Here are several lengthy letters of Fourrier François Hinard who served in General (future marshal) Suchet’s Division during the Austerlitz campaign. He provides many interesting details on daily life in the Grande Armée, hardships, money issues, family matters and battlefield experiences.
Landshut (1) in Bavaria, 29 October 1805.
Dear Rosalie, I can still enjoy the pleasure of sending you news of myself since I crossed the Rhine, and after all the hardship and fatigue caused by the initial consequences of the war. It has spared my life until now, since I am taking advantage of the favourable moment to write to you, as I have not been able to do so until now. I want your health to be sound, as well as that of our children, our mothers, etc. That is my only concern.
From the moment, dear Rosalie, that we crossed the Rhine, on the day I indicated to you, we slept in bivouacs on the mountains and in the woods. We travelled fifty leagues (2) to reach the enemy, and once we had reached their outpost, we marched day and night to reach them and cut off their retreat, which tired me a lot, due to lack of sleep, the journey and the deprivation of food. The divisions which were in front of us ‘began the dance’ and in the first affair two leagues from our bivouac captured 1,500 prisoners, nine cannon and three flags. (3) The next day at four o’clock we marched upon them, but they had broken camp and we did not manage to reach them until two in the afternoon, and we were ordered to bivouac until the following day. That day, Marshal Ney took 5,000 prisoners. (4)
We therefore departed the next day at five o’clock in the evening to surround a wood where they were, however at daybreak we received orders to counter-march [and to] take the road to Visloop (5): we bivouacked there while awaiting orders to march to join a division that was engaged in battle. We did not leave until the next day in the middle of the snow which fell during the night, always surrounding them and cutting off their retreat. On 22 Vendémiaire (6), we joined them at one league of Ulm, but the night having fallen we did not do battle with them. That day, a division crossed the Danube (a river) and repaired a bridge that they had severed. It was a most serious affair, since a bridge had to be built while the enemy was on the other side of the river and occupying heights that prevented us from being able to surround Ulm, but this proved to be futile: the troops crossed, the heights were seized from them, and suffered a complete rout, although the night forced our troops to bivouac until the next day.
The following day, 23 Vendémiaire (7), at three o’clock in the morning, our division left and crossed the severed bridge to join the other divisions; at eight o’clock we encountered the enemy who were attacked by the division in front of us. The enemy was ambushed in a wood; the guns alone were able to dislodge them. The Emperor, who had always been present at various events, arrived and ordered us to surround the wood behind us. We therefore fought in the woods and the countryside and made them rally on the heights of Ulm where their entrenchments were located, so that the town, a league away, was blockaded by the French army. However, it was becoming almost impossible to advance any further: the rain, which had not stopped falling since the morning and throughout the previous day, had intensified to such an extent that we could no longer move. We were knee-deep in ploughed earth (8), and the mist from the rain made it impossible to distinguish anything.
Combined with the fatigue endured by the troops who had not stopped marching for ten days in pursuit of the enemy, and reduced to three ounces of bread a day, and often none at all, meant that we wanted to pursue them and drive them back to Ulm. The Emperor was no less affected by the inclement weather. At four o’clock, when the rain had eased off, we wanted to enter some villages to make a fire to dry ourselves; the Emperor began to say: ‘Soldiers, forward! Victory will dry us!’ The deployed army immediately surged forward, swept away their entrenchments and pursued them as far as Ulm, where three companies of the 17th Regiment, which was part of our division, entered; however, as they did not advance quickly enough, they closed the gates and made the soldiers and the colonel prisoners. We managed to get under the ramparts after passing through the water and shelled the town until nightfall. The next day, we resumed the cannonade, but it did not make much of a showing, and on the 25th, during the night, the town surrendered; 27,000 men were taken prisoner (9), with the result that in the span of ten days, seventy thousand Austrians who formed […] were taken prisoner and disbanded. We set off immediately and have been marching for eight days towards the Tyrol on the Russians. (10) We passed through Munich where the Emperor was received with all possible pomp by the Prince of Bavaria (11) and, the inhabitants being with us, we were fed at the homes of the bourgeois.
The next day, we headed off to continue our journey, and arrived in Landshut, eighteen leagues from Munich. (12) Suffering from a sore foot and in need of rest, I feigned that I had dysentery and obtained a hospital billet, where I am now for a few days, although we are not well off; we have no food other than what the bourgeois can provide and we are sleeping on straw. However, I performed the role of carriage driver and I obtained a lodging billet with a bourgeois where we are fed, and from where I am writing you […] to the postmaster who told me that a courier was preparing to leave for France. I hope, my dear Rosalie, that it reaches you so that you can put your mind at ease, as there is no news on the war and the capture of Ulm. If God is still watching over my life […].
[…] to have with the Russians. Pain, fatigue and hardship will be nothing to me given the courage I possess and the hope of returning to hold you close to my heart. I have received no word from you, and this deprivation is the greatest I can endure; therefore do not stop sending me news of you, for if one letter does not reach me, another will. It is in this pleasant expectation that I am going to endure while waiting for your dearest news. Extend my love to our mothers and our dear children and receive a thousand embraces from your most sincere husband.
Your faithful husband,
Hinard.
My address: Hinard, fourrier in the 7th Company of the 1st Battalion of the 40th Line Infantry Regiment, part of the 4th Division commanded by General Suchet, in Bavaria via Munich, in the wake of the army.
Le Vée is doing well.
Notes
(1) Landshut is a town in the west of the Duchy of Bavaria, close to the Austrian border. Hinard was therefore still in Allied territory.
(2) Approximately 200 kilometres.
(3) The first notable engagement of the 1805 Campaign was Donauwörth on 7 October 1805.
(4) Battle of Günzburg, 9 October 1805, where Ney defeated Karl Mack, capturing 900 prisoners and five guns.
(5) The place name does not exist. Hinard was in a foreign country and did not understand the language. He transcribed the place names as he understood them.
(6) 14 October 1805.
(7) 15 October 1805.
(8) The third Bulletin of the Grande Armée, dated 15 October 1805, stated on this occasion: ‘The day was appalling; the soldier was up to his knees in mud’. On the morning of the 15th, Soult occupied Biberach.
(9) The seventh Bulletin of the Grande Armée of 19 October 1805 mentions exactly this number and reveals that it was the source of Hinard’s statements.
(10) The Russians, allies of the Austrians, came to their aid as far as the borders of the Tyrol, an Austrian province. After the capture of Ulm, they began a withdrawal marked by skirmishes with the French vanguard, which did not end until Austerlitz (on 2 December 1805).
(11) 24 October 1805.
(12) In other words around seventy-two kilometres, which is exactly the distance between the two towns.
***
One league from Brunn (1) in Moravia, 19 Frimaire Year XIV [10 December 1805].
Dear Rosalie, what a pleasure it is for me to be able to inform you at this time of my plight since my last letter from Landshut, and after all the various affairs we have had since the capture of Ulm, and that I can tell you of the good state of my health, of yours, my dear wife, of that of our children, of our mothers and of the whole family, has just been further assured to me by your letter in reply to mine from Landshut, which I received yesterday.
You cannot be in doubt of the pleasure it has brought me alongside the peace we have just gained from the renowned and unparalleled battle, known as the Battle of the Three Emperors (2), on the plains of Brunn. It was with lightning speed that our army advanced on Vienna and seized it, after having razed all the strongholds, forced the passage of the Danube and the Linz (3), where the enemy had severed and burnt all the bridges, we made prisoners and destroyed a large part of the Austrian and Russian armies. However, on the other side of the capital, the enemy was in force, occupying a bridge near which a formidable array of artillery was ready to fire, and the bridge was rigged with barrels of gunpowder underneath to blow it up along with our army when we forced the passage. Nothing could hinder the courage and intrepidity of our army: the bridge was blown up, the artillery were buried in the ground and the enemy army was forced to retreat.
We were already pursuing them on the road and in the plains, when the Russians assembled and confronted our troops, forcing us to retreat for a moment. They had seized the villages and were beating our men through the doors and windows. We immediately fired howitzers at the villages and reduced them to dust, forcing them to abandon their positions and continue to fight while retreating. Yet the vigour with which we pursued them gave them no time to establish themselves properly and they were content to set fire to bridges to arrest the progress of our advance. But unfortunately all this could not be done without losing many men, for the Russians, who had the largest army, are not men, but rather animals who fear neither danger nor death. (4) They are like walls, unshakeable, and only the bayonet can frighten them, which enabled us to be victorious everywhere, and made us take prisoners by the thousands.
Our army, after having pursued them as far as Moravia, seized Brunn (5) and the fort, had fortifications erected there for fear of withdrawal, and the enemy army had occupied the heights of Brune [sic]. Our troops had made a junction with the Army of Italy (6) and occupied the whole of the Tyrol and the Bohemian side, while Prince Charles (7) was pursued by this same army. We did not fear being blockaded by the enemy, which resulted in the troops billeting in the various villages for eight days and only going out to scout each day and returning to sleep in the evening. However, the Russian army had been reinforced and they intended to cut off our retreat towards Vienna, which led to the entire army reuniting.
On 10 Frimaire, the anniversary of the coronation (8), each soldier lit a straw torch in the bivouacs to celebrate the occasion. (9) The Emperor who was present informed the army of his intention to attack the enemy, and said that it was an important day, that there was only one battle left to fight, but it did not take place that day. The next day, at dawn, the enemy attacked, with the three armies in battle array and the three Emperors present. They responded, and at eight o’clock fire was engaged on both sides, but with unequalled force. The Austrian army was soon routed and taken prisoner, whereas the Russian army was no different, with more than a hundred guns firing furiously and pelting our battalions. (10) The Russians did not move and were counting on victory because they had prepared everything for it. Two hundred paces behind the army, they had put their backpacks on the ground and one man per company was guarding them, so that they would be nimble enough to rout us. However, the bayonet and the cavalry charge(s) soon frustrated their expectations. At every position along the army it was nothing but butchery.
Never was a battle more dreadful (11) : Marengo (12) now only comes in second, and from six o’clock in the morning until nightfall, we did nothing but sabring and capture 30,000 prisoners. (13) Entire corps of our troops were destroyed. Our regiment suffered a great deal, especially our 2nd Battalion, which found itself under the barrage of cannon fire. The men from Coutances [a municipality in the French department of the Manche in Normandy] were fortunate enough; we have only to pity young Quesnel who alone had his leg broken by a biscayen, although it is believed that he will have to limp and that he will retain his leg.
I therefore do not need to tell you anything about the others; they are all doing well, as is the one who is writing to you. Let us give thanks to God and pray to him to grant us peace. We are stationed in the villages where we were before the affair and there is much talk of our return to France and to Paris. You asked me to let you know whether the 16th Regiment of Chasseurs à Cheval had been annihilated at Ulm. I can only tell you that they were there, but they may have lost some men without being completely destroyed, because they were involved in this last affair, and it is still impossible to know the losses suffered by the different corps. The towns and countryside are crowded with the wounded and the ground covered with the dead. However, the Austrians and Russians will remember that our Emperor has just added further glory to himself; at the head of his Guard, he charged the enemy.
The three Emperors had a meeting (14), which gave rise to the surrender of the army and the prospect of peace. (15) He (our Emperor) left again for Vienna. I have not received your letter in reply to the one from Spire on the Rhine in which you tell me about the conscripts who have been arrested; it seems that no pardon has been granted, but they are too fortunate to be spared from a battle in which they would have given half their lives to spare the other half. Extend my love to our dear children; alas, I think well of them if they think well of me! Our mothers, whom I long to see again, and you, dear and tender wife, who lives far from the man who yearns only for the blissful moment of holding you close to my heart.
Your faithful and sincere husband,
Hinard, fourrier.
The question you asked me, dear Rosalie, about whether the fourriers do not enter the fire, is unfortunately all too true: no one is exempt, because if food is provided, it is brought to the camp. This question, my dear friend, in any other circumstances would have cost me to convince you of it. But when God watches over us, we are well watched over!
Many thanks to Passelais and his wife, Motin and his wife, our brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, Victor and his wife, and the Levée cousins. I saw their son yesterday, we are not staying in the same village. Le Lièvre is doing well; Le Rendu and Frigot each were struck by a spent bullet but they are not crippled; they walk, drink and eat well. The war has spared our officers; not a single one was killed but several were wounded.
Hinard, fourrier in the 7th Company of the 1st Battalion of the 40th Line Infantry Regiment of General Suchet’s Division, part of the vanguard commanded by Marshal Lannes stationed near Brunn in Moravia or in the wake of the army.
Notes
(1) Brünn, a German designation for what is now Brno in the Czech Republic, was at the time one of the main towns in the province of Moravia, part of the Austrian Empire. It was here that the French army set up camp in the days leading up to the battle of Austerlitz, with Napoleon making his entrance on 20 November.
(2) Nickname given to the battle of Austerlitz, which took place in the presence of the three main belligerents: Napoleon I, Emperor of the French; Francis I, Emperor of Austria; Alexander I, Emperor of Russia.
(3) The Inn, a tributary of the Danube, was a stage on the road to Linz, which Marshal Lannes entered on 3 November without a fight.
(4) Another description from the 25th Bulletin de la Grande Armée of 15 November 1805: ‘[General Klein] has witnessed the horror of the Russians everywhere: the devastation they are committing makes one shudder. ‘We and the French’, say the Germans, ‘are the sons of the Romans; the Russians are the children of the Tartars […]’. In Vienna, the mere mention of a Russian inspired terror. These hordes of savages are not content with plundering their subsistence; they remove and destroy everything’.
(5) Here Hinard summarises the troop movements of the previous three weeks, culminating in Murat’s capture of Brünn on 18 November.
(6) The junction had been made on 24 November 1805.
(7) Archduke Charles was the younger brother of the Emperor of Austria. A distinguished general and commander of the Austrian army sent to operate in Italy, he withstood Masséna’s army before withdrawing in good order northwards to come to the aid of the remnants of the Army of Germany and the Russians.
(8) Napoleon had been crowned a year earlier, on 2 December 1804.
(9) Another description found in the 30th Bulletin of the Grande Armée of 2 December 1805: ‘Straw torches were raised in an instant to the top of thousands of stakes and 80,000 men presented themselves to meet the Emperor’.
(10) Again a description, provided by the 30th Bulletin of the Grande Armée of 2 December 1805, concerning Marshal Lannes’ division in which Hinard was serving: ‘A tremendous cannonade began all along the line; 200 guns and nearly 200,000 men were producing an dreadful noise’.
(11) Another description drawn from the 30th Bulletin of the Grande Armée of 2 December 1805: ‘Never was a battlefield more horrifying. From the middle of immense lakes, we can still hear the cries of thousands of men who cannot be rescued. It would take three days for all the wounded to be evacuated to Brünn’.
(12) The outcome at Marengo was considerable, with more than 10,000 dead or wounded on both sides, but considerably less than the almost 25,000 dead or wounded at Austerlitz.
(13) This figure seems clearly exaggerated. There were probably more like 11,000 prisoners on the Austrian and Russian sides.
(14) In reality, only Napoleon and Francis of Austria met directly after the battle, on 4 December, not far from the village of Austerlitz, to discuss the peace terms. Alexander, who had made known his intention to withdraw and accept an armistice, did not take part.
(15) The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, who had followed the Grande Armée to the outskirts of the battlefield, was about to receive the Austrian plenipotentiaries to negotiate peace. It was to be signed on 26 December in Pressburg, the capital of Hungary.
(16) Lannes, who was in command of V Corps. During the battle of Austerlitz, Hinard was part of the 3rd Infantry Division commanded by General of Division Suchet, within the 2nd Brigade led by General of Brigade Nicolas Léonard Bagert Beker. At the time, the 40th Line Regiment numbered an estimated 1,149 men.
***
Brünn in Moravia, 4 January 1806.
It bothers me to no end, my dear, sweet friend. The reason is quite simple: you are not writing to me. This silence causes me great anxiety. Are you ill? What is the reason? Have you not received my letters, do you no longer know my address, or do the post offices deprive me of this comfort? I am fighting against ill health, and I fear I cannot prevail.
Diseases spread, a sudden stagnation draws them in, and the foul air caused by the large number of dead and wounded in the town and surrounding area contributes a great deal; and this is a burden that everyone owes when they leave a country, after forced marches and hardships of all kinds, and which I have only just fulfilled. What must my position be, my dear Rosalie, five hundred leagues from you? What am I to think, what am I to do, when I have nothing to offer, and when up to now we have always been in the uncertain balance of a sudden peace or a continuation of the war, and have nothing, not a single word from your dear hand, to ease my suffering? I can judge for myself, from a thousand idle remarks about the state of my home country; all the more so what your thoughts must have been after the news, which was received more promptly than my letter, of the battle of Austerlitz! This war has therefore spared my life and I am spending it far from you without either of us having a future.
So the peace was signed, and the Emperor announced our departure for France: what joy! What pleasure after so much suffering! The distance is great, and I cannot see myself arriving in this capital where so many celebrations, announced to us by the Emperor, await us. (1) I fear for this journey and even more for my health. Courage, courage, I have never lacked it, and it will double when it concerns getting closer to you; however, on the 1st of May, I will still be seventy leagues away, since I will be in Paris for certain. There I will forget all my troubles, my pains and my fatigue. I will do my best (knowing a general with whom I have worked since my stay in Brünn, and who is wounded) to obtain a semester to spend the summer beside you and our dear family. I would like to see you in Paris to share the enjoyment that the Emperor is preparing for us; the whole army will be gathered there and will dine at the same table on the boulevard, such is the order he left before his departure for the capital. But I think you will be unable to make it.
In accordance with the peace treaty, the troops occupying Moravia will evacuate it within a fortnight, those in Vienna within ten days, and the whole of Germany within three months; we are leaving in three to four days and taking a different route from the one we followed to get here. We will cross all the mountains of the Tyrol and reach the road to Strasbourg. As you can tell, dear wife, this route does not allow me to tell you of any certain town we will pass through and where you can write to me to have the mail stay there; however, you will not forget Strasbourg. And you can be assured that for my part I will do my utmost to be aware of the places we will be passing through, which I will indicate to you in my letters.
Up until now, as I have not stayed in any town where I could find, or rather encounter, a post office belonging to the army, I have not been able to frank my letters, which cost you a rather high price; but now that everything is peaceful and that we prefer to occupy cities, towns and villages rather than the countryside, in order to sleep and stay there, my letters that you receive will all be franked. We have just been paid for two months’ worth in local paper: you can imagine what value it has in a country where war has brought ruin and famine… We have to use it, and I have already spent part of it on handkerchiefs and the remainder on a frock coat and trousers so that I can dress myself appropriately in Paris; the two or three months during our journey, which I hope will be paid for in cash, will be spent on other things when I arrive in France… If during the three or four days we have to spend here I do not receive any word from you, I shall be deprived of it, my dear friend, for some time. But if I am deprived of news, please take a moment of your time and write to me by post so that your letter reaches me by the route at the address on the opposite page.
If I were not afraid of prolonging your sorrow, your past worries regarding the battle of Austerlitz, I would tell you that despite our victories, and the intrepidity of the soldiers, death has produced a hundred years of peace. The battlefield revealed after several days only an inanimate surface, deserted of all living things: unfortunate men deprived of their limbs and prey to the most severe pain remained for three or four days without any food other than what they could get, unheeded by the world that could have given them assistance; others, whose remaining courage had dragged them close to a bivouac, were burnt there, unable to escape; and lastly, countless wounded in hospitals, deprived of food or nothing more than a piece of raw bread, and unable to receive assistance quickly enough, perished there without having been able to bid farewell to anyone: such were the consequences of the illustrious and memorable day of Austerlitz.
If I have described to you all the misfortunes that result from a battle, I will tell you, according to the report of the day, that more than ten thousand enemy soldiers remained on the battlefield; that a large number drowned in the lakes where, pursued, they tried to save themselves on the ice; that thirty thousand men were taken prisoner; 120 guns remained in our hands, forty flags were seized, twenty generals and one Russian […] captured, as well as the standards of the Imperial Guard of Russia. (2) From now on, Austria can no longer interfere in a war unless it has allies, and we have defeated them. The men from Coutances were fortunate, only two suffered injuries, Quesnel (3) and Le Rendu: the former will limp; the latter, who had thought that the bullet that hit him had only grazed but had entered the flesh, recovered without any further consequences. I will therefore end my letter, dear Rosalie, by awakening your heart, which for a moment has slumbered for my sake. I hope that through your letters you will revive my courage, and that through your letters you will assure me that you, our dear children and our mothers are doing well.
At the start of this new year, I wish them perfect health so that I can enjoy the comfort of seeing them again when I return to France. And you, my dear friend, time has changed things: only a year ago I pressed you to my heart on the first day of this year, and all I can do now is send you a thousand and one embraces that the future promises to reward me with.
Your faithful and caring husband,
Hinard.
My address: Hinard, fourrier in the 40th Regiment, 1st Battalion, 7th Company, General Suchet’s Division, at Brunn in Moravia or in the wake of the division on its way to France.
Everyone from Coutances is doing well; I have done for them what you asked me to do on behalf of their parents.
Notes
(1) A statement written by Napoleon from Schönbrunn Palace (Vienna) on 27 December 1805, when peace had just been signed with the Emperor of Austria (Treaty of Pressburg, on 26 December), reads: ‘I will host a great celebration in Paris in the first days of May; you will all be there’. (Inserted in the 37th Bulletin of the Grande Armée, 26 December 1805).
(2) Official estimates put the death toll at 4,000 Russians and Austrians, 12,000 wounded, 11,500 prisoners, 180 guns and 45 standards captured.
(3) Charles Quesnel, registration number 1255 in the 40th Line. The son of Jacques Quesnel and Louise Belle Etoile, he was born on 1 September 1781 in Coutances, and was drafted at Brest on the same day as Hinard (8 February 1803) as a Year X conscript. Appointed corporal on 24 August 1805, he was granted retirement leave on 23 September 1806.
Source : Second Lieutenant François Hinard’s correspondence with his wife, Rosalie Passelais, on website Napoleonica: Les Archives, document numbers 36-38.
Other accounts to read :
> From Boulogne to the aftermath of Austerlitz, 1805 …
> To Austerlitz – A French officer’s 1805 journal … (I)
> An Imperial Guard chasseur at Austerlitz …
Jonas De Neef's Napoleon Chronicles 