Canadian Transport Sourcebook

II

ANTHONY VAN EGMOND WITH AND AGAINST NAPOLEON

WHAT OF Anthony Van Egmond as an actor in these shifting scenes?

As a young officer in the Dutch army when Holland was invaded, he was conscripted along with the Dutch contingent for service with the French. Details are not complete regarding the nature of his service during the next few years... Van Egmond reports himself that he was in Mainz in 1802 and 1803 acting as a member of a court for judging cases of robbery. As thrones toppled in the German states before Napoleon's advancing armies, chaos reigned; the machinery for the maintenance of order and the administration of justice ceased to function. Seeing no security for life and property, men of courage here and there banded together and took the law into their own hands, after the manner of Schiller's 'Robbers'—men who were by no means criminals themselves, but imbued with the chivalry of a Robin Hood in the protection of those who needed it. The outstanding individual of this type was Johannes Buckler of the Rhineland, who, under the name of Schinderhannes, achieved national notoriety. In the end, however, he was caught by the military authorities and condemned; Anthony Van Egmond saw him guillotined at Mainz in 1803. Two other such robber captains arose in the Rhineland, and shared a similar fate. We are interested in noting the fate of these two less known men—Hessel and Geymuller by name—because Van Egmond had to act as a member of a court that condemned them. His comment on this event throws a telling sidelight on the condition of Europe at that time, as well as the character of the individual Anthony Van Egmond himself: "And verily I say: Had these three men been judged by a Court purely of equity in lieu of one of law, and their good deeds been allowed to weigh in contra of their misdeeds, they would have been honourably acquitted. It was the laws and not the crimes that condemned them."

Van Egmond was married some time between 1802 and 1807 to the German Susanna Dietz. In 1808 he was still in the Rhineland, where his eldest son Constant was born on April 8th of that year. In how many earlier campaigns with Napoleon's armies he was engaged, we cannot say. But the Dutch contingent to which he belonged did take part in the great invasion of Russia, with the calamitous retreat from Moscow in 1812. The defeat of Napoleon in the great battle of Leipzig in 1815 meant the approach of the end: the Dutch and others who had been forced into service under Napoleon naturally grasped the opportunity to break away and join the Allies. The Dutch and Belgian contingent, who, as has already been stated, distinguished themselves at Quatre Bras and Waterloo, included Anthony Van Egmond. At Waterloo he was severely wounded.