My great-grandfather Franz Joseph Hausmann served as a young officer with the 7th Bavarian Infantry Regiment and was one of the fortunate few members of Napoleon’s Grande Armée to survive the Russian campaign of 1812-13. Later, after the Bavarians changed sides and joined the Allies in the campaign against Napoleon, Franz fought his way across France up to the capitulation of Paris on 31 March 1814. It was Franz’s good fortune on these military campaigns to be serving as adjutant to one or another of the Bavarian commanding officers, thereby greatly increasing his chance of survival.
From the Russian campaign, Franz wrote a series of 24 letters (21 of which survive), and from the French campaign a series of 11 (only 4 of which survive). These letters were written to his parents, who were then living at Neuburg on the Danube, the garrison town of the 7th Bavarian Infantry Regiment, where his father was assigned to the Reserve Battalion.
I first became aware of these letters after the death of my grandfather, Franz’s youngest son, in 1951. Although the quality of the paper and ink was probably as good as one would encounter today, through the years the letters had clearly been lovingly pored over by Franz’s children. In places they were tom or mended with small strips of brown or transparent paper, some pages were out of order, and here and there my grandfather had pencilled in comments, as was his wont. Although Franz’s handwriting was quite good, he used the old-fashioned Gothic script, sometimes squeezed comments into the margins, and generally wrote in a very small hand - in later years he would admonish his children to write as small as possible, so as to save postage by not using much paper.
By 1951 Franz’s only living descendants were in the United States, and only my father and I had sufficient linguistic interest to attempt a preliminary translation for the benefit of other family members. The older generation was thrilled to learn what an honourable young man Franz had been, and the younger generation by and large merely noted the fact that some ancestor had written letters during Napoleon’s time. So matters remained, until I recently realised that my days were slowly running out and that I ought to make a serious effort to learn if there might be any outside interest in what had until then been considered strictly a family curiosity. I was fortunate enough to make contact with Lionel Leventhal of Greenhill Books and with Jack Gill, my co-author, who together have helped add another dimension to this material and place it in its broader military-historical setting. In the meantime family attics have also produced various other related treasures, notably Franz’s military diaries, his voluminous later letters to his children, and the citations associated with his decorations.
In writing to his children, Franz often expressed his pride at being the third generation to serve in the Bavarian infantry. The first of the family to do so was Bartholomäus Hausmann (1724-1800), whose father was the assistant to the mayor of Heydeck, Bavaria and also had the unusual distinction of being able to read and write. In 1744 Bartholomäus joined the 4th Bavarian Grenadier Regiment at Neuburg and marched with them into garrison at Jülich, near Aachen in the Rhine Province, where he remained throughout his career. In the latter part of the 18th century Aachen was part of the Rhine Province that came under the protection of the combined Palatine-Bavarian Electorates. Bartholomäus’ only son, Wilhelm Hausmann (1759-1841), was born in Jülich and joined the same regiment, now garrisoned at Aachen, where he married and had one son, Franz, in 1789.
A few months after Franz’s birth in Aachen on 25 February 1789, the French Revolution erupted, and tensions between Revolutionary France and other European nations led to war in 1792. The ensuing fighting ebbed and flowed across the Rhineland region. Over the next few years Wilhelm Hausmann was engaged in campaigns against the French, particularly around Düsseldorf, which finally capitulated to the revolutionaries on 6 September 1795.
Franz did subsequently manage to attend primary school in Aachen for four years, but after that his father’s regiment was ordered to march back to Bavaria, preparatory to helping fight the French in southern Germany. On 2 January 1799 Wilhelm, accompanied by his wife and son and whatever worldly goods they may have possessed, marched off from Aachen, arriving in Munich on 25 February 1799. After further moves within Bavaria, on 27 November 1799 the family finally arrived at Neuburg, which was to be the regiment’s permanent garrison town. During the main period of relocation, from 1 January to 1 May 1799, ten-year-old Franz was carried on the payroll of the 3rd Company of the 4th Grenadier Regiment as a junior fourier or cadet (Fourierschütze).
Once settled in Bavaria, Franz lost his military status, and after arriving at Neuburg he spent four years attending the Latin School there. On 1 November 1804 he was then accepted as a fourier-trainee or cadet (Fourierpraktikant) in the 7th Bavarian Infantry Regiment Graf Morawitzky, as his father’s and grandfather’s regiment was now called. In addition to learning his military duties, in this capacity Franz also participated in Bavaria’s campaigns in alliance with France against Austria, Prussia and Russia during the period 1805-09. On 1 November 1806 he was promoted to full fourier in the 1st Grenadier Company of the 7th Royal Bavarian Infantry Regiment, and on 1 August 1809, during the campaign in Austria, he was advanced to second lieutenant with the Reserve Battalion of the 7th Infantry (now Löwenstein). On 1 September 1809 he was also appointed adjutant of this unit.
Wilhelm, meanwhile, continued to serve as a non-commissioned officer in the 7th Infantry. He was made a member of the French Legion of Honour, the notification of which was provisionally issued to him from Napoleon’s headquarters at Ebersdorf on 13 May 1809, in recognition of his role in the Battle of Neumarkt on the Rott on 24 April of that year.
However, Wilhelm had received a severe wound in the foot at Neumarkt which would keep him out of active campaigning for the remainder of his long career in uniform. For most of the rest of this career, he was assigned to the Reserve Battalion of the 7th Infantry at Neuburg as a recruiting officer, although in June 1813 he was named lieutenant and adjutant of the 4th Battalion of the Rezat District Mobile Legion (later re-designated as the 17th National Field Battalion) and served in this capacity for a time. Promoted to captain on 26 October 1833, Wilhelm died in Neustadt on the Haardt (today Neustadt on the Weinstrasse) on 19 July 1841 as a retired officer in that rank.
When Franz marched out in March 1812 preparatory to the invasion of Russia, his father (owing to his injured foot) remained at Neuburg with the Reserve Battalion, and it was largely through military friends and couriers that the two corresponded with each other. As Franz’s letters show, his father expected regular, well composed letters detailing the regiment’s marching route, military engagements, personnel particulars and general living conditions in the field. Wilhelm’s training and discipline are reflected in young Franz’s pains to separate fact from rumour in his narrative, and in his apologies for not having the time (sometimes in the midst of battle!) to organise his material better. Throughout, Franz does his best to follow his father’s advice to ‘act with reason’ and ‘stand like a man’.
In the letters, young Franz’s main concerns at first are about wearing the proper uniform and keeping correct account of his finances, but as his unit closes with the enemy he concentrates on describing the military engagements. The Bavarians, who formed part of the Grande Armée’s left flank, most notably succeeded in heading off the Russians under General Wittgenstein at the Battle of Polotsk, 18-19 August 1812, which Franz treats at length. For his participation in this battle Franz was made a knight of the French Legion of Honour, the provisional notification of which was sent him on 25 September 1812 from Moscow, where Napoleon was at that time. During the following cruelly cold winter, Franz came down with typhoid fever on the disastrous retreat from Russia, a death march so horrible he says he cannot bring himself to write about it. Following the retreat, he suffered through the siege and capitulation of the fortress of Thorn (Torun) in Poland, and he was finally able to return to Neuburg on 13 July 1813. On his way home from Thorn Franz learned that he had been promoted to first lieutenant on 18 May 1813.
With the signing of the Ried Treaty on 8 October 1813, the Bavarians switched their allegiance away from Napoleon and joined the Allies. For the next few weeks, however, Franz himself enjoyed a respite from the wars, travelling around Bavaria from 8 October to 10 November 1813 and on 30 October coincidentally missing out on the battle of Hanau, where his battalion lost three officers dead and five more wounded. Franz met up with his unit at Heidelberg on 10 November 1813 to join in the invasion of France.
During the subsequent campaign, Franz writes about the battles where ‘we met the enemy without flinching’, including the battle of Chaumesnil, where ‘the Emperor himself was in command against us’. Here Franz particularly reports on the fate of individual officers, since he believes that ‘the newspapers will have already told you about our fortunate and unfortunate incidents’. After fighting his way across France to Paris, the provincial Bavarian was amazed to find the French capital ‘fantastically large’ and ‘illuminated day and night by innumerable shops or boutiques’.
After Napoleon’s abdication on 6 April 1814, Franz decided to leave the military, because he believed that the armed forces would be cut back in peacetime and that the chances of promotion would therefore be slim. As he would write on 27 June 1854 to his son Otto, who was by then fretting over his own slow promotion to first lieutenant in the artillery,
Back then [when I was a lieutenant in the infantry] I allowed myself to be driven by dissatisfaction over the sudden insertion of four mobile legion battalions into my regiment and to be overcome with worry that I would not become a captain until I had grey hair and would even have to sacrifice for that with pay of 44 francs a month, and that is why I left the service.
Although Franz would go on to a distinguished career in the Bavarian civil service, he always showed a certain nostalgia for the military, and he encouraged several of his sons to consider military careers, with varying degrees of success.
On 1 December 1814 Franz went on leave status from the military and proceeded to Augsburg, where for the next four years he studied cameralistics (economics) at the university. Upon his graduation in 1818, he joined the Bavarian civil service and finally left the military on 30 April 1818.
All of Franz’s civil service was spent in the Palatinate, which at that time formed part of the Kingdom of Bavaria (the elector of Bavaria having become King Maximilian I Joseph in 1806). Franz began his new career on 21 April 1818 with an assignment as actuary with the regional commission in Zweibrücken. There he married Catharina Chandon, the daughter of a local merchant, with whom he had three children who lived beyond infancy. On 16 September 1824 Franz was assigned to Kaiserslautern as inspector of the main prison, and on 17 March 1826 he was promoted to regional commissioner in Pirmasens. On 7 January 1834 he was assigned in the same capacity to Neustadt on the Haardt, where his wife died in childbirth later that same year.
On 10 October 1837 Franz took a second wife, Antonia Adolay, the daughter of a landowner and notary in nearby Frankenthal, with whom he had eight more children. Franz’s career continued to prosper, and on 28 October 1843 he was appointed royal counsellor in Neustadt.
In 1848-49 revolutionary unrest sporadically swept across the Palatinate. On 20 July 1848, for example, Franz remarked to his son Otto that he had been busy pacifying a student mob that had marched over from Heidelberg. On 22 May 1849 Franz told Otto, who was assigned to nearby Fort Germersheim with the 2nd Artillery Regiment Zoller during this period, that the president of the Palatine government had fled to the fort, and that he (Franz) would soon seek refuge there.
By the autumn of 1849, Franz was back in Neustadt, and then, probably in late 1850, he was promoted to royal counsellor in Speyer, at that time the capital of the Palatinate, making him the second-highest government official in that jurisdiction (after the president). Franz held the counsellor’s position until he died of a heart attack on 30 July 1856. Along the way he received several decorations from the Bavarian king, but the highlight of his career came on 25 October 1852, when King Maximilian II came to Speyer and personally dubbed Franz a knight of the Order of St. Michael, thereby entitling him (but not his descendants) to use the noble form ‘von Hausmann’.
Throughout his life Franz strove to send his children to the best schools available, pointing out to them that, although he could not leave them any financial fortune, he was willing to give them the best education possible, so that they would become honourable and self-sufficient members of society. For the boys this meant preferably a military education leading to a career in the army, while the girls were sent to finishing schools.
After initial disciplinary struggles as a cadet, the oldest boy, Otto (1830-1917), had a successful career in the Bavarian artillery (not the infantry, to his father’s regret), dying as a retired colonel. The next two boys, Franz (1834-77) and Fritz (1838-62), had even greater difficulty adapting to military life and were in and out of various military schools and tutoring sessions. The other boys were too young when Franz died for him to have exerted any significant influence on their careers.
Upon his death in 1856, Franz senior’s widow had to make do with a very small pension. Franz had estimated that it would amount to only some 300 francs annually, which was roughly as much as it had been costing him to send one child to boarding school for a year. It is therefore not surprising that most of the children emigrated to the United States, the land of opportunity, although some, either unmarried or without children, remained in Germany.
Of interest is the fact that Fritz and the next youngest boy, Eduard (1843-77), not only emigrated but on 22 April 1861 enlisted in Company D, 4th New York Volunteer Infantry, to fight in the American Civil War. Fritz was killed at the battle of Antietam on 17 September 1862; Eduard was wounded in the same battle and discharged, later to marry and settle in Chicago.
My grandfather, Julius (1849-1951), Franz’s youngest child, emigrated in 1869, became an American citizen in 1874, and founded a successful importing business in New York. He spent long periods of time in Germany around the turn of the century, even maintaining a house there in Weissenburg (in Alsace, now Wissembourg in France) where his unmarried sisters lived. In approximately 1923, when travel between Germany and the United States again become possible after World War I, he came into possession of all his father’s letters and diaries.
Presumably, these had previously been kept by his half-brother Otto, Franz’s eldest son, who had remained in Germany. Otto, however, had no children, and after his death in 1917 my grandfather assumed responsibility for the family legacy. In the war-related interim before someone from my family could bring these papers and related mementos to the United States, they were probably kept by Franz’s unmarried daughter, Mathilda who, by the time of her death in 1939, was the last of Franz’s descendants living in Germany.
In his later letters to his children Franz makes it clear that he considers a military education the best preparation for a successful life, on one occasion pointing out to his son Otto that not only Napoleon, ‘the greatest man of our times’, but also Friedrich Schiller, ‘the greatest poet’, were products of military schools (letter of 16 May 1844). Elsewhere the concerned father exhorts his son serving in the artillery always to be ‘pleasant and obedient to your superiors, friendly to everyone, as well as sociable and thoughtful toward your subordinates’ (letter of 20 March 1851), to keep a clear conscience, and, above all, to trust fearlessly in God.
Although it did not hurt Franz’s career that King Maximilian I Joseph took a special interest in his army and apparently also in Franz, and that Franz would continue to enjoy good relations with the king’s son and grandson, Ludwig I and Maximilian II, it is evident that the military discipline and code of honour passed on to Franz by his father and grandfather must have contributed greatly to his later outstanding career, culminating in his becoming the king’s top representative in the Palatinate.
The young Bavarian lieutenant who wrote the letters which appear later in this book was already demonstrating in them the moral principles and deep faith in God that humanised his life-long firm belief in orderly conduct and military obedience. I trust that those same admirable qualities are today still shared by many military officers around the world, and by many Hausmanns, young and old.
Cynthia Joy Hausmann, 1998
In an effort to make this book a pleasant as well as an informative read, we have adopted the following conventions:
• Franz’s erratic spelling of place names has been regularised and, in some cases, modernised. The Polish and Russian names used represent a compromise between modern accuracy and historical familiarity; readers will thus find Vilna instead of Vilnius and Polotsk instead of Polock or Polack. Where major Polish and Slovak towns have been renamed in the twentieth century, these new names are included in brackets after the old German names Franz knew - for example: Willenburg [Wielbark].
• German ranks have been rendered into English. Although this is a fairly straightforward process for ranks up to colonel (Oberst), it is important to keep in mind that a Bavarian Generalmajor (translated as major general) was a brigade commander and thus performed basically the same functions as a modern British brigadier or American brigadier general. Similarly, a Generalleutnant (translated as lieutenant general) would command a division as would a major general in the armies of the United Kingdom or the United States today.
• Original French and Austrian rank titles are preserved insofar as this is feasible and convenient. A table at the end of the volume relates these to current U.S. and British ranks.
• Ligne and Léger respectively are used for French line and light infantry units.
• Military units are often described in the text by both their number and their name (the Bavarian 4th Chevauxlegers are also the Bubenhofen Chevauxlegers).
• To minimise confusion between individuals and units, those units which were also known by the names of their proprietors or their commanders are shown in italics (for example, Oberstlieutenant von Butler commanded the Bavarian 5th Light Infantry Battalion von Butler).
• Battalions or squadrons are designated by Roman numerals (thus II/7th indicates the 2nd Battalion of the 7th Infantry Regiment).
• The term Rheinbund throughout refers to the Confederation of the Rhine.
• Occasional gaps or illegible sections in Franz’s letters or diaries are shown thus [...].
• The authors are responsible for all translations: Ms Hausmann for Franz’s material; Mr Gill for the translations in the commentary.