"Atrocities in the Napoleonic Wars" Topic

In a couple of recent threads reference has been made to rape and pillage on the part of the French whilst on foreign soil.

Over the years I have read about the siege of Badajoz and the brutalities of the 1812 retreat, but I have probably not read as much about the Peninsular as I should have.

Concerning the Napoleonic Wars in general, I would be interested to read of specific examples of the excesses of the French armies, who I know lived off the land, but didn't think commited wide spread atrocities throughout the period.

I shall order in the popcorn:).

There was a whole dirty war in Spain against the Spanish guerillas, including plenty of atrocities by both sides. I've never read that the French were all that prone to committing atrocities, but in war in they happen.

And then there's the British at Badajoz and San Sebastian, both of which were complete horror shows.

My impression is that no one nationality was worse or better for atrocities, but they happened when any soldiers were hard pressed and vulnerable to breaches in discipline.

The Cossacks had a very bad reputation in Germany and France in 1814.

No one cornered the market on atrocities. French certainly pillaged, murdered and raped in Spain. Spanish and Portuguese guerillas murdered and tortured French stragglers. The British army went berserk a couple times storming towns and Moore's retreating army pulled some outrages on Spanish civilians. And that's just Spain. I'm sure a theater by theater survey would turn up plenty more on both sides.

Even during the War of the Austrian Succession during the supposedly civilized Enlightenment you can find atrocities.

French armies tended to "live off the land" or more precisely the people of those lands. This was one of the factors which made French armies faster as they consequently required a shorter supply train. There was resentment of this throughout Italy, Germany, Austria, Russia as well as Spain. Given the opportunity, any civilian whose livelihood and perhaps his very existence was threatened by these garage parties would act accordingly, and the army would of course react.

Check out Goya's 'Disasters of War' series of prints. Artistic license aside I don't think he was making a lot of stuff up.

link

Napier, Siborne and Ohman all mention atrocities in Spain. Some quite graphic.

Here in Portugal most of our churches were vandalized by French troops…

How bad does it have to be to count as "an atrocity"? I'm just reading the memoirs of Jakob Walter, a Wurttemberg infantry private in Infanterie-Regiment Nr.4 von Franquemont.

Of his time on occupation duties in Prussia, he describes a number of questionable actions, including shooting a guard dog, kidnapping a local Jew and forcing him to act as guide, compelling local nobles to provide transport so a small group could catch up with their regiment, stealing a carriage and horses, and selling them cheaply when they had served their purpose. Young, inexperienced, armed and unsupervised, he and his comrades did most of these things not wantonly but in order to carry out orders to forage and then rejoin his unit.

I wouldn't call these major war crimes, but if this behaviour was at all typical, then multiply this a thousand times over, and I can see why an occupied country would soon yearn to be rid of its conquerors.

The Disasters of War are one of the classics, definitely. The most remarkable thing about them is that they foresee the mass, annonymous slaughter of the First World War and the 20th Century more generally. The rows of barrels pointing at people with the soldiers out of sight, for instance, amongst many other aspects. It's worth some time to go through them one by one with the titles on hand in English (if needed) to get an idea what the countryside was like at the time.

Los Caprichos are also a century+ ahead of thier time as well, and in addition to being etchings have other issues in common with The Disasters.

But then again compared to the 30 Years War the Napoleonic Wars were a model of modern civility, no?

Whatever they did was fine as long as they didn't use chemical weapons.

Once the officers stopped wearing powdered wigs and beauty spots, all bets are off.
It's those grubby sans culottes that started it all.

With the Grande Armee, it depended on the commander. Davout wouldn't tolerate it, and neither Suchet nor Soult allowed it in the areas under their control in Spain, and in those areas they were little troubled by guerillas.

Frederick the Great's actions in Saxony in the Seven Years' War either rivaled or surpassed anything the Grande Armee ever did.

And Blucher encouraged, and looked on with favor, any pillaging or looting that his troops did in 1813 and 1814.

The Belgians thought the Prussians were worse than the Cossacks had been in 1815.

All of the allied armies in France looted and pillaged as they saw fit because of which the people in eastern France rose against them and started filling wells with dead Russians and Prussians.

The international champions, though, were probably the Cossacks.

B

The issue is logistics. 18th century armies moved slowly with large baggage trains, troops were not given a great deal of freedom to wander off to liberate the locals goods to the same extent as later armies of the levee en masse. (This is a generalisation to illustrate a point, of course there were atrocities during the 18th c). Once they moved onto the offensive and operated in foreign countries, for the French there was the need to live off the land. Goods were taken, at best worthless paper money was exchanged for the forcible requisitions by quartermasters and the troops themselves had greater opportunity to take what they needed.

In wealthy countries, arrangements with the local authorities ensured some kind of order to the requisitions. In poor under populated countries like Naples and parts of Spain, where the population was also in the throws of insurrection against the occupying French, troops came into conflict with the locals. This perhaps was the root of the atrocities that took place in the Peninsular as depicted famously by Goya and recorded in several observers of the time.

I think there is a difference between the kind of atrocities that different armies can be associated with. The atrocities the French and local population engaged in resulted from the way the French in order to move and exist sought to draw directly on the local population, a population badly governed and poor. The excesses of parts of the British/ Allied army at Badajoz, Ciudad Rodrigo and San Sebastian while intense and of short duration had a different cause. A city that did not surrender, usually after an effective breach had been established in the city wall, by custom and usage was plundered. Some elements of the army of that era would have expected as of right to be stealing and worse. Anyone who got in the way of such troops plainly risked their lives.

Wellington understood the risks of relying on living off the land. Plunderers and rapists if caught in flagrante were executed on the spot by the Judge Advocate General, others subject to military discipline as several accounts attest. When generalissimo of the Spanish army in 1814, on entering France several Spanish regiments were sent back to Spain for breaches of discipline with the locals. This was not pay back time. Wellington realised that creating difficulties with the local population could create real difficulties for his operations. He even went to the extent of casting his own "French" coins for payment of goods ensuring the metal content was correct.

In short I think atrocities by occupying armies were not due to any innate national weakness/ badness but rather the way in which commanders organised and supplied their forces and the local circumstances that created additional friction with local populations. The way troops were actually supplied had a direct effect on discipline as we would understand it. Accordingly, at different times and places during these wars, there are differences in the behaviour of troops of different nations.

That's what I think anyway; of course I could be wrong, all my troops are not allowed to move from the shelves were they are kept unless under my strict supervision.

Does anyone think that there might be a market for miniatures based on the Goya prints? No, perhaps not…

Brian Rix, I think you offer a very sensible analysis of the various causes of the different kinds of atrocities, without descending into national stereotyping.

IIRC, the British troops at Badajoz were under the impression that the Spanish population of the city had collaborated with the French, which does not excuse the behaviour of some of the stormers, but does help to explain it.

"The Cossacks had a very bad reputation in Germany and France in 1814."

I used to think that, too. That's what I was told as a student during the Cold War: If the Russians come, bad stuff happens. I think most of us in the West grew up on that trope and never questioned it seriously because it flattered our Us-vs-Them concept of civilization and the superiority of the West.

But then I started doing actual research about small towns and cities and the experiences of people during this period, particularly in the northern half of Germany, and I've been forced to revise my thinking substantially.

Time and again, people comment upon how well-behaved the Russians were. Including the Cossacks.

Sometimes the locals comment that perhaps the Russian soldiers were too afraid of their officers to misbehave. But in most cases, they simply comment that the Cossacks arrived (typically in 1813), and were greeted with ecstatic celebrations marking the end of French rule. I've read letters, memoirs, and reports of this nature from all across Germany: from East Prussia to the Rhineland.

Perhaps that was the smart way to greet Cossacks, so they weren't tempted to plunder. Or perhaps the locals really were just that happy by 1813 to be rid of the French. But in any event, I've read too many accounts like this, from people of all classes and in too many locations, for this to have been a fluke or an isolated regional phenomenon.

In fact, three feet from this keyboard I have a collection of letters from a family in Kassel, and the grandmother describes the Cossacks in 1813 as liberators, greeted joyously by the city, and she writes to her niece, describing her comical attempts to communicate with a Cossack in order to wash and trim his filthy long hair. Eventually she persuades him to sit down and let her cut his hair. Then she feeds him a soup and he beds down on her kitchen floor for the evening, without taking a thing.

(This isn't long after-the-fact memoir, either: this is a letter she wrote that same week to her niece, describing events happening around her.)

As I said, I've read this sort of recollection so many times that I'm forced to reconsider the Russian & Cossack presence in Europe entirely.

When they got to France, perhaps, it was a different story, I don't know. I'm not an expert on those communities. But in Germany, the primary sources do not support the traditional old notion that the Russians left a trail of atrocities in their wake.

Thanks Arthur, I have also heard Badajoz explained in that way.

With reference to part of the original question raised by the Colonel, the atrocity at Acre where Napoleon was personally implicated in the execution of thousands of prisoners of war is of note. This incident like the assassination of the Duc d'Enghien shows Boney at his worst and I believe this was the contemporary view as well.

"I would be interested to read of specific examples of the excesses of the French armies"

Well, the sack of Weimar, for example, in 1806. Mass rape and looting. If you can read German, there are a lot of recollections of it. The memoirs of Johanna Schopenhauer and her correspondence to her son describe it. Other examples in: Eckart Kleßmann, Deutschland Unter Napoleon in Augenzeugenberichten (Düsseldorf: Rauch, 1965).

I've got a number of memoirs and letters from the winter of 1806-07 in East Prussia, and that stuff is chilling. French cavalry rolled into town, and people scrambled to hide their daughters and remaining valuables. There are several examples of French colonels accepting personal bribes in order to move on to somewhere else, like mafia protection money.

One of the basic issues was accountability. In areas under occupation, or even in the French satellites and vassal states, French soldiers could not be arrested by local police, nor tried by local courts. There are several cases where locals attempted to do so, and the French soldiers were extracted under armed guards and taken away. Whether they were punished or not, the locals never knew. (The city of Braunschweig (Brunswick) erupted into riots over this in 1809 and 1811).

Another basic issue is that people tend not to pay attention to the women. Their recollections don't often get into secondary sources and books about the armies and battles. You have to find their diaries, memoirs, and letters. And then you get a whole other world. But unfortunately that means you have to read the old scripts in the original languages, scattered across various archives.

For a small sample in English, Michael Hughes' recent book about the cult of masculinity in the Grande Armée has a section about rape. He gives examples of French songs and ditties in which they sing about "taking" local women.

Trout,

Growing up in the DDR, which was not an experience that I would wish on anyone, we were taught about the occasions on which our Russian brothers had liberated us from tyranny (oh the irony!). Of course, one of these occasions was the campaign of 1813; according to the official version of events, the French were rapacious plunderers and the glorious Russian liberators were paragons of virtue. However, the official version of 1945 was rather similar, which, even then, made me wonder about the accuracy of the 1813 history.

So many myths have built up about the behaviour of all parties during the Napoleonic wars that it is almost impossible to separate fact from fiction without the sort of primary research that you are undertaking, rather than the repetition of biased nationalistic propaganda.

Jurgen

Thank you gentlemen for the contributions so far which have been very informative and exactly the type of information I was after.

Nothing done in the Napoleonic Wars compares to 1945.

On THAT topic, I can recommend the terrific new book by Lowe: Savage Continent.

excerpt
link
Does look like a good if grim book

No such thing as bad soldiers, only poor Officers.

French officers failed to make adequate logistic provision for their men, so could hardly step in to prevent plunder, worse things inevitably follow…

British Officers were expected to provide for their men, so could and did step in to prevent plunder, with the exceptions of the dreadful Peninsular retreats…

Badajoz was a stain, no doubt about it. But in keeping with the laws and usages of war prevalent at the time. And several British and Allied officers were killed attempting to prevent the worst excesses.

The excesses committed by some elements of the civilian townsfolk, though hardly excusing the troops misconduct, seems not to be a popular area of study….

What excesses committed by the civilian population?

I am have bought the Lowe book, which sounds interesting

Trout, on another thread, "The 'Edwulf Index' – Calibrating right and wrong in warfare?" you wrote concerning French occupation:

"People generally aren't too crazy about foreigners taking their food and property, occupying their houses, raping their wives and daughters, raising their taxes dramatically, shutting down their commerce, arresting them for printing or reading their favorite newspapers, and conscripting their sons to go die in Spain or Russia.

By that point you're probably not in a mood to contemplate whether or not it's been overall a good thing that the judiciary has been significantly modernized."

Was this, to a certain extent, a throw away remark, or do you believe from your research, that rape was an everyday reality of French occupation rather than the stuff of isolated periods of excess.

I would guess that the worst atrocities involved the conflicts between the Ottomans and the European armies that fought them, although this is not something that I have studied in incredible detail.

One of the worst atrocities was the slaughter of the prisoners at Jaffa.

This was during the Egyptian campaign so not strictly part of the Napoleonic Wars, and it wasn't a case of raping and pillaging but an actual calculated act of murder.
Although terrible, and difficult to condone, it is actually very difficult to come up with an alternative choice given the circumstances. I haven't read any historians who actually could come up with a viable alternative choice for Bonaparte. The actual method used to kill the prisoners was absolutely brutal though, and by far the worst episode in Napoleons career, from a human rights point of view.
The next day, when he visited the plague victims at the hospital, was one of Napoleon's finest moments, from a human rights point of view. He always was a mass of contradictions.

TelesticWarrior

Good post. But I guess some people fail miserably to place themselves in the position or time of those they are quick to criticise. I wonder if the same people feel the same about the English king, Richard The Lionheart, who killed his prisoners? And I don't think there was a food or drink problem at the time.

And would any of us be happy to let go those who had killed our comrades after being let free and agreeing to a parole earlier?

TelesticWarrior

This is in relation to Coopman's post saying anything is okay unless chemical weapons were used. (I'm not saying he was serious, by the way)

But in the same way that some people are quick to condemn Napoleon for any hint of atrocity, what will history say on the future concerning the use of Chemical Weapons. Eg-do we blame whoever used them or those who it is alleged sold them to those who may have used them? It also seems such an atrocity also looks acceptable in some cases, if the links below are to be believed.

link

link

But like Napoleon and the atrocities thrown at him, do we know the full facts, will we ever know them, and from both sides?

TelesticWarrior,

The case of the massacre at Jaffa is an interesting one. Some, if not most, of the soldiers involved had been captured previously and had been released on parole. On discovering that the garrison contained troops who had already given their parole and broken it, Bonaparte was indeed faced with a dilemma; for logistical reasons, he could not keep them as prisoners but he also could not afford to release them again as they had proved to be untrustworthy (although it is, of course, possible that they had no option but to fight again).

Given the standards of the time and the situation, killing them was probably the only realistic option that he had. Killing them in the way that he did was probably also about the only option open to him, given the dreadful supply situation that his army was facing.

The whole affair was brutal and, by modern standards, abhorent, but it was probably reasonable by late 18th century standards.

Judging the past by the standards of today is problematic.

Jurgen

" do you believe from your research, that rape was an everyday reality of French occupation rather than the stuff of isolated periods of excess."

My expertise in primary sources is limited to the northern half of Germany. I haven't done primary research in southern Germany, unless you count Saxony.

OK, so as far as the limited scope of my expertise: I'd say that there are two periods of real turmoil and chaos in which there was widespread violence against civilians:

1) The 1806-07 War stands out as particularly bad.

2) The Napoleonic collapse in 1813 was bad, although for different reasons.

Rape stands out as a very common crime in the 1806-07 period. But the violence in 1813 has more to do with punishing civilians for their perceived disloyalty to the collapsing Napoleonic satellite states or provincial authorities. (Arrests and executions for things like distributing forbidden publications, or hiding conscripts or deserters, etc.)

I can get more specific if you like, but those are the stand-out periods.

There are always interesting exceptions. For instance, even though the French occupation of Hessen-Kassel occasioned civil disobedience and (within a few months) armed uprising, the initial occupation of Kassel came off without a hitch, and Lagrange's men surprised the locals by being well-behaved. Lagrange was very smart about it; he organized various balls, parties, and "meet-and-greet" events to schmooze with the local well-to-do and to allow their daughters to flirt with his handsome young officers. But then the uprisings began and all of that good work went out the window because the French (by that point mostly Italians) were sent around from town to town, rooting out suspected collaborators and rebels, making widespread arrests, confiscating people's weapons, etc.

And then of course Napoleon totally mooted all the good work that Langrange had done, by ordering mass executions and entire towns burned to the ground, as "examples" for the others. (Consider N's order to Berthier on 19 Jan 1807, to burn the towns of Eschwege and Hersfeld, and then his furious reaction when he found out that Eschwege had been spared by the mercy of a young Baden lieutenant who had refused to carry out an immoral order against unarmed civilians.)

Napoleon to Berthier, 19 Jan, 1807:

Write to Gen. Lagrange that I read his letter of 8 January, and that I am far from satisfied. My intention is that the two towns of Eschwege and Hersfeld should be burned, that sixty or more of the guilty of these two towns and their environs should be shot, and three times that number should be arrested and transported to France….

Trout, "I can get more specific if you like, but those are the stand-out periods."

If you have the time and inclination any additional information would be gratefully received, certainly by me. This is throwing a very interesting light on things.

"any additional information would be gratefully received"

I'm presently working on a book about the Kingdom of Westphalia, so my recent work has been in the Hessian archives, and the city archives in places like Kassel, Braunschweig, Wolfenbüttel, Münster, the Uni archive at Göttingen, etc. I'm heading back to Berlin in January, because with the renovation of the old state library, they've finally made available a lot of old texts that were previously assumed to have been lost in WW2. So there's an absolute ton of material, but it's all very old and hard to get to. (And of course almost entirely in German, a bit in French.)

I'm very interested in the experience of civilians in this period; what was it like to live through the French conquest, and then the experience of Napoleon's political and social reconfigurations of Germany, and then the subsequent war periods, and finally the collapse. So I'm trying to devote a significant part of the book to this "bottom-up" approach, using the recollections of people who weren't powerful or influential.

Anyway, there is a very predictable refrain of complaints throughout this period:

1. Confiscation of money, property, land, and weapons.*

2. Arbitrary arrest by French agents or their local accomplices, and subsequent incarceration or death.

3. Massive increases in taxation, special war "contributions," forced "bond" issues, and other ways of taking your money and sending it off to France.

4. Conscription, and the punishments that await families who resist it.

5. Violence against women. This peaks during the conquest period in 1806-07, but remains a touchy issue because if the perpetrator is French, then he cannot be punished by local law enforcement, and often gets off scot-free. (There were two big riots in Braunschweig because of this; in one case because the local husband took justice into his own hands and murdered the Frenchman himself.)

6. The takeover of the churches and their properties. One of the revolts in Marburg, for instance, occurred after the Westphalians, on Napoleon's instruction, saved money by merging Catholic and Lutheran congregations, so that the clerics (who were now state employees in the French style), had to share the same cathedral.

7. Censorship and paranoia. This reaches bizarre levels. Fraternities on college campuses are broken up because the boys get drunk and shout in the streets at night, wishing a happy birthday to the former (German) ruler. Or: an aristocratic woman is arrested because she held a dinner party at which it is reported that they drank a toast to the health of the King of Prussia. That sort of thing.

Westphalia interests me a lot because (a) no one has ever really tackled this subject in English, at least not in book-length, and (b) Westphalia spans several former German states, so you get a nice cross-section of experiences, vis-a-vis different past experiences.

- – – -

* the above-mentioned Lagrange, for all his light touch in Kassel, was nonetheless by 1809 the owner of nine large tracts of confiscated German property, which he kept as an an absentee landlord and never paid taxes on. I have seen a lawsuit brought against him by one of the former owners, in the Hessian state archive in Marburg.

Funny how some people like to throw at Napoleon the same things that other leaders and regimes were doing, as if it is okay for them but not for Napoleon.

Take Trout's No 7 bit on censorship and paranoia -

Perhaps he should try reading – Censorship and Political Caricature in Nineteenth Century France by Robert Justin Goldstein, available free via googlebooks.

p104
Meanwhile, in France in July 1816, the police raided the offices of the Pellerin Company in Epinal, a major publisher of popular prints, as well as those of some of its distributors, and seized many pro-Napoleonic prints. The head of the company was fined six hundred frances and sentenced to a four-month jail sentence (which was subsequently suspended). The regime became so sensitive to pictures that in July 1817, the newspaper Le Constitutionnel was supressed for supposedly suggesting there was a depiction of Napoleon's son in a drawing by the well-known artist Isabey.

If that wasn't enough Bourbon paranoia-page 112
Thus, in June 1820, a print seller was fined six hundred francs for selling an engraving depicting Napoleon and members of his family. On many occasions three-month jail terms were the penalty for such offences, such as the case of a jeweller convicted in February 1822 of having sold a gold trinket which had Napoleonic designs on its five facets.

The book makes for some interesting reading and clearly shows that ALL regimes went in for censorship and paranoia.

Forgot to add this link about censorship as well

link

Gazzola, while you raise interesting stuff, I think that censorship and paranoia is possibly the least relevant of the seven points raised by Trout as regards the OP, and indeed these seven points from Trout were supplemental in nature, arising from a request for further information on my part rather than from the OP directly, but the two overlapped to a degree.

If you read the OP again you will see that while I referred primarily to the actions of the French, it is not limited to this alone and can and has included atrocities committed by the forces of other nations.

I know at Badajoz, members of unit belonging to the maybe the third division were guilty of breaking into a nunnery and assaulting and raping some of the women there aswell as looting the place of food and money.

Wellington was unable to find the culprits but ordered the unit involved to stitch its regimental buttons on to their trouser flies as a mark of shame. The reference I saw deleted out the units number.

Gazzola, I'm afraid that proving that the Bourbons practiced censorship doesn't prove that ALL regimes practiced censorship. They may well have done, but you haven't proved it with the evidence offered.

French army song, posted elsewhere. Rather suggests that "atrocities" were commonplace.

"Buvons!
Brulons!
Foutons!
Mettons le feu a toutes maisons!
Venons a cinquante, cinq cent!
Chiens, brigands, paysans,
Ouvrez donc la porte? Panc*!"

*bang, as of a gun.

"I'm afraid that proving that the Bourbons practiced censorship doesn't prove that ALL regimes practiced censorship. "

As far as I know, they all did, except perhaps for Britain, the USA, the Dutch Republic and the Hanseatic republics (until the latter two were annexed by France.) And of course one can find exceptions in the above-mentioned, such as the American "Alien and Sedition Acts," etc.

But that has nothing to do with the question that Colonel T-A asked. He asked for specific examples of atrocities perpetrated by the French. I gave a few, including Napoleon ordering the burning of towns and mass-executions of civilians. Col. T-A then asked me to elaborate on grievances against French occupation, so I listed seven things that I've most frequently come across, in the way of local complaints against French rule in Germany. Censorship – and the resulting arrests and sometimes executions for defying it – was one of the seven.

I know at Badajoz, members of unit belonging to the maybe the third division were guilty of breaking into a nunnery and assaulting and raping some of the women there aswell as looting the place of food and money.

Wellington was unable to find the culprits but ordered the unit involved to stitch its regimental buttons on to their trouser flies as a mark of shame. The reference I saw deleted out the units number.

88th Foot???

AHA! I see we have Zombie-ized the "Was there a "good guy" in the Napoleonic Wars" in the continued attempt at the cannonization of the little fat Corsican peice of filth.

I shall reprint my comment from that list with a few additions to harmonize it with this thread.

"The good guys were the poor peasants and townsmen, tradesmen and shopkeepers who tried to keep their lives going with armies tramping over their farms and fields, rampaging through their shops, looting their posessions, ripping open their featherbeds, the accumulation of generations and turning them out to starve while they slaughtered their chikens, killed their milk cows, and burned down their homes after they had turned them into running latrines. The bad guys are the people smashing what few paltry posessions they had, hanging them over camp fires to find out where their gold was hidden, and laughing and insulting them in the bargain. They tried to hang on to their sons and prevent them from being dragged off to the armies to have their lives snuffed out, their limbs shot away, their bodies racked and destroyed by starvation, illness, and abuse, and hid they their daughters and wives to prevent them from being raped and killed by soliders coming to liberate them and give them "their rights" and fight for "La Gloire!"

And the real heroes, the heroes of the heroes are the women who tried to hold their families togther, tried to save the children, starved for them, picked grains of wheat out of the dung that horses of the "Friends of the People" left behind, and even sold their bodies for food for them and their husbands, and let themselves be raped to save their daughters.

None of these people asked to be "liberated" all of them just wanted to live their lives in peace, love their families, play with their children, watch their daughters and sons marry and be happy. They didn't care about Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or the Rights of Man or the Divine Right of Kings, or any of that rubbish. They wanted bread and peace and to live their little lives with a little happiness in a world of egocentric, megalomaniacal inhumane monsters who required an income of 10,000 lives a month.

This debate is rather ridiculous. Like it or no, admit it or no, war--- all war-- IS ATROCITY! It breeds atrocity in its wake as young sons are brutalized tne inured to these miseries. Don't just point at Spain. There were lootings, and rapes and murders enought for all. As I said, young men see and are compelled to do the most horrible things till their sensibilities are dulled, their conceptions of right and wrong dimmed. Women are demoralized by want and worry and care and need. It happens everywhere, all the time and in all wars, and if some peoples are better than others and do less of it, those who are victims in "that less" are just as dead, just as wronged, have their lives just as shattered as those who were so treated by those nations who were the worst at atrocities. We have seen in "Private Ryan" the dramatization of tales that even the arguably best soldiers, American Gi's gunned down German soldiers who had surrendered, pleading for their lives.

Atrocity will follow war wherever it goes and current events right now, today, tomorrow will prove that.

The resurrection of this thread in an attempt to exhonerate a brutal dictator, a sociopath raised to the throne, who needed an income of 10,000 lives a month because they are the darling of a few wargamers who want to see in him a saint because they want to see themselves as him, simply adds insult to the injury of those brutalized, ruined and smashed by war.

And how far msut we go? Beyond the instance of the battlefield or the occupied lands, what of the hundreds of thousands of women who could find no husbands after the bloodlettings in Flanders Fields (1715,1815,1915 take your pick) or "The Girls with Yellow Hands" who got that condition from handling the highly toxic explosive filling of shells? Or the hundred thousands of Mutliee's from any of the wars, the farms left untilled, the impoverization of the homeland and the moral decay that spread to it? Be careful when you poke at the graves of the "atrocified" legions more will rise to accuse.

Let the game remain a game and do not drag out comparative lists of brutalities in an attempt to white-wash those who have committed them becaue you think they are neat and you see yourself a nascent Napoleon.

OSchmidt that was an interesting read. My aim in the thread was as originally set out, I don't think I am seeking the canonization of anybody and I must confess I don't think I read the "Was there a good guy" thread.

Sometimes threads are about wargaming, uniforms, all sorts of topics. This is more about the history of the wars and more precisely about examples of atrocities taken from the collective knowledge of the membership that care to contribute.

I am at a loss as to the white wash you mention and I didn't write the post because I think I am Napoleon, maybe I am misunderstanding you, and if so please feel free to elaborate.

Horror and atrocity goes with war and it has ever been thus, asking for documented examples of it hardly excuses it, in fact quite the reverse.

Huevans

I don't know. I suspect it maybe a regiment belonging to the second brigade. But I've only read two references to it one I've pretty much paraphrased and it doesn't specify the unit. The other was a contemporary account but the units number was unspecified or removed, the --th foot.

I don't think it was the 88th, the 5th or the 45th despite being in the forefront these units seem to have been well respected and if Wellington was displeased he could "blank" units.

I think the answer maybe lost. But, with out wanting cast aspersions on any particular units, the 77th were removed from the 3rd Division after Badajoz and sent to Lisbon, not rejoining the main army til 1814. Could be the unit was shattered and not fit for campaigning but it maybe also that the army wanted them out of the way til the shame had died down.

Dear Colonel Toffee Apple

No I was not generally directing my comments to you, but there is always a danger that in this game of "atrocity dredging" people choose a position and operate as I said,-- more or less " Well X made atrocities but so did Y and therefore X isn't so bad after all."

YOu ask about the prevelence of Atrocity. Someone will make a general statement like Sam did, who knows his stuff, (very good comments Sam) and that ignites the fuse of the Nappy lovers who immediately fly to hid defence, and those who fly to attack those who attack him.

In the end the "atrocitized" become mere abstractions.

War games has always existed in uneasy partnership with the more unhappy elements of war. As I asked the victorious Mongols once after a Battle between Mongols and Khwarezem,"and what do you think will happen in Samarkand tomorrow."

Now and then this erupts into a discussion of the morality of war games. Usually these are either bland denials or overwrought hand wringing. A case can be made for either side. I feel we have to meet this issue squarely, as many do.

That's why I say it's best to leave these things unstated and undealt with. I mean-- we're not going to model these in a game are we?

I remember once a long time ago one person on the Ancient/Medeival Group asked "If you could go back in history what battle would you like to witness for the purposes of War Game Rules Research." I was horrified by this! I don't want to go back and watch any battle, Certainly not for a set of rules Research. The role of voyear to slaughter would I feel make me complicit in it. I would like to go back to the Battle of the Milvian Bridge an see in the sky what Constantine saw, but after that he could go and have his battle and I would find a quiet place to ruminate on what I saw.

It's why I play Imagi-Nationa almost exclusively.

This is also why I do mostly battles in the 18th century.

I like the idea of generals who manuever more than they fought, who waged a grand and intricate game of chess on the campaign field. It shounds like an entirely admirable way to manage such a business.

Permit me to take inspiration from "Van Loon's Lives."

"In those days as soon as the weather became warm enought for armies to be in the great outdoors, each would break winter quarters and set about finding the enemy. But why risk everything in a battle, when it was far more profitable to besiege and enemy town or fortress. And this would you do and dig like moles and eventually there came a point where the besiegers would send over under a flag of truce, an officer to request a parlay. You, dutifully agreeing, would be taken to the enemy commander whereupon he would say "Sir, if tomorrow I blow my mines and give fire to my batteries, I will destroy two bastions, three ravelins, five demi-lunes, twenty banquettes and 500 yards of your curtain. You, on the other hand, can at most only demolish a mile and a half of my trenches. Therefore, my honerable opponent, as you can plainly see I have won and you have lost. Will you not consider an honerable surrender and not cause such a great effusion of blood and the unleasing upon the defenceless citizens of the town the barbaric lusts and unbridled sentiments of an aroused and enraged soldiery?" Whereupon you would be allowed to make an inspection of the works, jot down a few notes, be shown the loaded mine chambers, the parallels, the batteries mounted on your counterscarp, and after the end of it you would say ."My Honerable opponent I cannot argue with you, you have indeed won and I have lost. Please accept this as token of my surrender" and you would reach for your sword. Whereupon the besieger would step forward and say "Please! Sir! Do not dishonor me! I would sooner strike the pen from a Shakespeare or the brush for a Watteau than deprive you of your instrument of artistry. You would bow, he would bow, and you would ask "Sir, what terms do you propose?" Whereupon he would with the wave of a hand as if in dismissal "Sir I am pleased to accept whatever terms you desire to write!" "You are most gracious in victory!" you say.

Where upon the whole business was prepared and the following morning as the gates swung open the garrison would march out in good order bands playing, colors flying, through the ranks of the enemy drawn upon the road, who come to a snappy salute as you pass, with their bands playing your tunes and airs in salute as yours play theirs. As men move by waves and nodds are given to old friends on each side (for many of the people on the other side are not only your friends but your relatives) and time will be taken where officers step out of line to greet old friends.

At the end of it a Colonel will come up and hand to the enemy commander an inventory of all arms, stores, ammunition, and food left in the place, and he will cavalierly give them to his quartermaster to deal with."

Maneuver by minuet, battle to the tempo of the Contretanz.

"Violence against women … peaks during the conquest period in 1806-07, but remains a touchy issue because if the perpetrator is French, then he cannot be punished by local law enforcement, and often gets off scot-free."

It is easy to see how this sort of resentment could boil over into violence, prompting return violence from the occupying troops.

In the Cologne branch of the family there's a story about one ancestor taking matters into his own hands by waylaying one such French culprit at night, hoisting him up in the family brewing shed and beating the *** out of him. After which he had to flee to the US until French occupation of the Rhineland ended.

I've also wondered whether the female volunteers recorded in the Prussian army during the Wars of Liberation were motivated solely by patriotic feelings, or perhaps more personal experiences of occupation?

ColonelToffeeApple

I think OSchmidt either can't read, does not understand the posts or just wants to rant against anything relating to Napoleon.

No one was condoning anyone doing any atrocities. It was merely pointed out that probably ALL nations were guilty of them. But going by some people you would think it was only Napoleon.

His posts are very sad, especially his insult to wargamers and enthusiast attending this site – 'see yourself as a nascent Napoleon' Very sad.

After all, we are just wargamers and military enthusiasts trying to enjoy history and wargames

OSchimdt

Nice to see an unbiased viewpoint – 'little fat Corsican peice of filth'

By the way, you spelt piece incorrectly – tut tut! Did no one tell you about the I before the e except after c?