Frederic Shoberl Narrative of the Most Remarkable Events Which Occurred In and Near Leipzig | Page 7

the
look of a village, a field, or a garden, that you shall not know it again,
how well soever you may have been acquainted with it before. Such
was the fate of Leipzig, and of the beautiful environs of our inner
city-walls.
You must know that the bread and forage waggons of a great French
army are destined merely, as they pass through the villages, to receive
the stores collected from all the barns, cellars, lofts, and stables, which
are taken by force from the wretched husbandman, who is beaten, cut,
and mangled, till he puts-to his last horse, and till he carries his last
sheaf of corn and his last loaf of bread to the next bivouac; and then he
may think himself fortunate, if he is suffered to return home without
horses or waggon, and is not compelled to accompany the depredators
many miles without sustenance of any kind. In all other armies,
whether Russians, Prussians, Austrians, or Swedes, when the troops are
not drawn out in line of battle opposite to the enemy, in which case it is
necessary to send back the carriages into the rear, care is always taken

that waggons with bread and forage, and herds of cattle, shall follow
the marching columns. Whenever the army halts, magazines are
immediately established; and, if even the stores necessary for it are
required at the cost of the country, this case bears no comparison with
that where every attendant on the waggon-train is at full liberty to
pillage till his rapacity is satisfied. Woe to the country where, as in
our's, hundreds of thousands of such commissaries are allowed to
exercise their destructive office at discretion! Ask the inhabitants of
more than twenty villages round Leipzig, and many hundred others at a
greater distance, which certainly fared no better, what soldiers they
were who carried off roofs, doors, windows, floors, and every kind of
household furniture and agricultural implements, and threw them like
useless lumber into the watch-fires?--Ask those unfortunates what
soldiers they were who pillaged barns and cellars, and ransacked every
corner of the houses; who tore the scanty clothes from the backs of the
poorest class; who broke open every box and chest, and who searched
every dunghill, that nothing might escape them?--They will tell you
that it was the so highly vaunted French guards, who always led the
way, and were the instructors of their comrades.
It is a great misfortune for a country when, in time of war, the supply of
the troops is left to themselves by the military authorities, and when
that supply is calculated only from one day to another; but this calamity
has no bounds when they are French troops who attack your stores. It is
not enough for them to satisfy the calls of appetite; every article is an
object of their rapacity: nothing whatever is left to the plundered victim.
What they cannot cram into their knapsacks and cartouch-boxes is
dashed in pieces and destroyed. Of the truth of this statement the
environs of Leipzig might furnish a thousand proofs. The most
fortunate of the inhabitants were those who in good time removed their
stores and cattle to a place of safety, and left their houses to their fate.
He who neglected this precaution, under the idea that the presence of
the owner would be sufficient to restrain those locusts, of course lost
his all. No sooner had he satisfied one party than another arrived to
renew the demand; and thus they proceeded so long as a morsel or a
drop was left in the house. When such a person had nothing more to
give, he was treated with the utmost brutality, till at length, stripped of

all, he was reluctantly compelled to abandon his home. If you should
chance to find a horse or a cow, here and there, in the country round
our city, imagine not that the animal was spared by French
generosity:--no such thing! the owner must assuredly have concealed it
in some hiding-place, where it escaped the prying eyes of the French
soldiers. Nothing--absolutely nothing--was spared; the meanest
bedstead of the meanest beggar was broken up as well as the most
costly furniture from the apartments of the opulent. After they had slept
upon the beds in the bivouacs, as they could not carry them away, they
ripped them open, consigned the feathers to the winds, and sold the
bed-clothes and ticking for a mere trifle. Neither the ox, nor the calf but
two days old; neither the ewe, nor the lamb scarcely able to walk;
neither the brood-hen, nor the tender chicken, was spared. All were
carried off indiscriminately; whatever had life was slaughtered; and the
fields were covered with calves, lambs, and poultry, which the troops
were unable to consume.