… Wars
"The year was 1807. Napoleon and his Grande Armée, having defeated the vaunted Prussian army the year before, was on the move again, and the Russian army was marching west to meet him. Among the multitude of Russian units was the Polish Lancer Regiment, whose recruiting parties rode alongside its line of march, trying to fill vacancies in its ranks. One rainy night in March a young man presented himself to one of those parties and politely asked to join the regiment. His only answer to the captain's questions about his background was that he was a Russian nobleman who left his family to join the military in spite of its disapproval. The volunteer, who called himself Aleksandr Sokolov, enlisted as a ‘gentleman-ranker.' Nobody suspected that this slim, dark-eyed man was, in fact, a young woman named Nadezhda A. Durova.
Turbulence awaited Nadezhda even before her birth on September 17, 1783. Her mother, Aleksandra Aleksandrova, was the beautiful daughter of a wealthy Ukrainian landowner. Out of many suitors, she gave preference to a dashing hussar officer, Andrei Durov. Aleksandra's father was appalled at the prospect of his daughter marrying a Russian and a soldier to boot. He categorically forbade the union, but Aleksandra eloped.
When she found out she was pregnant, Aleksandra dreamed about the beautiful baby boy she was going to have. The first labor pains, however, came as a shock. After a very difficult birth, she demanded to see her son, only to be presented with a girl with thick, dark hair, screeching at the top of her lungs. Aleksandra turned away in disgust…"
From here
link
Amicalement
Armand
goes to sea with the Terrain Mat.
