The Note-books of Captain Coignet: Soldier of the Empire, 1799-1816 (Napoleonic library)

Greenhill Books. Very Good/Very Good. 1985. Hard Cover. 8vo 0947898131 Dust jacket complete, unclipped. Original cloth boards with bright gilt titling on spine. No ownership marks.292 pages clean and tight. Captain Jean-Roch Coignet was born a month after the American Declaration of Independence, and lived through three French Revolutions, two Republics, one Empire, and four Kingships. He writes with transparent truth, of himself and his times in these fascinating memoirs. "The Note-Books of Captain Coignet stand rather alone among french military memoirs", writes Sir John fortescue in introducing this volume. "They are not, according to the English way of thinking, very distinctively french. They are free from boasting and self-glorification, and they say very little about glory or the superiority of France, all of which goes to show that the French soldier can be as simple, modest and straightforward as the English.. . It is indeed his simplicity which is the great charm of Coignet. His record of service is very remarkable, embracing as it does every campaign of Napoleon as first Consul and Emperor. . . It is in the little details of the soldier's calling and his relations with his officers that Coignet is most valuable; and he sets his information down with the blunt sincerity of one to whom these small matters are the most important things in the world. In no other memoirs, perhaps, can be studied so closely the inner life of the Army which for so long was the terror of Europe." In the pages of Coignet's Note-Book he recalls his ordinary soldier's views about Montebello and Marengo in 1800; the campaigns of Austerlitz, Jena, Eylau and Friedland in 1805-1807; a brief dash into Spain in 1808, where he helped to pursue Sir John Moore, but never saw a British soldier; the campaign of Aspern and Wagram in 1809; the Russian campaign of 1812, with its sequels in Germany and France; and finally the campaign of Waterloo in 1815. .