#napoleoni

"Women accompanying the military were in what military historian John Lynn calls the combat zone, which is

best defined by the intensity and immediacy of danger and by the ability to do direct harm to the enemy… the full reality of war lives here. Modern armies regard it as an innovation to send some women into combat, but in the campaign community all women stood in harm’s way.

It would be odd to imagine that the women accompanying an army, exposed as they were to all the dangers of the military world, didn’t pick up arms and fight. In 1643, in the earlier stages of the English Civil War, a regiment of troops was recalled from Ireland to support King Charles. Rumours swirled that they were accompanied by a regiment of women, and that ‘these were weaponed too; and when these degenerate into cruelty, there are none more bloody’. Indeed, when 120 Irish women were taken prisoner at Nantwich they were discovered to have long knives with them, causing a furore in the press. The dubiously named True Informer excitedly reported that the knives in question were half a yard long, with a hook at the end ‘made not only to stab but to tear the flesh from the very bones’. The likeliest explanation for these knives, however, is that the women weren’t soldiers; they were camp followers, and they needed the knives to help them with pillage and self-defence. 

The women of the campaign community did fight. The Bishop of Albi, on the battlefield of Leucate in southern France to administer to the dying in 1637, came upon the bodies of several women in uniform. ‘These were the real men,’ he was told by the Castilian soldiers, ‘since those who had fled, including certain officers, had conducted themselves like women’. 

Madeleine Kintelberger was a vivandière accompanying the French Seventh Hussar Regiment at Austerlitz in 1805, along with her soldier husband and their six children. The regiment was under heavy attack from Russian forces when her husband was killed by a cannonball, and her children seriously wounded. Madeleine herself had taken a cannonball to the arm, virtually slicing it off below the shoulder. As the Russian Cossacks approached, she scooped up a sword to defend her children, receiving further wounds in both her arms before the family was taken prisoner. Madeleine was six months pregnant and gave birth in captivity. Her bravery was rewarded with a pension from Napoleon. Examples of cantinières fighting are ‘legion’."

The First French Empire under Napoleon I, 1812