I first learned of Herbert Knötel at the beginning of the 1950s when a friend showed me some beautiful watercolor paintings of American Civil War zouave regiments. They had been sent, he said, by a German artist in West Berlin who was anxiously seeking commissions from American collectors of military art. No suitable paper being available in that still-ravaged city, the artist had painted them on the backs of small linoleum tiles, which he had carefully scraped and smoothed. That artist was Herbert Knötel.

Recently assigned as an instructor in the Department of Military Art and Engineering of the U.S. Military Academy, I wanted accurate illustrations of such exotic military species as cuirassiers, grenadiers, chasseurs, and carabiniers (both à cheval and à pied) which my cadets were encountering in their studies. I began by ordering two of Knötel’s small watercolors a month. The first two were a cuirassier and (since I had been reading Baron Marbot’s Memoires) a private of the 23rd Chasseurs à Cheval. Ann, my good wife and comrade through all fortunes—who has been known to declare herself the last widow of the Napoleonic Wars—considered them “little jewels.” She had no objection to my gradually increasing the size of my monthly “contingent,” once my original intention of having a few pictures as instructional aides burgeoned into the intention of developing a collection that would recreate Napoleon’s Grande Armée.

Having served as an intelligence officer, it was natural for me to use an order of battle of the Grande Armée as my guide in choosing subjects for Knötel’s work. That meant examples of all its combat arms and services, together with pictures of the different types of officers and men in one regiment of each arm.

Knötel worked almost exclusively from manuscript pictorial collections assembled by actual eye-witnesses during or shortly after the Napoleonic era, having an unequaled knowledge of such sources. Occasionally he might borrow from another expert “uniformologist”-artist or paint a figure—always at my request, such as the fusilier of the 110th Ligne—based on uniform regulations alone. And there were times (very few, but very satisfying) when my own research for A Military History and Atlas of the Napoleonic Wars and Swords Around a Throne turned up a uniform unknown to him.

Our correspondence was always something of an adventure. Knötel wrote in colloquial Berliner’s German, spiced with often-archaic military terms. My knowledge of that language being confined to a few World War II G.I. words and phrases, I sought help from West Point’s Foreign Language Department—only to find its instructors equally baffled. Fortunately, the department’s messenger, a German-born retired sergeant, came to my rescue. I am not certain who translated my letters to Knötel—possibly a neighbor who had served for years in Africa and did wonderful wild animal paintings. Knötel valued his first few American customers; no matter how many valuable commissions he might have to fill, our standing orders always arrived on schedule.

Our cooperation flourished; my collection expanded to include Napoleon’s allies and enemies. Unfortunately it was far from complete when Knötel died unexpectedly in 1963.

Here then is Napoleon’s Grande Armée as Herbert Knötel recreated its French and foreign regiments. (Allies and enemies will appear, we trust, in future volumes.) These are real soldiers, whether in full-dress or field uniforms—not as their uniform regulations decreed that they should look, but as they really did as men of their own time saw them passing by.

A note to the reader: While most words and phrases in French and other foreign languages are in italics, those words which are commonly used in standard English have been left in roman type.

John R. Elting