The following letters are drawn from a voluminous register which also contains copies of the Emperor’s proclamations, accounts of our narrator’s travels and more or less unusual recipes.
The author in question is Étienne-Nicolas Pilloy, born in Santeau, canton of Pithiviers (Loiret), a farmer by trade. Here are his service records: 13th Cuirassier Regiment. Entered service as a cuirassier trooper on 13 April 1813. Amalgamated into the 9th Regiment of the same arm, on 9 August 1814. Brigadier on 25 July 1815. Admitted as a cuirassier to the 2nd Cuirassier Regiment of the Royal Guard on 13 March 1816. Brigadier on 21 October 1818. Served in the campaigns of 1813, 1814 and 1815.
His notebook also contains the progression of his training, which seems quite extraordinary in this day and age of shortened service: after three years’ service, having charged six times at Waterloo and becoming a brigadier, Pilloy started his training all over again when he joined the Royal Guard, and at such a slow pace! Although the method and duration of training had changed, the men were still the same, and Pilloy made a remark several times in his letters that, nowadays, all those who have undertaken manoeuvres and long journeys have often heard made: ‘I would rather be two years on the road than two months in the quarters’.
In 1830, nine years after his discharge, Pilloy found at his father’s house the letters he had written during his time in the army; he copied them and annotated them in a register. Few changes have been made to the style and spelling; as far as proper names are concerned, an attempt has been made to rephrase them as far as possible to make them intelligible.
EUG. TATTET.
***
First letter, dated 5 April 1813, at Tours.
I was conscripted on 1 April 1813. I was then eighteen and a half years old. I was ordered to travel, as I have just said, on 1 April, to Orléans, where I was destined for the 13th Cuirassier Regiment. The first letter I wrote to my parents was from Tours, in which I told them that we had a very good corporal, who was a recruiting corporal, to take us to the depot.
Bread was sold for four sous a pound and wine for eight sous a bottle.
Seventeen years have passed since I wrote the letter to my father, and I have not forgotten the itinerary of my first journey, which I made from Orléans to Niort in Poitou. I passed through Meung, Beaugency, Blois, Amboise, Tours, Saint-Mars, Chatellerault, Poitiers, Lusignan, Saint-Maixent and Niort.
***
14 April 1813, at Niort.
I wrote to my brother that I arrived in Niort on the 12th and that I reached my depot in good health. In the same letter, I state that I am part of the 13th Cuirassier Regiment, 10th Company, and that there were ten of us in our detachment, and that we had been chosen from fifteen hundred men, in the courtyard of the prefecture, and only three [were selected as] carabiniers…
We exercised three times a day, once on horseback and twice on foot…
***
9 June 1813, at Tours.
I left Niort on 3 June to travel to Wesel on horseback, on the Rhine; we were in a detachment comprising sixty men and passing through Tours, where we stayed, I wrote the following letter to my father to inform him of my arrival, as I had to ask permission from my lieutenant, commanding the detachment (Mr. Linard). This officer had his roots in Brussels.
I told my father that I could arrive at their home on the 14th of the month and that he could confidently put the herrings on the grill and the peas in the casserole. I told my father: ‘I will arrive with a large sabre, a carbine and a helmet, at six or seven o’clock in the evening…’
***
19 July 1813, Wesel (Prussia).
I arrived yesterday at Wesel and we are departing tomorrow, because we are only sojourning here; as there are no horses, we are leaving tomorrow for … (?). And if we are not mounted there, we will head for Magdeburg, in Westphalia, which is nearby, to join the Grande Armée; and when we leave Wesel, we will be issued with ten rounds of ammunition because we are told that there is a revolt in … (?) and that we must be ready to defend ourselves against the Cossacks.
I also said that to reach Wesel, we had to cross the Rhine, which flowed alongside the town walls, and that a citadel was even being built on the opposite side of the Rhine from the town, built entirely of brick, and that we crossed this river on a pontoon bridge; that the money changed every day. There were coins of three sous, seven, thirteen, sixteen and twenty-nine sous; the three franc coins were worth two fr. eighty five. Six-franc coins were not subject to any reduction, five-franc coins were worth five fr. fifty, one-franc coins were worth one fr. ten, and two-franc coins were worth two fr. ten in local currency. If they were in French silver, they would be valued accurately.
I told them that when we had covered three stages, we would be fed by the locals and that we would still receive our ten sous a day. We made six stops: Melun, Laon, Mons, Louvain, Ruremonde (Roermond) and Wesel. We were on the march for eleven days, and a six-day stay amounts to seventeen. I told my father that the more I marched, the more I wanted to, and that I would rather spend two years on the road than two months in the depot…
***
8 August 1813, Magdeburg and Westphalia.
I arrived at Magdeburg on 2 August at noon. On the 8th of the same month, we each received two francs fifty; that, for three weeks, we had not received pay, and that these fifty sous were due because they had commenced five days too early to withhold our pay. The next day, we were to receive one franc which the Emperor granted to the entire army. We travelled fifteen leagues over water from Maestricht (Maastricht) to Roermond. That amounted to two stages, each of which cost us twelve sous. I really enjoyed travelling on the water.
I told my father that I was unable to provide him with news of the country’s harvests, as I could not leave the city; out of perhaps 20,000 men that we numbered, not one could leave. I say twenty, but I later found out that there were 40,000 of us at the blockade of Magdeburg and about 1,000 guards, both in and outside the city.
We were travelling by carriage when I wrote this letter. I did not think I would last nearly a year without being able to write, and to suffer as I did in that miserable city of Magdeburg, both from hunger and from the cold, for there was snow on the ground for four months and I often slept in the barracks on straw and in the snow, even accompanied by first-rate scabies and a large provision of lice. And, what is more, I suffered a severe illness there and, for this illness, I was treated in the barracks, that is to say in a corridor. There were a dozen of us there, to remove us from those who were doing well; our beds consisted of a handful of straw and our coats, and I ended up in the hospital from where I was discharged after fourteen days, in spite of the surgeon, so to speak, who was kind enough to grant me a fortnight’s convalescence.
At the end of this period, I resumed my service which lasted only two days; and, to make matters worse, on the days when we were not on duty, we had to go and work at Fort Jérôme or Fort Napoléon, which, along with Fort de l’Étoile, which was very old, formed three fortifications near the city. And, as I wrote this letter dated 8 August, in other words eight days later, as the truce ended on the 16th, we were blockaded and all correspondence was intercepted between the Grande Armée and France.
I forgot to tell you that General Lema[r]rois was the governor of the blockade and our two principal generals were Du Vergé and Bourcier; the blockade was lifted when the Bourbons returned. We left Magdeburg towards the end of May and arrived in Metz on 26 June 1814, after having suffered a great deal along the way, as we were obliged to take the cross-country route, on account of the Allies occupying the main roads to return to their countries. This meant that we crossed some very mountainous regions, in very hot weather and extremely heavily laden, with our portmanteaus on our backs, equipped with carbines, sabres, cartridge boxes and our helmets; our commanders did not spare us much.
It was General Grabait (?) who was in command of our division when we returned to France. I do not know whether it was because he was wearing a dragoon uniform that he threatened us, the cuirassiers and the carabiniers, [to have] our uniforms being turned inside out. I remember that, in the same column, the dragoons were free to go and have a drink from the ditches; and we were expressly forbidden to leave the ranks, under penalty of arrest by our officers.
In the end, he left us when we entered France, and I can assure you that none of us [missed him]. It was in Thionville, half a kilometre before arriving there, in a village where we stayed, that I had the greatest pleasure watching children play, because they spoke French. Finally, we arrived in Metz…
***
27 June 1814, at Metz.
The ten months I spent in this cursed Magdeburg seemed extremely long to me. I experienced a lot of trouble and a lot of grief; we endured much cold, accompanied by continual fasting. We were on guard every other day, on those damned ramparts and very often [we had] to make sorties in the snow up to our knees, being shot at by those peculiar Cossacks. We stayed up to six or eight days without returning to Magdeburg, lying on the snow and hearing the Prussians’ bullets whistling past our ears.
It had been ten months since I had received a penny; I asked my father if he could send me some, which would have pleased me very much. I was very content for two days in Metz when we were to be amalgamated into the 4th Cuirassier Regiment (because ours had been disbanded), and when I travelled to Caen, in Normandy, I hoped to obtain permission to go and join them, but the order had changed and we were to complete the 9th Cuirassier Regiment in garrison at Colmar, in the Alsace.
At Magdeburg, I ate salted mutton which was very foul. When we could manage to find a piece of horsemeat, it was a feast for us. The sheep as well as the oxen, which we gathered on our sorties, were put on the ramparts until they fell over from need of food. And even then, there was no hurry to fetch them; therefore we had to make good soup [out of them].
We had no mounts in Germany. Although we did not change our clothes, we had been given large[r] muskets and were exercised like the infantry. I hoped to find a mount at Colmar…
***
29 July 1814, in Colmar.
I also told them that we left Niort, the eight of us from our department, to move to Prussia, and that at the moment, I alone represented the department, as some had died, the others remained in the hospital. Houzé, Prieur, Huset were all dead; Bouvard and Défoud remained in the hospital, Simon was transferred to the 12th Cuirassier Regiment.
I owned a white horse, there were three in the company; the animal was quite good. I told them that this horse came from the chief quartermaster because, having found mine better, he took the precaution of changing it for me. We had a lot of work to do, we always had two and sometimes three horses to groom every day. I also mentioned that we received eight and a half sous a day, that we have to live on that; and that what remained at the end of five days, we still had to pay between eight and twelve sous.
A law was passed regarding deserters; in fact, the order of the day read that all deserters who had left their corps, if they did not proceed to the sub-prefecture to obtain a travel document (feuille de route), would be rigorously prosecuted. Garrisons would be posted at their parents’ homes. I told them that I was hoping to obtain permission to go and see them and that half-year periods of leave were being issued according to seniority. We were very much tormented by the manoeuvres and exercises that our colonel Bigorne kept repeating. I found myself very fortunate as a result of what I experienced at Magdeburg…
***
15 November 1814, at Colmar.
In the morning, the reveille sounded at six o’clock, and at seven o’clock the call went out for the grooming of our horses, which lasted until half past eight; we mounted our horses at nine o’clock until half past ten.
At eleven o’clock, the call was sounded for soup; at midday, for drill on foot, which lasted until half past one; at two o’clock, the call was sounded for grooming the horses until half past three; at four o’clock, for soup; at seven o’clock in the evening, the muster was sounded; this was done in the rooms. This call did not prevent you from going to bed if you wanted to; if you were asleep, someone else answered for you. At eight o’clock the lights were put out.
This is what we did every day, with the exception of Saturday, which was spent cleaning our weapons, cuirasses, sabres, helmets, pistols, heavy and small boots, our harnesses and our clothes. On Sundays, we sounded the assembly to attend mess; every Sunday, the same practice was repeated…
Source : ‘Lettres du brigadier Pilloy, 13e Cuirassiers – 9e Cuirassiers – 2e Cuirassiers de la Garde Royale (1813-1821)’, in Le Carnet de la Sabretache, 1907, pp. 505-511.
Other accounts to read :
> Cuirassier officer Jean de Gouttes and his 1813 correspondence …
> Experiences of a cuirassier at Dresden, 1813 …
> Turmoil on the Katzbach (1813), a report of General Sébastiani …
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