Franz Roeder - The ordeal of Captain Roeder : from the diary of an officer in the First Battalion of Hessian Lifeguards during the Moscow campaign of 1812-13

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ROUTLEDGE LIBRARY EDITIONS:
MILITARY AND NAVAL HISTORY

Volume 20

THE ORDEAL OF CAPTAIN ROEDER

The Ordeal of Captain Roeder

From the Diary of an Officer in the First Battalion of Hessian Lifeguards during the Moscow Campaign of 181213

Helen Roeder

First published in 1960

This edition first published in 2016
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

1960 Helen Roeder

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice : Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-138-90784-3 (Set)
ISBN: 978-1-315-67905-1 (Set) (ebk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-92795-7 (Volume 20) (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-68215-0 (Volume 20) (ebk)

Publishers Note
The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent.

Disclaimer
The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and would welcome correspondence from those they have been unable to trace.

Captain Franz Roeder of the 1st Battalion of Lifeguards of the Grand Duke of Hesse. Born April 25th, 1774; died 1840.
From a drawing in the possession of the family.

THE ORDEAL OF
CAPTAIN ROEDER

From the Diary of an Officer in
the First Battalion of Hessian Lifeguards
during the Moscow Campaign of 181213

TRANSLATED AND EDITED FROM
THE ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT
BY
HELEN ROEDER

First published in 1960
Helen Roeder 1960
Printed in Great Britain by
The Shenval Press Ltd
London, Hertford and Harlow
Catalogue number 2/6397/1

Contents

Illustrations

PLATES

1 Captain Franz Roeder: drawing

2 A page from the Diary of Captain Roeder

LINE DRAWINGS

MAPS

Acknowledgments

I OWE A debt of gratitude to my uncle, the late Herr Franz Roeder, for giving me access to the diary of his great-grandfather and for providing me with photographs of family portraits and other relics. I should like to thank Major E. W. Sheppard, who read my original translation and gave me not only much encouragement and the benefit of his great learning as a military historian, but also made available the engravings of Faber du Faur as illustrations to the text. I should also like to thank Sir Kenneth Clark, Dr C. H. Talbot, J. C. Garvin, and many kind friends, both soldiers and scholars, who read the manuscript and gave me much help and encouragement.

C. W. von Faber du Faur, an artillery officer in the Wrttemberg division of Marshal Ney's 3rd, followed Captain Roeder's route into Russia almost step by step, Plate 5 and three of the line drawings in the text come from his pictorial record of the campaign, Bltter aus meinem Portefeuille, im Laufe des Feldzuges 1812 in Russland an ort und stelle gezeichnet , published in Stuttgart in 1831. It is especially interesting to compare with Captain Roeder's detailed entries from Smolensk for November 11th and 12th.

The soldiers on pp. 56 and 130 are drawn from Professor Richard Krtel's Uniformkunde, published Max Babinzier, 1912.

The first page of the Diary of Captain Franz Roeder, 1812. 19 x 12 cm.

THE DIARY OF Franz Roeder has lain for nearly 150 years among the papers of his family. Few of his descendants were prepared to struggle with his beautiful but difficult German handwriting:

'It will be about strategy,' they said, 'and who nowadays wants to read about Napoleonic strategy?'

True, he did note down a good deal about troop movements and fortifications because they interested him and because he thought they might be of use if he were called upon to defend an area. He also kept a careful account of Napoleon's Moscow campaign because he was interested in military history, holding as he did a chair of Military Science in the Academy at Darmstadt, but he never wrote his diary for any eyes but his own and those of the wife and children who were to him the other half of himself. In 1812, as he staggered down the icy Russian roads with the Cossacks at his heels, he would very likely have perished had it not been for the thought of them.

The diary, stoutly bound in calf, is written upon thick, solid paper, but the writing races over the page like a man behind galloping horses; one can sense his impatience even after a century and a half.

'... I have never been able really to keep to the middle road. Even when I am walking or riding I always take the side tracks, which instead of getting me faster to my goal, usually take longer and often lead me into such confusion that I have to make wide detours to get on to the right way again. I write too much; I read too much; I study too much; I take too violent exercise; I eat too much; I fast too long; I talk too much; I am too long silent; too violent here and too docile there; here I am too ardent and there too indifferent. I never seem able to get into the middle way or to keep to it by my own strength. The lodestars of my life, Mina and Sophie, those two excellent women, who have somehow managed to find a way both to my heart and my intelligence, have had and always will have to steer a husband who evinces the strongest inclination to swerve.'

Wilhelmine (Mina) Krmer was his first wife and Sophie Willich the second. Wilhelmine he married when he was young, poor and wildly in love. She bore him four children, two of whom died in infancy, followed by Caroline in 1804 and Carl in 1806. Carl was like his mother, wise and sweet tempered; he was also endowed with an intellect and his father's fighting spirit, so that in later years he attained some eminence as the first Professor of Legal Philosophy at Heidelberg University and as an uncompromising opponent of Bismarck. Caroline was like her father. In December 1811, when Wilhelmine died of consumption, her husband reproached himself that her death had perhaps been accelerated by the violence of his own temperament and the privations which she had had to endure while he was away at the wars, for he was a veteran soldier, having fought at Wagram and Aspern and Friedland in 1807.

'O bleeding heart, I think such thoughts of you! That it may have been my own wild storms in earlier life which helped to snap the frail thread of your life!... O what libations have I not poured at your festival! What cups of bitter tears!'

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