, 1813.
Good people took pains to give their guests an opportunity to clean
themselves thoroughly; the well-to-do had their servants attend to this
process; in houses of the working class man and wife would give a helping
hand.
Sergeant Schoebel, together with a comrade, was quartered in the house of
an honest tailor who, seeing how the soldiers were covered with lice, made
them undress and, while the wife boiled the undergarments, the tailor
ironed the outer clothing with a hot iron.
Generous people tried to ameliorate in every manner possible the need which
presented itself in such a pitiful form.
Lieutenant Schauroth was sitting in despair at a table in an inn when one
nobleman pressed a double Louisd'or into his hand and another placed his
sleigh at the lieutenant's disposal to continue his journey.
In Tapiau a carpenter's helper, himself a very poor man, begged among his
friends to obtain a suit of clothes for Sergeant Steinmueller, whom he had
never known before.
But cases of this kind were the exception; in general the Prussian
peasants remembered the many excesses which, notwithstanding Napoleon's
strict orders, the soldiers had committed on their march through East
Prussia; they remembered the requisitions, they felt the plight of Prussia
since the battle of Jena, and they revenged themselves on the French
especially, but even the Germans of Napoleon's soldiers had to suffer from
the infuriated, pitiless peasantry.
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