Woldemar Von Löwenstern

Woldemar von Löwenstern, a Baltic German Russian Cavalry officer, states in the course of his memoirs, “I am not writing a history of the war…that is sufficiently known from every history of the war of 1812.” In his memoirs he is reliving his own personal successes, frustrations, failures, and tragedies from 1790 to 1815, and desires his readers to join him on his journey, as he prepares for cavalry service, leaves that service, marries and runs estates in Estonia, but then takes his ill wife to Vienna seeking a cure, where she dies as Napoleon is invading the city. He rejoins the Russian army and at one point is sent to Moscow. When he arrives there, he finds his dispatch is an order for his arrest. His deportment saves him so he returns to the army as it retreats to Moscow and follows Napoleon until Paris. He describes skirmishes and battles but more importantly the lodgings from dirty straw to noble luxury and the people he meets from Catherine the Great to boiler of soap.