Before the great age of Pasteur arrived, Europeans, of course, did not understand that dysentery was caused by dysentery bacilli infecting the human body. Its main routes of transmission, besides the waterborne route known to Goethe, also included three others: fly-borne transmission, foodborne transmission, and contact transmission.
The last of these, contact transmission, was the fundamental pathway by which bacillary dysentery spread. Put plainly, it meant either direct contact in daily life with patients and carriers, or indirect contact with contaminated food, drink, and household items. In an army, where men lived in close quarters and interacted constantly, this made large-scale outbreaks far more likely. If internal hygiene was not managed well enough to curb contact transmission, dysentery in the Prussian army would be very difficult to stop.
Moreover, Prussian soldiers loved sweets. The raisins they carried on them had already been used up during the siege of the Fort of Longwy. Thus, in the Lorraine hills, those endless, untended wild vineyards became a little paradise of sweet snacks after meals. Neither the Prussian medical officers nor Goethe himself, of course, understood that dysentery bacilli could also multiply in large numbers on spoiled food and unclean fruit and melons. With the added “help” of weeks of autumn rain in the hill country, dysentery and other intestinal epidemics continued to erupt again and again throughout the Prussian ranks.
These basics, André naturally understood. But he had mentioned them only to a small handful of military physicians such as Percy and Larrey. In the internal regulations issued to ordinary officers and soldiers, he said not a word of it; the document contained only admonitions on discipline, obedience, and compliance.
...
At his staff’s worries, the Duc de Brunswick sighed. He motioned for Goethe to follow him into a carriage. Inside were only three people: the Duc’s private secretary, Monsieur Lombard, and two copyists. The moment the Duc de Brunswick brought Goethe over, Lombard hurriedly signaled his subordinates to take their writing boards, ink, and pens, and withdraw.
Leaning back against the carriage wall, exhausted in body and mind, the Duc said to his private secretary, “Monsieur Lombard, tell our friend what intelligence we received from Paris today. Yes—leave nothing out.”
Lombard nodded. He quietly removed his spectacles and, as he carefully wiped them with a clean velvet cloth, began to recount the dreadful facts of what had happened in Paris on September first...
In late August, Danton, in his capacity as Minister of Justice, declared at a routine cabinet meeting: “To crush their conspiracy and halt the enemy’s advance, we should give the traitorous elements of the Royalist Party a fright.”
The other five ministers present, and their assistants, understood at once what “a fright” was meant to imply, and were left at a loss. Danton tried to explain with a smile. “Yes, I can assure you—this ‘fright’ is nothing more than shaking a fist. As simple as that.”
Yet his colleagues did not believe him. They opposed the horrible plan with silence and fear. Once they had turned away, Danton issued orders to the Paris Commune’s supervisory committee responsible for house searches and arrests of suspects—Marat and Hébert were both committee members—setting the time for the “frightening operation” as the early hours of September first. The targets were royalist nobles and non-juring priests who had already been arrested and imprisoned for conspiracy activity.
Late on the night of August thirty-first, Hébert and his associates spread rumors across Paris that the French armies had been utterly defeated; that General André and his 200,000 troops had been annihilated; and that the Prussian army had already occupied Reims and Chalons. In an instant, rumors proliferated everywhere, throwing Paris’s 700,000 inhabitants into panic.
The next morning, alarm bells rang across the city. Citizens mistakenly believed the Prusso-Austrian Coalition had reached their doorstep, and that the ferocious intervention army would take revenge on all 700,000 Parisians. Hébert, Maillard, and the rest seized the moment to carry out their dreadful plan.
At ten o’clock in the morning, the city gates of Paris were shut. Cafés and all entertainment venues closed their doors. Patrols roamed the streets, and the barriers at twenty checkpoints scattered throughout the city were locked tight. The bells continued to ring without end, and the September massacres began:
Twenty-four clergy being transferred to the Saint-Germain-des-Prés prison were attacked by the mob and ultimately killed.
At the prison attached to the Paris tribunal, more than 200 captured Swiss soldiers were killed by citizens desperate for revenge.
At the Abbaye prison, a monastery converted into a prison only one week earlier, 122 ordinary inmates had just been declared sentenced to death when they were dragged outside the church by sans-culottes acting as an execution squad and stabbed one by one with pikes.
In the prisons of the Sainte-Pélagie convent, the Saint-Firmin convent, and the Bicêtre house of detention, more than 300 clergy and noble prisoners accused of belonging to the Royalist Party—including the Archbishop of Arles, the Bishop of Saintes, and the Bishop of Beauvais—were killed by a sans-culotte execution party backed by the Paris Commune and personally directed by Colonel Maillard, a butcher by trade. Forty-three of the dead were minors under eighteen years of age.
At the Force prison, the former Minister of Foreign Affairs and Controller-General of Finance, Comte de Montmorin, was hacked to pieces and thrown into the Seine. André had originally intended to rescue him, since the man had helped him more than once, in what was essentially an exchange of power for money. However, in a confidential letter to the royal house, Comte de Montmorin had demanded that Louis XVI send someone to assassinate André, calling him the greatest threat to Bourbon authority. Unfortunately for him, André obtained that letter from the secret cabinet kept in the King’s bedchamber. Therefore, Comte de Montmorin had to die.
In addition, the Princess de Lamballe, a close friend of Queen Marie, avoided the tragic fate of another timeline: after repeated warnings from the King’s sister, Princess élisabeth, she ultimately did not return to Paris from London.
A jurist later described the perpetrators of the “September massacres” in Paris in these terms: they killed freely and without visible agitation. They turned sacred legal punishment into slaughter—playing judge at one moment and executioner the next. They did not look like men taking vengeance so much as men for whom killing was a profession. They butchered without emotion and without remorse, with both the conviction of fanatics and the obedience of hangmen.
As for the Bourbon royal family imprisoned in the Temple, they suffered no physical harm. Yet during the move from the spacious, well-lit main building to the cramped, gloomy tower, both adults and children were inevitably shaken and frightened. The children’s nursemaids were also expelled from the compound, though General Santerre ordered a detachment of the National Guard to escort them safely out of Paris, sparing them injury at the mob’s hands.
“And there is more: at the Salpêtrière prison, thirty-five women accused as prostitutes were raped and killed. From September first onward, under the direction and incitement of Jacobin radicals, the mob executed prisoners in prisons or openly along the roads. Prisoners were put to death without trial; no distinction was made between political and criminal offenders. By the evening of the third, when the slaughter gradually subsided, it is estimated that 1,000 to 1,100 people in Paris had been murdered...”
Before Lombard could finish, Goethe spat out bitterly, “These unforgivable criminals—we ought to send them to hell!” Yet the poet at once recalled the Prussian army’s own grim experience, and his expression darkened.
The Duc de Brunswick nodded. “Johann, my friend—but the mob’s slaughter is not the crux. I believe that once our monarch and the Holy Roman Emperor learn of this, they will order the coalition to seize Paris as quickly as possible, to rescue the French royal house and Louis XVI. If we delay, all our efforts will come to nothing. And...”
He paused, his tone heavy with helpless bleakness. “And if I refuse to march south and turn west, and instead prepare to withdraw north to hold our positions, then the two monarchs, under immense pressure from their courts, may well strip me of every command and appoint the young Prussian Crown Prince to lead the grand army. At that point, gentlemen, I would not dare predict the outcome.”
When news reached Berlin that Friedrich Wilhelm III had led a feeble detachment to seize the strategic city of Metz and capture vast quantities of military stores, the Prussian King, overjoyed, bypassed the cabinet war ministry and personally ordered the Crown Prince’s promotion to the rank of General, appointing him Deputy Commander of the Prussian grand army as a reward for his “great achievements.” Now all Prussia was singing that the brilliant and heroic Crown Prince would become a second Frederick the Great.
Only the Duc de Brunswick knew his nephew’s true nature: hesitant, irresolute, ambitious beyond his talents. As a Crown Prince, he was barely adequate; as supreme commander of a grand army, he would be a catastrophe for the Prussian kingdom—much as the Field Marshal of Saxe-Coburg had once told of the misfortunes that befell the young Archduke Charles of Austria.
Inside the carriage, the men fell into a long, oppressive silence. Goethe finally looked up and said to the Duc de Brunswick, “Duc, I wish to go to the French Command Headquarters and pay my respects to General André.”
The Duc de Brunswick frowned and shook his head at once. “There is no need. Others might have a chance, but André will not be persuaded by you. Those Duc, Marquis, and Comte in the émigré French units would gladly tear him to pieces and hang him from every lamppost in France.”
But Lombard, the Duc’s private secretary, brightened. He seemed to grasp what the Hessian meant. “Johann—you are not thinking of striking a bargain with André, so that both sides conduct a sit-down war without casualties?”
Goethe smiled and did not answer, tacitly confirming Lombard’s words. Soon the Duc de Brunswick smiled as well. His most important mission was to preserve the Prussian army; everything else was irrelevant to him.
French nobles? No—I am a Prussian soldier.
Catholic priests? Forgive me, but I am a Protestant.
King Louis XVI? Damn it—Prussians should not sell their lives for an enemy monarch.
“Johann, you will need a guide—someone to take you safely through the Argonne forest and bring you to the French commander.”
The Duc remembered a French prisoner taken by chance the day before, a man named Meldar. By rank, the young Frenchman was a newly commissioned artillery Second Lieutenant. Under interrogation, it emerged that Second Lieutenant Meldar had been covertly monitoring the Prussian army’s marching routes when he slipped on rock, sprained his ankle, and was captured by a patrol.
By the customary rules of prisoner management among the great powers, any wounded enemy officer received sufficient preferential treatment. In the émigré French units, the treatment was far worse, unless the prisoner swore to betray the National Assembly and oppose revolutionary Paris. Thus Second Lieutenant Meldar was fortunate enough to be given a white canvas ox-cart as transport.
About twenty minutes later, when the Duc de Brunswick, Goethe, and Lombard stepped down from the carriage, the Austrian chief of staff, Comte de Saxe-Coburg—who should have been waiting in étain, about three kilometers ahead, to join up with the main army and the Crown Prince’s westward detachment—came rushing in, breathless and hurried. He seized the Duc de Brunswick with a face full of gloom and pulled him back into the carriage, apparently to report extremely bad news.
While Goethe waited outside, he inadvertently caught a few words that sent a chill through him: Hessian mercenaries, étain, massacre, civilians.
...
During the brutal, blood-soaked Thirty Years’ War, the shattered German states lost roughly 60% of their population; Pomerania lost 65%; Silesia lost 25%, and among men nearly half died. Confronted with the grim fact that indiscriminate slaughter could depopulate entire regions, the belligerent powers later signed the Peace of Westphalia. As the modern international order began to take shape, it also produced a body of interstate law that would influence later generations.
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Within that law, it was proposed—though not strictly binding—that both sides in war should avoid the deaths of innocent civilians. After civilians had fulfilled their obligations to an occupying army, including public taxes and food requisitions, the occupiers were not to take further pretexts to infringe civilian interests. Armed resisters and soldiers, however, were not protected by this principle.
In the wars that followed—the Franco-Dutch War, the War of the Grand Alliance, the War of the Spanish Succession, the War of the Polish Succession, the War of the Austrian Succession, and the Seven Years’ War—the European powers, Russia included, broadly observed the rules of warfare that had gradually formed after the Peace of Westphalia.
When the Prusso-Austrian Coalition invaded France, André, as acting head of state and supreme commander in the north, decided to observe that same European wartime convention. By dictatorial authority he vetoed proposals from the Legislative Assembly and the Paris Commune to call civilians to arms in Lorraine and Alsace. He also tacitly allowed civilians in occupied areas, if they refused to abandon their homes, to comply with the various taxes and levies demanded by the intervention forces of Prussia and the Austrian Empire, without treating such compliance as treason.
He made this decision not only because arming civilians would impose too high a human cost on civilians themselves, but chiefly because André—who had planned ahead for three years—was calm and confident. With 110,000 regular troops already in hand, the Army of the Meuse plus the strategic reserve, he believed he could annihilate the Prussian grand army once it penetrated too deeply.
Furthermore, once the anti-invasion war ended, André would immediately order the three great northern armies to cross the frontier and counterattack into the Austrian Netherlands, the Dutch Republic, and the western German states, pushing the northern front onto enemy ground. For that reason, André, who would be shifting from defender to invader, least of all wanted the French army to face a fight to the death from a pan-Germanic popular resistance.
After the Prusso-Austrian Coalition entered Lorraine and Alsace, the 140,000-strong German intervention force, under the restraint of the Duc de Brunswick, dealt with the towns and residents along the route as one great power dealt with another. The French civilians did not like these Germans, but neither did they bring needless calamity upon themselves. The invaders still had discipline: they did not profane Catholic churches, and the food requisitions and taxes remained within tolerable limits.
In addition, coalition soldiers who had harmed civilians in isolated incidents, or abused farm women, had been punished by gendarmerie courts with hanging or flogging, and had paid compensation, to one degree or another, to their victims.
If a coalition soldier straggled and was kidnapped, the gendarmerie would usually surround the nearby village with the kidnapped man’s unit. A guide and an accompanying priest would first negotiate with the residents. If the captive showed no obvious bodily harm, the participants would be flogged several times, imprisoned locally, and the village would be fined through confiscation of a portion of public or private property. That was the end of it.
If the soldier had been killed, the village headman was required to hand over the murderer to the gendarmerie waiting outside the village for trial. If the headman deliberately concealed the truth or shielded the culprit so that the killer could not be found, then the gendarmerie would select five to six villagers at random and execute them by firing squad together with the headman. The gendarmerie would also confiscate public property of a certain value, half of which would later be paid as compensation to the dead soldier’s family.
This process largely conformed to the occupation rules generally recognized by European states after the Thirty Years’ War: even when civilians engaged in armed resistance, they typically faced only limited retaliatory punishment by the gendarmerie.
If an occupying army carried out an unprovoked massacre of innocent civilians, the rules held that its commander and the perpetrators should be tried by court-martial. In practice, this was usually minimized, and “punishment” fell on only a handful of unlucky soldiers. But the victim state, by contrast, was entitled to issue an unrestricted order of pursuit against the slaughterers.
...
In early September, the left wing of the Prusso-Austrian Coalition split in two. The aged Prince of Hohenlohe-Kirchberg remained in the Metz area with 12,000 troops from the German states, including part of the émigré French units, to maintain pressure on the Army of the Rhine. Meanwhile, the Prussian Crown Prince led a westward detachment of 10,000 men—8,000 German-state troops and 2,000 émigré French rebels—departing Metz and marching due west. On September fifth, they laid siege to the Fort of étain, defended by 500 French soldiers.
After holding out in hardship for three days, the fortress commander, a Lieutenant Colonel, ordered all confidential documents and the colors burned. Then the garrison formed up and surrendered its arms to the Prussian Crown Prince. Under André’s standing orders, any commander who held out for seventy-two hours before surrendering in a situation of enemy superiority would not be deemed a traitor.
After harvesting yet another “great victory,” Friedrich Wilhelm III ordered that on September ninth the entire westward detachment would celebrate for a full day, with the cost of food and drink paid from the Crown Prince’s own purse.
Trying to please subordinates and win hearts was not, in itself, a bad thing. But the young Crown Prince had no experience commanding an army, and those around him were a circle of flatterers. He actually allowed a disorderly rabble to hold a revel while the war’s outcome was still undecided, thereby setting the stage for an unhappy incident.
The Hessian mercenaries, as a rule, came from the Duc’s territories of Hesse-Kassel, hence their name. In general, they inherited the Germans’ habitual courage and loyalty, and often displayed excellent military skill. But unlike earlier times, many of the Hessians under the Crown Prince were criminals, gamblers, and bankrupts. They fought bravely, yet their discipline and obedience were poor. While garrisoned in Metz, a number of Hessians had already been arrested by coalition gendarmes for drunken brawling, looting homes, and abusing women.
Wien Hans was one of them. Like many of his countrymen, he enlisted for a simple reason: to avoid the gallows for theft. His pay was pitiful. Officers claimed he would receive one shilling per day, a silver coin equivalent in value to a livre, yet what actually reached Private Hans’s hands was only about half that.
On the night of September ninth, Hans lay dead drunk in the camp. Suddenly his face was splashed awake with cold water. In his ears came the hysterical shouts of a bearded sergeant: “You sluggards—up! Wake up! Take your weapons, all of you! French spies just raided our camp!”
Only one week later did Hans learn the truth. The battalion commander’s two brothers had been killed in the fighting at the Fortress of Montmédy, and under the double shock of family tragedy and excessive alcohol, Colonel Bach became viciously violent. The Hessian commander had the sergeants assemble the battalion, and on the pretext of hunting French spies, drove them out of camp in a frenzy, surrounding a village near the Fort of étain called Damlou.
Bach ordered the men to fix bayonets, and hauled the priest and the village headman into the church for interrogation. At first, the Hessian Lieutenant Colonel merely wanted to torment a few Frenchmen to vent his rage, then return to sleep. But events quickly outran the mercenaries’ expectations, and then spiraled beyond control.
After twenty minutes, the village headman and the elderly priest, tortured until they were scarcely human, finally breathed their last. The headman’s wife’s heartrending screams carried to every villager’s ears. The compatriots of Saint Joan, one after another, burst from their houses, shouting, “Take up arms! Take up arms! Kill the Germans!” The desire for revenge in their chests spread like fire through a dry wood under a hard wind.
With a few outdated matchlock guns, sabers, and long wooden forks, the villagers fought back. They dragged out anything that could serve as a weapon, from their own homes or their neighbors’. They hauled flowerpots, bricks, earthenware pots, even pendulums, and from balconies rained them down on the butchers below. Some who could not find a weapon simply grabbed short clubs and threw themselves onto enemy bayonets.
...
At dawn the next day, when Hans crawled out of an empty cellar, drenched in sweat, he felt as though all strength had been scooped out of him. He slumped weakly onto a low wall and panted for breath.
Above the village, the shouts and curses gradually died away. There was no doubt: the Hessians had taken this rebellious little French village of Lorraine. Houses belonging to civilians who had resisted were set ablaze one after another, and black smoke rose in heavy palls. From time to time, a figure wreathed in flame would stagger out of a room, groaning in agony.
In the night’s action, the soldiers of the Hessian mercenaries’ Second Infantry Battalion, armed to the teeth, had sent these brave and ignorant resisters to heaven with lead balls and bayonets. The Frenchmen’s vaunted valor, like a mantis trying to stop a cart, was no match at all.
By the scattered light of fires, Hans saw bodies piled in all directions—men, women, and children together. The mercenaries, made more savage by slaughter, went house by house along the street, hunting survivors and carrying out further killing and looting. In the open square at the village center, around roaring bonfires, heaps of stolen goods were piled up—gold and silver ornaments, women’s dresses, and everything else of value.
In the powder-reek, the many jumbled corpses lay mixed with refuse, stinking everywhere. Yet that did not dampen the victors’ mood in the least. In groups of three or five they drank deeply, jostled and laughed, and shouted about their exploits, or went back into the homes of women who had just been made widows to do what pleased their loins.
Before long, Hans seemed to hear French women screaming again, threaded through his comrades’ songs and laughter. No sergeant went to stop it. Everyone pretended to hear nothing and see nothing. In the eyes of German mercenaries, raping women and looting homes were simply privileges granted to the victor.
Comte de Saxe-Coburg, as coalition chief of staff, learned of the Damlou massacre only when he arrived at the westward detachment the next day. The Austrian Field Marshal did not bother to wake the Prussian Crown Prince, who was still insensible with drink. He led two gendarmerie companies straight to the scene.
At the church door in Damlou, Colonel Bach, even before senior commanders, continued to justify his atrocities. Again and again he insisted: “Everything I said is true. The French provoked us first. They attacked my patrol, and the soldiers struck back—hence what you see before you...”
Comte de Saxe-Coburg, grave-faced, told the Hessian commander, “Lieutenant Colonel, you will go into the village and bring your entire battalion out to undergo gendarmerie inspection, man by man. As for all other matters, the Prussian Crown Prince will make the final decision based on the gendarmerie report. In addition, tell your soldiers that as they pass the church outside the village, every man must remove his rifle, bayonet, and belt kit, and hand them over to the gendarmerie for safekeeping.”
Hearing this, Colonel Bach felt his tension ease. He knew the matter would be smoothed over. The hesitant and proud Crown Prince, Friedrich Wilhelm III, would not admit his own error. Therefore, Colonel Bach and his Second Infantry Battalion would face no real punishment.
Twenty minutes later, the Hessian mercenaries arrived in formation under their commander. The entire battalion voluntarily disarmed in the open ground before the church, and the gendarmes posted there breathed a long sigh of relief.
Walking through the village that had barely survived, one saw devastation everywhere: broken walls and collapsed roofs, corpses strewn across the ground. Some houses still burned, sending up thick smoke. The remaining homes had been looted bare, and everything of value was piled in the central square.
Ordered to count and identify the newly murdered, the gendarmes made a horrifying discovery. Some victims, though terribly wounded, still breathed, crawling and begging for rescue; others cried in voices that broke the heart, pleading to be finished off. The survivors were mostly women who had been raped, many already driven mad.
Not far away, several women who still had good looks ran naked down the only road leading to the square, their legs wobbling as they went. They waved headscarves high overhead, and now and then turned back to cackle at the gendarmes, babbling nonsense that made the skin crawl. One woman had both arms wrapped in cloth, as though shattered by gunfire, with blood dripping continuously onto the ground.
Seeing this, the Field Marshal of Saxe-Coburg shook his head and cursed under his breath, “Those lawless Hessian bastards.”
The gendarmerie major in charge of recording the casualties stepped forward and asked quietly, “Field Marshal, shall I write it as it was, or...?”
The Austrian Field Marshal shot the major a hard look and issued very different instructions. “Write it as it was, but describe the villagers as rioters, and accept Colonel Bach’s explanation. Also, gather all survivors and take them back under gendarmerie guard. As for the grievously wounded, end their suffering humanely, and have the chaplains assist you.”
Roughly two hours later, the gendarmerie major submitted a report on the Damlou incident to the Austrian chief of staff:
“...In the course of operations to suppress resistance forces hiding within the village of Damlou, the Hessian Second Infantry Battalion killed 256 rioters. The remaining fifty-three are mostly women. One third of the houses were burned... Our own losses in the action were eighteen, including two killed, five severely wounded, and eleven lightly wounded... According to the gendarmerie’s post-action accounting, fifty-five soldiers were drunk during the operation, and twenty-three concealed looted goods. By order of His Royal Highness the Crown Prince, all violations of discipline will receive the corresponding disciplinary punishments.”
Plainly, the report downplayed what mattered. It described innocent villagers as rioters who had attacked the coalition, and deliberately omitted the Hessian mercenaries’ rapes. The number of soldiers who concealed stolen goods was also sharply reduced, not because the gendarmes wished to conceal the truth, but because the Field Marshal of Saxe-Coburg had warned the major.
Afterward, the Prussian Crown Prince, Friedrich Wilhelm III, accepted the coalition chief of staff’s handling in full. The coalition high command tried to bury the Damlou massacre, but it failed. Although German gendarmes hunted down survivors around Damlou in large numbers—imprisoning them rather than killing them—several villagers still escaped. They fled west across the mountains and were rescued by French patrols in the eastern forests of the Marne.
A few days later, when news of the massacre reached the Northern Command Headquarters, André could not regain his composure for a long time. He personally issued a special order to the Army of the Meuse and to all French forces: any officer or soldier encountered from the First Infantry Regiment, Second Battalion of the Hessian mercenaries in the Prusso-Austrian Coalition’s westward detachment was to be shot on the spot. No surrender would be accepted. Not a single butcher would be spared. No Quarter!
