 1810, a decree even provided financial support for soldiers marrying a “respectable girl.

Women Soldiers

Officially, Napoleon’s Grande Armée was not supposed to have women soldiers. Even during the Revolution, the profession of arms was denied to women, as military service was ideologically linked to citizenship (and, by extension, the right to vote). However, there were a few exceptions that proved the rule, such as Marie-Thérèse Figueur (1774 – 1861).

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Orphaned and placed with a cloth merchant in Avignon, she pleaded with her uncle in 1792 to let her wear a uniform.

With this cavalry regiment, she participated in several campaigns: the Eastern Pyrenees, Germany, the Army of the Rhine, the Swiss campaign, and the Italian campaign.

On November 4, 1799, her horse was killed beneath her, she was wounded, and she was captured at the Battle of Savigliano (Piedmont). She was brought before Prince de Ligne, who allowed her to join his army.

Under the Consulate, in 1800, she was forced into retirement but managed to reintegrate the 9th Dragoons, with whom she participated in the 1805 campaign, including the battles of Ulm and Austerlitz. In 1806, she fought in the Battle of Jena but fell ill and was repatriated to France. Once recovered, she joined the Young Guard and went to fight in Spain, where she was again taken prisoner at Burgos.

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Figueur was then transferred to a women’s prison and later to Southampton, where she remained until the end of the Empire. Upon her return to France during the Restoration, Marie-Thérèse opened a guesthouse for officers and married an old comrade, the sergeant Sutter, late in life.

Although rare, we know of other examples of women soldiers, such as Marie Angélique Duchemin, who distinguished herself during the Revolutionary campaigns and for whom Marshal Sérurier tried to obtain the Legion of Honour during the Empire. Other European armies also had such examples, as in the Prussian army. It was only when mortally wounded at Dannenberg (1813) that soldier Renz confessed to being a woman—it was Eleonore Prochaska, who had enlisted during the Prussian War of Liberation as a drummer and later as a line soldier, successfully concealing her true identity.

4,300 to 7,000 wounded in the ranks of the Grande Armée by the evening of Eylau, more than 21,000 wounded by the evening of the Moscow! The dark side of these Napoleonic victories are the mass graves, the field ambulances where amputations are performed in assembly-line fashion, and the makeshift hospitals where the wounded are crowded together. Here, the soldier faces new enemies: gas gangrene, tetanus, dysentery, fevers… To save those who can still be helped, the medical service established an entire support network from the battlefield to rear facilities.

Napoleon: Medicine, and Surgery

Napoleon Bonaparte was always very skeptical of medicine, ambivalent about its true benefits, and often mocking of those who practiced it. He enjoyed teasing Corvisart and mocking remedies that did more harm to the patient than the illness itself. He still maintained at Saint Helena:

Our body is a machine for living, it is organized for that, it’s its nature; let life run its course, let it defend itself, it will do more than if you paralyze it by burdening it with remedies. Our body is like a perfect watch, which is meant to run for a certain time; the watchmaker does not have the ability to open it, he can only handle it blindly and clumsily. For every one who, by tormenting it with odd instruments, manages to do good, how many ignorant ones destroy it…

Dr. Godlewski acknowledged that Napoleon’s distrust of the medicine of his time was not entirely unfounded. While the early 19th century was the age of great surgeons, it was not yet the age of great physicians, which would only come with the discoveries of Pasteur, radiology, and bacteriology. Indeed, while he despised medicine, Napoleon held surgery in high esteem, particularly the army medical corps surgeons who risked their lives to save others. Napoleon himself was even personally drawn to the field and reportedly attended anatomy courses three times from April to July 1792, before his military career took off.

Treating the Army in Garrison

Each regiment had a few surgeons to care for soldiers in garrison. The most common cases were “fevers,” a generic term that covered various diseases such as influenza, meningitis, and dysentery, often caused by poor water quality and food. If necessary, the patient was sent to a military hospital, or even a civilian hospital in certain special units like the Departmental Reserve Companies. Other treatments were conducted directly at the barracks, particularly for cases of scabies or venereal diseases.

Field Ambulances

The massive use of artillery is the cause of the worst injuries found in 19th-century armies. Surgeon-Major de La Flize reports in his memoirs some colder and darker realities than the epic paintings of the same period might suggest:

I remember some [of the horrific wounds] that particularly struck me. An artilleryman had three-quarters of his face torn off by a cannonball; he had only one eye left but had not lost consciousness and communicated by signs; he was horrible to look at. Another artilleryman had both thighs and one hand blown off and the other arm broken near the shoulder; he could still speak and asked me for brandy; I gave him a drink, and he expired immediately after. […] A young artillery non-commissioned officer, who was on guard near the guns, had his hands resting on the pommel of his saddle when a cannonball crushed both of them. He cried like a child and called for his mother.

To save those who can be saved, and ensure the morale of all, the Grande Armée quickly equipped itself with an important health service structured by a network of ambulances. In the Grande Armée, an ambulance refers to all centers of varying importance responsible for providing care to those in need, whether at the regimental or army corps level. There are five distinct types of ambulances:

• The regimental ambulance, closest to the fighting, where first aid is provided to the wounded, but also all operations requiring urgent intervention: from amputation to trepanation… The infantry division ambulance with its two wagons takes charge of the wounded at the division level, theoretically composed of six surgeons, four pharmacists, and four employees.
• The army corps ambulance is a mounted ambulance, called a light ambulance, which can deploy and redeploy as needed. It can form an ambulance depot just behind the front line to quickly evacuate the wounded during battle. It can also form ambulance divisions to reinforce division ambulances or form ambulance sections responsible for supporting small detached units or deployed at outposts. In the case of ambulance sections, the unit carries provisions in addition to its traditional equipment of dressings and medical instruments.
• The ambulance reserve, directly attached to the general headquarters, is a strategic reserve composed of about fifty surgeons (under the command of a chief surgeon) on horseback or in carriages to reinforce as quickly as possible any other ambulance that might need it.
• Finally, the Emperor’s ambulance is responsible for the sovereign’s health. Napoleon always has a surgeon, a doctor, a pharmacist, and a few nurses ready to intervene in case the Emperor is wounded. They have a wagon with all the necessary equipment. Although often exposed, Napoleon was very lucky on the battlefield. He was nevertheless wounded on April 23, 1809, during the Battle of Ratisbon in Austria. A bullet fired from the city walls wounded him in the right heel, grazing the Achilles tendon. It was surgeon Yvan who cut the Emperor’s boot and dressed the wound before he remounted his horse to keep up appearances for the enemy.

Being Wounded on the Battlefield

Even though in practice it sometimes happened, soldiers were generally forbidden during battle from going to assist the wounded. Doing so risked weakening the ranks to the enemy’s advantage. While some wounded soldiers managed to reach the ambulance on their own, others were cared for on-site by the medical service. To facilitate this, Larrey set up “flying ambulances (ambulance volante),” two- or four-wheeled carts mounted on springs (to cushion the shocks somewhat), capable of carrying two to four wounded soldiers lying on mobile beds. These flying ambulances allowed for the rapid evacuation of the wounded after they had received first aid from surgeons following the ambulance on horseback.

However, for cost reasons, this system did not last during the Empire, except within the Imperial Guard, where Larrey operated. Along similar lines, Pierre-François Percy introduced the Wurst, long sausage-shaped carts (hence the name, which means “sausage” in German) that surgeons would straddle like a horse to quickly reach those in need. They were used during the Swiss, Danube, and German campaigns. But more commonly, toward the end, the Grande Armée employed stretcher-bearers equipped with pikes that could be transformed into stretchers. Da La Flize recounts:

The stretcher-bearers were then ordered to construct stretchers. These men, two by two, unrolled the straps from their packs, unscrewed the iron head of their pikes, inserted the pole into a slip knot formed with the straps, and fixed their canvas belts in place. The stretcher-bearers then headed towards the battlefield.

The wounded who were not evacuated during the battle usually spent the night without help and had to wait until the next day for the evacuations to resume. Further back, the first-aid posts were improvised, either in pre-existing buildings or under tents on some straw gathered from nearby. The situation was even more critical in winter, as during the Battle of Eylau, since these makeshift shelters offered little protection from the cold. It was at these first-aid posts where the diagnosis was made, and the wounded soldier came into the hands of the surgeons. A former officer of the Grande Armée, Elzéar Blaze, provides a nuanced account of the surgeons, acknowledging their bravery but also the lack of experience among newcomers who learned “on the job”:

The major surgeons were generally good practitioners. Amputating an arm or a leg was as easy for them as drinking a glass of water; I even knew some for whom the latter operation would have made them grimace. These gentlemen had great zeal, and were often seen on the battlefield assisting the wounded, risking their own lives. Many combined science with practice; for others, practice alone sufficed; but by constantly treating all kinds of wounds, with the same cases repeating every day, they knew as much as they needed to know.

But new young men constantly arrived from France, who, through connections or to avoid going into battle with a pack on their back, had somehow gotten a surgeon’s assistant certificate after three months at medical school. They then underwent a practical course in the army at the expense of the first unfortunates who fell into their hands, having escaped the cannon; the scalpel awaited them… and… well… It was, in truth, far worse than Scylla and Charybdis.

The chief surgeon of La Flize recounts in his memoirs the horror of mutilations and operations during the Battle of Borodino in 1812:

On that day of grim memory, how many cruel operations we performed! One cannot imagine the impression a wounded soldier has when the surgeon is forced to tell him that he is doomed unless one or two limbs are amputated. The unfortunate soul is reduced to submitting to his fate and preparing for horrific suffering. It is impossible to express the groans, the teeth grinding, torn from the wounded when a limb is shattered by a cannonball; the painful cries they let out when the surgeon exposes the limb, cuts through the muscles, severs the nerves, saws the bones, and slices the arteries, with blood splattering everywhere. We could say that we were literally drenched in blood, although we were not responsible for its flow, but were instead striving to stop it.

In the French army, amputations were frequent. During the Battle of Borodino, the surgeon Larrey stood for 36 consecutive hours and performed 200 amputations himself! For this experienced surgeon, it took only 4 to 5 minutes to amputate a shoulder. In the absence of anesthetics, the speed of the operation was crucial to minimizing the sufferings of the wounded.

Often, the patient was given just a little alcohol to drink. Sometimes, he clenched his clay pipe to endure the pain: if the wounded died during the operation, his jaw would sometimes loosen, causing the pipe to fall to the ground and break — the origin of the expression ‘to break one’s pipe’ (a French idiom meaning ‘to die’). These rapid and repeated amputations may seem cruel, but they often saved the wounded who would otherwise have died from gangrene.

This extensive resort to amputation was also justified by the very particular context of wartime surgery: if the wounded soldier survived, he would be transported along rough roads and cared for by inexperienced personnel who would be unable to properly manage a serious wound requiring regular dressing — the stump offered a better chance of survival. Aside from a few wealthy exceptions, like generals who could afford luxury prosthetics, most amputated soldiers spent the rest of their lives with a wooden leg (sometimes jointed at the knee), or a simple crutch. Some, unable to afford or bear such prosthetics, were left with crutches or canes.

The soldier’s recovery was not the end of his misfortunes. On the battlefield of Borodino, La Flize reports that there was a lack of food for the wounded. However, the Guard was better fed. As the army resumed its march, the wounded were left in field hospitals, sometimes tens of kilometers from the battlefield, and not all survived the journey. Percy, recounting the arrival of a convoy of wounded during the Peninsular War, wrote:

It had been five days since most of them had left the cart that had served both as their transport and their bed; their straw was rotting; some had a mattress under them, soiled with the pus from their wounds and their excrement. […] The stench was unbearable. The wounds had not been dressed in several days, or had been done so poorly; many were already gangrenous…

Upon their arrival, they were greeted under conditions that varied greatly depending on the location and time. In 1809, a corps of hospital nurses was even created, deployed in Austria, Spain, and Italy. These nurses were unarmed, not even carrying a small sword, with Napoleon hoping this would ensure their neutrality on the battlefield—an initiative later adopted by the Red Cross. This neutrality was reinforced by the fact that French doctors treated all wounded, regardless of nationality. However, no written agreement on the inviolability of military hospitals was reached during the Napoleonic wars, despite an attempt that Austria rejected in 1800.

Regardless, these hospitals are remembered grimly: the wounded often lacked food, heating, especially during the Russian campaign, and typhus outbreaks occurred frequently (such as in Mainz in 1813). There were also personnel shortages (if there were no local staff, particularly nuns, prisoners were requisitioned without hesitation), as well as shortages of medicine and bandages. At the Mojaïsk hospital in 1812, the wounded were bandaged with straw due to the lack of cloth or bandages.

However, these dark descriptions should be tempered by acknowledging that there were well-run field hospitals under the Empire, such as in Burgos in 1810, which had a bathroom, fans for the summer, and stoves for the winter. Despite the difficult conditions and frequent improvisation, it is notable that only 10% of the wounded who reached the hospital died. To understand this figure, it must be considered that hospitals treated not only the war wounded but also the sick in general.

In the end, our view of the healthcare services during campaigns under the First Empire must be nuanced. It was run by dedicated, qualified, and dynamic men who constantly had to make do with limited material and human resources. Napoleon, who always favored short campaigns carried out by fast-moving armies, ultimately invested little in modernizing the healthcare service, which did not allow for maintaining a sufficient and experienced staff. Young surgeons gained experience, and nurses were often neophytes, more or less voluntary depending on the circumstances. Observing the shortage of nurses at Eylau on February 9, 1807, Napoleon exclaimed in frustration: “What an organization! What barbarity!” Surgeon Lombard then dared to explain the lack of enthusiasm for joining the healthcare service:

Sire, when one is sure that in peacetime, no matter how well one performed during the most difficult and perilous war, they will be dismissed, it is hard to be zealous and decide to follow an army as an employee or nurse; this very title upon returning to France will be a terrible recommendation.

One can indeed speak of a lack of recognition for the healthcare service, which, straddling the civilian and military spheres, remained overshadowed by the latter. Napoleon distributed the Legion of Honor to them sparingly (ten surgeons were decorated after Eylau, two of whom died of exhaustion a few days later…) and forbade surgeons from wearing epaulets, which he believed should be reserved for true soldiers (although the surgeons of the Guard granted themselves this right…). Nonetheless, it was these few years of war that allowed surgery to develop at an unprecedented speed.

From 1792 to 1815, France experienced over twenty years of nearly unbroken warfare. The Empire, in this regard, merely continued the French Revolution, though it diverged in other respects. In this context, the daily life of Napoleon’s soldier took on particular importance and significance. More than a million soldiers had to be recruited, clothed, fed, and armed.

How did the Emperor overcome the challenges he faced? What were the reactions of the population and the army? How can we explain that in 1815, despite the sacrifices and hardships endured, so many men once again rallied to the imperial regime? These are some of the questions we will attempt to answer.

Napoleon’s Soldier

From the moment he came to power, Napoleon Bonaparte had considered drawing from the reserves found in orphanages, but the mortality rate there was so high that he had to abandon the idea. The imperial soldier was therefore recruited through conscription; legislation since 1796 mandated that every Frenchman aged 20 to 25 was required to perform military service.

During the relatively peaceful period of the Consulate, the First Consul endeared himself to the wealthier classes by allowing substitution: those called up could avoid their military obligations by purchasing a substitute, provided the replacement did not come from the reserves. This unequal arrangement primarily filled the ranks with men from the lower classes, creating a divide in the burden of service.

The long period of war that began after the break in the Treaty of Amiens created recruitment difficulties, which led Napoleon to bypass the laws. He began calling up classes early and incorporating young men from previous classes who had been exempt from military obligations. An article was introduced into the imperial catechism threatening Christians who refused to serve with damnation. Schoolchildren were placed under military supervision and given uniforms to instill discipline and a military spirit in them.

The conditions for exemptions were tightened so that individuals previously deemed unfit were enlisted, with the weakest assigned to the role of nurses. After the disastrous Russian campaign, the creation of the Guards of Honor forced young men from wealthy classes to serve the Emperor, tying their fate to that of the regime. By 1813, many recruits were barely out of childhood, and they were referred to as “Marie-Louises” in reference to the Empress.

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During the Empire’s early campaigns, the issue of military training did not arise, as the army largely consisted of soldiers who had been fighting for over a decade. However, as time passed and battles thinned the ranks of veterans, the training of recruits became increasingly problematic, leading to frequent accidents.

During the German campaign in 1813, for example, Napoleon suspected that many soldiers who had injured their hands while loading their rifles had done so intentionally to avoid service. He considered decimating them but was persuaded otherwise by Larrey, the famous surgeon, who demonstrated that the injuries were accidental and caused solely by the conscripts’ incompetence. The Emperor was grateful for his candor, which had spared innocent men from being condemned to death.

A Recruitment Increasingly Problematic

Over time, the high proportion of inexperienced soldiers forced the Emperor to adapt his tactics. To reinforce the sense of security and cohesion among the troops, who had become less maneuverable, he increasingly resorted to using massive formations. These compact masses had the advantage of acting like battering rams to break through the enemy’s front lines, but at the same time, they offered the enemy perfect targets, with each cannonball from their artillery wiping out entire rows. This is why the battles of Eylau, Wagram, and the Moskow were much deadlier than that of Austerlitz, without achieving equally decisive results.

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From the beginning of the Empire until its fall, no victory was ever capable of leading to peace, as England remained out of reach. Victories never resulted in more than fragile truces. However, the enormous consumption of men that these perpetual conflicts demanded wore down the country. Draft evaders were increasingly numerous. Some young men even went as far as having all their teeth pulled out, making themselves ill, or faking deformities to escape conscription. Prefects received strict orders; the parents of deserters were heavily fined.

These measures had no effect. By 1813, Napoleon himself estimated the number of draft dodgers at 100,000, and this number was likely much higher. The population was turning away from the regime at a time when it was crucial to rekindle the revolutionary fervor of the soldiers of the Year II. The enormous death tolls partly explained this shift: over 450,000 dead in Spain, at least 80% of them French, more than 300,000 in Russia, around 200,000 of whom were French, to mention only those losses. Another cause of the public’s disaffection was the dispute with the Pope, which disoriented a largely Catholic population, and the invasion of Spain, with which regions of France, particularly Auvergne, had close ties due to traditional economic migration.

1.6 Million Draftees Under Napoleon

During his reign, Napoleon called more than 1.6 million Frenchmen to the colors. Clothing, feeding, shoeing, and arming so many men was no small feat. General Bonaparte believed that war should sustain war, with troops supplying themselves from the field. However, this principle could not be applied in all parts of Europe.

The Emperor knew this and was not disinterested in supply issues; quite the opposite. Orders for setting up mills to grind grain, building ovens to bake bread—documents that have come down to us—attest to how carefully he addressed the vital problem of provisioning the Grande Armée (The Great Army). During the invasion of Russia, the army was accompanied by herds of livestock and numerous supply wagons, but unfortunately, they couldn’t keep up!

Logistics failed to obey the master’s will. Suppliers often lacked honesty: the soles of shoes were sometimes little better than cardboard, and those wearing these carnival shoes soon found themselves walking on the balls of their feet! Pay was irregularly distributed, especially in regions like Spain and Portugal, where guerrilla warfare disrupted communications.

Shortages often forced soldiers to resort to looting. In regions they passed through, even those considered friendly, like Poland, residents hid their provisions for fear of being stripped of their last resources. During the 1807 campaign, soldiers demanded bread in Polish from Napoleon (“tata, chleba”), and he responded in the same language that he had none (“chleba, nie ma”).

In Portugal, in 1811, famine forced Masséna to retreat back to Spain in a hurry, with an army severely reduced by malnutrition and desertion. In Spain, soldiers resorted to eating acorns and vetch while Marmont feasted openly from silverware in front of his starving troops! Looting obviously weakened discipline and exposed those engaging in it to guerrilla attacks. During the march through Poland and then Russia in 1812, soldiers were reduced to eating tough, salted meat that had been preserved for several years, nearly spoiled, and drinking from puddles contaminated with horse urine. Requisitions were insufficient, and the army became disorganized, with disorder leading to waste.

Logistics Struggling to Keep Up

Davout was the only marshal who, by maintaining strict discipline within his corps, managed to supply his troops more or less adequately. Additionally, the privileges enjoyed by the Imperial Guard deprived other units of food and equipment that would have been theirs if the distribution had been fair. The Grande Armée dwindled as it advanced, so that by the eve of the Battle of Borodino, it numbered only 120,000 to 130,000 soldiers, out of the more than 500,000 who had crossed the Niemen. It is true that part of its forces had been left behind to guard the flanks and rear, but the loss was still considerable.

The Napoleonic soldier spent readily without thinking about tomorrow. When he reached a cellar, instead of drawing wine from taps, he would shoot holes in the barrels to sample all the wine. What did it matter what remained for those who followed, as long as he could drink the best! On the eve of a battle, he discarded anything that might hinder him during the fight, so that the morning before an engagement, the bivouac ground was strewn with random objects, as if a tornado had passed through. It was easy to re-equip oneself with the belongings of the dead after victory!

An Army of Marchers

During the Italian campaign, it was said that Bonaparte won battles with the legs of his soldiers. Speed continued to play a decisive role in imperial strategy. The goal was to arrive quickly where one was not expected and to gather maximum forces to overwhelm a disoriented enemy. The Battle of Marengo was won through Desaix’s unexpected arrival on the battlefield just when the Austrians thought the day was theirs.

Conversely, the Battle of Waterloo was lost because Grouchy failed to arrive on time. The infantry covered long distances, usually around forty kilometers a day, but sometimes as much as sixty to seventy kilometers, burdened like mules with a heavy rifle and an array of gear (haversack, blanket, cartridge box, ammunition, food, spare shirts, and shoes…).

The march was so grueling that the bones of the weakest soldiers’ feet would break. To move faster without tiring the infantry, carts were sometimes requisitioned from peasants, but this was rarely possible outside of France. In warring countries, peasants would flee with their animals into the forests at the approach of troops. The abandoned houses, left to an unruly soldiery, were then looted and sacked. Conditions were sometimes so dreadful that soldiers murmured in discontent, leading to the nickname “grognards” (grumblers) during the Polish campaign of 1807.

In Spain, during the pursuit of the English army in 1808 through the Sierra de Guadarrama, these grognards, frozen and exhausted, encouraged each other to shoot Napoleon. The Emperor heard the grumbling, but remained impassive; at the next stop, a kind word and improved rations were enough for the cry of “Vive L’Empereur (Long live the Emperor)” to rise once again, as powerful and sincere as ever. Veterans of the Republic’s wars, who had seen much worse, sometimes found their situation so unbearable that they committed suicide, as was notably the case in Spain, in the mud of Valderas.

To be more mobile, the imperial army did not use tents. At bivouacs, soldiers slept on the ground under the stars, or on straw when they found some in a barn. If needed, they protected themselves by building makeshift huts from branches. When their stay was prolonged, the ingenuity of French soldiers took over, and temporary barracks sprang up, lined up as neatly as the houses in a village. The English admired these constructions in 1814 during the fighting in the Pyrenees.

In towns, lodging billets were distributed; the designated host was required to provide food and shelter. The good-natured Germans were the most appreciated of these unwilling hosts (and it was said, Germans, not Prussians). The soldiers’ meals were improved by the presence of “cantinières” and “vivandières” who provided brandy; their presence comforted the warriors if not rested them.

Unenviable Fate of the Wounded and Dead

After battle, the dead were not buried. The wounded were treated only with significant delay, and some were even forgotten where they had fallen. During the retreat from Russia, survivors were found still alive a month and a half later on the battlefield of Borodino! One of them had sought refuge inside the belly of a dead horse; half-mad, he shouted violently at the Emperor. Amputations were frequent, often the only way to save a wounded man’s life. These operations were performed without anesthesia, with the patient given a glass of brandy, if available, and a pipe to smoke. The phrase “to break one’s pipe” originated from these times, referring to the pipe-breaking when a surgery went wrong.

Hospitals were vast death-traps where the sick and wounded were thrown together, often on the ground. Such close quarters facilitated epidemics, and corrupt hospital administrators sometimes deprived the unfortunate patients of food and fuel to sell them for profit. During the winter of 1813-1814, more soldiers of the Grande Armée died from disease than in the battles of 1813. This was not a new phenomenon; the same had happened in Spain!

The fate of those who fell into enemy hands was even worse. In the Iberian Peninsula and Russia, they faced the risk of being executed after enduring horrific torture. In Russia, fanatical peasants would beat them to death with sticks. In Spain, they were tortured to death in grotesque ways: made into sandwiches, roasted like chickens, boiled like lobsters, fried like fish, or smoked like hams. They were poisoned, sawed between planks, castrated, buried alive up to their heads with their hands cut off so they could not free themselves.

Prisoners of the English were crammed into half-rotted ships, the infamous floating prisons known as “hulks,” or were deported to the deserted island of Cabrera in the Balearics, where many died of thirst and hunger. It would take an entire book to describe what these unfortunate souls endured, in conditions that foreshadowed the concentration camps of World War II.

The Emperor and His Soldiers

In the French army of this era, corporal punishment, still common in other European armies, was forbidden. It was considered degrading. For the most serious offenses, only one punishment was deemed worthy of a soldier: execution by firing squad. This was the punishment demanded by French prisoners in England who had been flogged. Marbot, sent as an emissary to the enemy camp, saved a French prisoner from a beating at the hands of the Prussians during the 1806 campaign.

Napoleon demanded such heavy sacrifices from his soldiers that one wonders how they not only endured it but also developed a genuine devotion to him. The answer lies in a few simple words, expressed by one of them: the Emperor brought dignity to these men, most of whom came from the lower classes. While he did not tolerate familiarity from his marshals—except in rare cases, due to court etiquette, with Lannes being almost the only one to address him informally—he tolerated and even encouraged it from his rank-and-file soldiers, whom they called “the little corporal.”

Gifted with an extraordinary memory, he remembered their names and reminded them of the places where they had fought under his command. He affectionately tugged their ears and even once stood guard at the Tuileries Palace in place of a sentry he had sent for a drink to warm up. He laughed at their witty remarks. Shortly before the Battle of Austerlitz, a sentry responded with humor when Napoleon, annoyed by an arrogant Russian envoy, shouted, “Wouldn’t you think these fellows want to devour us!” The sentry retorted, “Oh, but we’ll stick in their throats!” This remark brightened the Emperor’s mood.

The soldiers did not hesitate to analyze and criticize what they believed to be their general’s strategy, even at the risk of reprimands when they overstepped. This happened at Jena, when a young soldier impatiently shouted “Forward” at Napoleon’s passing. The Emperor replied that he should wait until he had fought in a hundred battles and won twenty before offering advice.

The Emperor placed such great trust in his men that, on the eve of the Battle of Austerlitz, he revealed his plan to them—an event unique in the annals of war. After a battle, he sometimes asked the infantry of distinguished units to nominate the bravest among them for a reward, and he once pinned his own Legion of Honor on the jacket of a worthy soldier. In short, Napoleon understood the psychology of his soldiers and mastered the art of inspiring their enthusiasm.