Note B — CAPTURED BY COSSACKS.

The writer of these letters, Joseph Diss Debar, served with the corps of Marshal Davonst. Before the French Revolution his father had filled the office of intendant of domains of the prince-cardinal de Rohan-Guéménée, of royal necklace memory, then residing on his estates at Saverne, Alsace, in the diocese of Strassburg, of which he was the beneficiary. Soon after the capture of the Bastille the revolutionary movement spread to this locality, and destroyed, imprisoned or drove into exile all the avowed adherents of the royal cause, including the cardinal and his friends. The greater part of the Saverne refugees gathered at Ettenheim in Baden, only one league from the Rhine, where a large stipend, allowed to the cardinal by the British government, enabled him to keep his friends and followers above want until they could find other means of support. Thirteen years later Ettenheim also attracted the unfortunate duc d'Enghien, who in March, 1804, was kidnapped by orders of Bonaparte and shot in the ditch at Vincennes. The terror inspired by this high-handed coup d'état, which destroyed the émigrés' safety upon neutral soil, caused many of the younger generation of exiles to return to their native country and to enter the army, the military career being the only one open to them. Among these were the writer and his two brothers, the oldest being then twenty-four and the youngest seventeen years of age.