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CHAPTER 1
Escape to England
1806–1811
Lindau begins his account in November 1806, when he was a teenager living in the town of Hamelin, in the north German state of Hanover.
Ever since 1714, when the Elector of Hanover had become King George I of Britain, the two countries had shared the same ruler, while remaining separate states. But Hanover, unlike Britain, was exposed on the mainland, and sandwiched between the stronger powers of France and Prussia. When the short-lived Peace of Amiens between Britain and France collapsed in May 1803, Napoleon ordered General Edouard Mortier to occupy Hanover with a French army. Two years later, in 1805, he offered the territory to Prussia, to induce her to remain neutral while he crushed the Austrian and Russian armies during the Austerlitz campaign.
Prussia duly acquired Hanover, but grew increasingly alarmed at Napoleon's growing power. The threat was starkly underlined in July 1806, when he grouped his German satellite states into a powerful bloc known as the Confederation of the Rhine, and thereby replaced Austria as the dominant power in central Europe. On 1 October, the Prussian King, Friedrich Wilhelm III, issued an ultimatum for all French forces to withdraw over the Rhine, and war immediately followed.
The result was a disaster for Prussia. Thrusting northeastwards from southern Germany towards Berlin, Napoleon smashed the Prussian armies at the twin battles of Jena and Auerstädt. He then exploited his victory with one of the most relentless and successful pursuits in military history, completing the destruction of the Prussian army and causing a whole series of fortresses to capitulate with minimal resistance.
One of these strongholds was Hamelin, whose commandant, Major-General von Schöler, was seventy-five years old. The town was occupied not by the Grande Armée under Napoleon's direct command, but by a detached corps of French and Dutch troops under Mortier, which advanced to take control of Hanover from the south-west. Hamelin was protected by such strong fortifications that it was known as the 'Gibraltar of the North', and its Prussian garrison actually outnumbered the forces brought against it, yet it surrendered without a fight on 20 November. As Lindau describes, the news of the capitulation destroyed the discipline of the Prussian troops, and caused widespread drunkenness and disorder.
The fortifications of Hamelin were subsequently demolished. Much of Hanover was incorporated into one of Napoleon's newly created satellite states, the Kingdom of Westphalia, while the northern part was directly annexed by the French Empire. Only in 1813 would Hanover be liberated, as Napoleon's power collapsed.
'A Terrible Night'
The night that preceded the day on which the town was surrendered to the French was terrible for the inhabitants of Hamelin. As the rumour spread that the commanding officer had capitulated and that the soldiers, separated from their officers, would be taken to France as prisoners of war, so they met full of bitterness and, without the orders of their superiors to obey, broke open the magazine on 20 November 1806 when it was dark. Soon after, masses of soldiers drunk on rum and wine marched with their weapons through the streets, shot into the windows and wounded each other. Others brought powder barrels on to the streets to blow the town into the air. The crowd, brought to desperation, uttering curses, surged towards the residence of the commandant, Major-General von Schöler, and certainly would have taken dreadful revenge on him for the betrayal had not the cavalry protected his house from the frenzied people.
While in this manner the storm of a liberated warlike horde raged on the streets of my home town, it was impossible for me to stay in the quiet little room of my parents, where my anxious father trembled before the terrible call of 'Fire!' and my mother with clasped hands called on heaven for help. I wanted to see what was happening outside; the desire for loot also attracted me. My parents begged me to stay with them and not to risk my life so carelessly; but in vain. I slunk up to the door, through the uproar on the streets and came to the Osterthor, where in the casemate I found a drunken Prussian soldier who didn't stop me from scooping up a bucketful of rum with which, I, protected by the dark, fortunately arrived back in front of our house. Meanwhile, in front of the house of our neighbours, where a captain had his quarters, his company assembled and was now just on the point of storming our house, from which some shots had fallen on the ranks. Someone shot through the closed shutters, wounded an old woman in the shoulder and killed a Prussian soldier who was in the lower room. The door of the house was broken; I came with a crowd into the house; someone stormed up the stairs and dragged my father out of the room since he was taken to be the originator of the shot. However, he succeeded in diverting the anger of the soldiers by protesting his innocence. They broke into another room that was barricaded; here they found some soldiers with rifles that had just been discharged. In his anger, the captain wanted to bayonet one of them, but the wife of the threatened man fell down, grasped the knee of the furious man and saved the life of her husband. However, she could not prevent the suspicious men striking him with a rifle butt and dragging the man to the guardhouse.
When it was quiet again in the house, I carried on; I wandered around the streets and watched the activity of the soldiers; here some of them who were no longer able to roll a barrel of rum swore; there a soldier fumed at a closed door and demanded that the householder buy a cask of rice; others smashed their weapons so that they did not fall intact into the hands of the hated French. Meanwhile I managed to collect eight undamaged rifles, fine polished weapons, for which I was heartily glad. I hurried home with them and hid them under a pile of roof tiles that lay in the yard. Then I ventured out again, it might have been about four o'clock in the morning, and I reached Bäckerstrasse, where my brother-in-law lived. All at once a crowd of Prussian soldiers stormed his house and demanded that he should buy what they offered for sale. I came soon enough to be able to help him. As he had made up his mind to refuse to comply with the soldiers' demands, one of them hit him with his bayonet. That was too much for us; we seized a pitchfork and forced the soldiers out of the house.
Meanwhile we met a peaceable man opposite. The householder bought from a Prussian soldier a large cask of raisins for a thaler. Next I hurried to the Münsterkirchhof to see what was developing, only in Kirchstrasse there was a mass of people coming towards me, fleeing on foot, with the cavalry strongly attacking them in order to bring them back to order and halt further excesses. Here the shooting was so bad that I preferred to run back very quickly and seek shelter in my brother-in-law's house, which I had just left, and where I remained until daybreak. Then the storm died down; most of the soldiers had escaped from the Osterthor in the darkness of the night in order to avoid wretched imprisonment; only individual drunken ones wandered round here and there on the street.
About ten o'clock in the morning the first Dutchmen and Frenchmen advanced into the Neuethor. I had to see them, so much did I hate the enemy who had succeeded in opening the entrance to my native town with gold. Near the gate at the corner of Ritterstrasse four Prussian soldiers had taken post and shot at the advancing enemy with drunken courage. But immediately a Dutch cavalryman rode out towards them, split the head of one of them and chased the remainder, who threw away their rifles in their flight. Now all the inhabitants fled their houses, so I hurried out and went to the nearest barracks, so that, if I found anything of value, it might evade the hands of the hated enemy. Here I saw everything in pieces; in the meantime I collected a leather pack and luckily reached home with it, having made my way through gardens and courtyards; there my parents were glad to have me safe and sound with them again.
Though it pleased me very little I had to remain in the house, since the enemy had made it known that no one should be seen on the street, under penalty of death. In this way two days passed in which the French established themselves in Hamelin.
People were then sought to undertake the care of the wounded and sick. Since in these turbulent days my father's trade could not continue, he registered and was employed, together with me and my mother. This service, often heartbreaking, we performed for about half a year in which each of us earned seven thaler a month and in which we had a great deal of work and no rest day or night. The schoolhouse, which had formerly served as a dwelling house for the canons of the Monastery of San Bonifacii, was furnished as a military hospital and completely filled with wounded Prussians and French.
One of these men aroused my particular sympathy. He was a very young man from the neighbourhood of the province of Minden, who had a bullet in his leg. Heconstantly grieved for his father and mother, whom it seemed certain he would not see alive again, and lamented his and his parents' lot. But the young man's parents yearned for their child and had come to Hamelin with a carriage. They turned to me for they knew that their son lay in hospital and implored me that I might get their child so that they could take him home with them.
I promised my help, called the father in the evening to get the carriage ready in front of the lodging and himself to appear at the corner of the Münsterkirche; I wanted then to see what would be possible. Trusting in the goodwill that the doctor of the hospital always showed to me, since I was always at hand in a friendly way, I risked it, as darkness was approaching, by taking the young Prussian on my back. I lied to the guard that I wanted to convey the sick man to the doctor in the bath and he let me through unhindered. With beating heart the father waited for me at the Münsterkirche, took away the load that was so dear to him and presented me with a thaler. We took turns to carry the sick man to the carriage that stopped outside the Zur Stadt Hamburg Inn where the mother received us with tears of joy. I accompanied the carriage all the way to the Neuethor where the gateway clerk, whom I knew well, let us pass freely after I had let him into the secret; then I returned to the hospital with a light heart. The next morning the Prussian was missing and a commission organised to investigate; I ought to know where he was. I thought it proper, however, only to declare that I had seen him stand up yesterday evening with the help of his crutch. After the commission had left I told the doctor the whole story, which pleased him; he was glad that the young man had found his parents again, having pined for them so often.
Certainly in the hospital the wounded were well looked after, but some of them wanted to have tobacco, which was not to be had. In order to provide it I brought some pieces of wood into the town to sell to the large wood store that lay on the Münsterkirchhof. I was accompanied by an old man, a lightly wounded Prussian who waited at table, and I bought tobacco with the money raised from the wood and slipped it to the wounded Prussian. He was granted such refreshment because, besides the pain of his wounds, he had to put up with the disdain of the Dutchmen and the French and all the horrors of the hospital. Here lay an unconscious dying man who was making his death rattle; there another commended himself to the Lord with fervent prayer and breathed his last with the last words of his prayer. Here was a dying man who in his unspeakable pains cursed the hour of his birth and gave up his soul with shouts and screams. With such scenes I now had to pass my days and my nights, to give medicine for one, to pour out tea for another, to try to restrain a third in bed if he wanted to get up in the fever of his wounds. One evening I was so tired and exhausted that instead of going to bed I lay beside a wounded man, without noticing it. I was woken up in the night by one of the sick men who wanted to have some tea. On waking up I felt something cold by my side – I lay beside a corpse. Nearly every night six or seven of these unfortunate men died and were removed in the morning; if it were a Prussian he would be thrown down the stairs by the brutal French. The dead were laid out in a little room by the kitchen until the doctor came to cut the body in two, put it in a coffin and send it on to the churchyard, from where the coffin would be brought back to the hospital each time to receive the new offering of death.
From this place of misery a commissary rescued me; he took me with him in his service to Göttingen and treated me in a very friendly way. But as he wanted to travel from there to Paris via Frankfurt I refused to accompany him further since I had an implacable resentment against France and the French. For that reason I left him, went back to Hamelin, was given a pass and journeyed to Lemgo where I worked for a year with a Sauerland master. I had scarcely been fourteen days in Lemgo when the French advanced into the town and my master got six men for billeting. These guests were already hateful enough to me in themselves but they became even more so since they behaved in such an arrogant and domineering manner. The food was not good enough for them and each evening they wanted schnapps and beer. One of them demanded yet another pleasure and wanted to compel my master to go with him. When I saw my master's fright I offered my company and led the Frenchman behind the wall where there were deep dung pits. However, it was too much for the Frenchman; he took hold of me and wanted to thrash me, but I extricated myself from him, ran against him and pushed him into a deep dung pit.
Then I returned to my master, told him of my adventure with the Frenchman and cleared out, since he had not come back. I spent the night with a friend of the leatherworker's miller. This friend had already served with the English-German Legion, had deserted in the expedition to north Germany and now had no more ardent wish than to dare to go back to his corps, but fear of the fighting held him back. He persistently advised me to go with the English-German Legion and described service with it so pleasantly that I made the firm resolve to follow his advice. However, it was hard to get to England because of the French and my master in Lemgo would not let me go so I remained with him for about a year.
Then I travelled back to Hamelin with the firm resolution to go to England as soon as possible. The few weeks that I spent in my birthplace were a prelude to my impending future. One day I went with other fellow tradesmen to the Berkelschen look-out, a place for dancing half an hour from the town at the foot of the fortress that was in the possession of the French. After we had begun to dance some Frenchmen appeared from the fortress. They first interrupted our dance, then, as various people had come up to them, demanded with drawn swords that we leave the place. We yielded, withdrew and considered whether we should let such behaviour go or whether we were a match for our troublemakers. After a short deliberation we made for the fence, pulled the stakes out, manned the house and courtyard doors and the bravest of us went into the hall. Scarcely had the first got in than the Frenchmen immediately attacked us with their swords, the strokes fell on both sides, the floor was discoloured with blood, our people moved forward. The Frenchmen drew themselves back into a corner and already a majority of them lay stupefied on the ground, then they spoke favourably and asked for protection. We came to an agreement with them, laid our stakes on one side and had a drink with them so that the battlefield was suddenly changed into a happy party.
Meanwhile we got the news that one of the French in the heat of the battle, unnoticed by us, had jumped out of the window and was already rushing back with help from the fort. So much did the French redouble their friendliness and seek to detain us that we deemed it advisable to make off, escaping through the nearest door while they, so we were told, were already posted. We circled the town, over Klein Berkel, the Ohrberg, Ohr and Tündern, where we crossed the Weser and, after we had carefully washed away the blood, we arrived separately at the Osterthor. It was high time we did so, since the hurrying French reinforcements followed us still, if in vain, up to the foot of the Ohrberg.
On another Sunday evening I went with some of my friends onto the dancefloor; we waited quite modestly in front of the gate. But the French would not tolerate this; they abused us as 'paisans', which was very displeasing to us; we retorted 'cur'. Then they pressed forcibly upon us and brought us to the door of the house with cudgels. Some French pursued us onto the street where it was dark; here some telling punches were traded and on the next morning the corpse of a Frenchman was found there. I experienced such events frequently and so little could I bring myself to do it, lest I make a mistake, nevertheless they put me off staying longer in my native town and reawoke the longing for England in me again.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "A Waterloo Hero"
by .
Copyright © 2009 Pen & Sword Books Ltd.
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