The Lives of Soldiers
The Lives of Soldiers
It is tempting to assume that the traumas of twentieth-century wars, resulting in well-documented psychiatric conditions such as mutism, were produced by the unparalleled destructiveness of such conflicts. Yet, it is worth re-examining such an assumption. This chapter looks at the impact of revolutionary and Napoleonic warfare on combatants, revealing the frequent juxtaposition of hardiness, disgust, and horror at the wartime conditions which soldiers encountered. Yet, although the suffering of ordinary soldiers during the Napoleonic Wars entered the official and popular historical records of the conflicts, it was marginalized for the most part by a narrative of Prussia’s, Austria’s, and ‘Germany’s’ heroic victory over Napoleon and France in what were later termed ‘wars of liberation’. The chapter investigates the varying responses of officers, common soldiers, and volunteers to victory and defeat in their diaries, correspondence, memoirs, and other forms of war literature.
Keywords: combat, officers, volunteers, wars of liberation, defeat, victory, diaries, memoirs, war literature
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