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Posted on 11/28/2025 10:00:01 PM PST by Cronos
His name was Geert Adriaans Boomgaard.
Born in 1788, he was a grumpy gentleman. And no one, in 1896, could blame him — at 108, Mr. Boomgaard had buried two wives, twelve children and more grandchildren than he could count. He had seen too much death, buried too many loved ones.
Born in 1788 in Groningen, Boomgaard was the son of a sea captain. And in 1812, at age 24, he enlisted in Napoleon’s Grande Armée. He wanted to see adventure, wanted to see the world. He stood with his comrades before the emperor. A sea of men, young men, hungry for glory. So many of them would never return home, dying in the doomed Russian adventure of Corsica’s most ambitious son.
Napoleon recruited in all the lands he had conquered and occupied; Spanish would serve with Spanish, Dutch with Dutch, Italians with Italians. This improved their camraderie, and made the youths feel close to one another. Young Geert served with men his age, who spoke his mother tongue. They could relate to one another, related to each other on a deep level and soon became thick as thieves.
Of nearly 600,000 troops to invade Russia, nearly 400,000 perished. Some deserted, some got taken prisoner and others died of diseases. Most of the men Geert served with died in the freezing cold, starved or fell victim to diseases, dying deaths that would have been perfectly preventable under normal circumstances.
When Geert came back, he did not speak of his experiences. He married, had eight children and became a seafarer like his father before him. When his wife died after giving birth to their eigth child, he remarried and had four more children with his second wife for a grand total of twelve. He felt a blessed man, but each of these children would die before sixty, the oldest of them dying at 57. By the time Mr. Boomgaard was 100, he had buried every single on his children, as well as both his wives…
It is no surprise that, in all the pictures I have seen of the old man, he looks absolutely miserable and depressed. Still, he was vain enough to put on what was very obviously a wig in every single photograph ever taken of him, covering his bald dome with what was supposed to look like natural human hair.
Boomgaard survived all his children, and many of his grandchildren as well. But in old age, he was blessed with several great-grandchildren. One of these, a young man by the name of Johan Christiaan Herman Winterwerp, was born in 1880 when the grizzled old veteran was 92. In his lonely old age, he received many visitors but was rather sullen and grumpy with most of them. Johan, his great-grandson, was one of the few who he could stomach to be around. The only one whose company he did not dread…
So in February 1899, when Geert was 110 years old and increasingly frail, he called for Johan. And he told his favorite descendant to look underneath his bed. In a box, neatly folded, Johan found Geert’s old uniform, and the medals he had received in service of Emperor Napoleon, 87 years prior…
Geert Adriaans Boomgaard passed away on February 3, 1899. He was 110 years old and the last known veteran of Napleon’s Grande Armée. When you look at his black and white photographs and meet his gaze, now forever stilled, you look into the eyes of the last man on God’s green earth who saw the Emperor Napoleon and marched with him.
Whenever the last survivor of any war dies, an era dies with him. A generation that once consisted of millions is reduced to zero. But before the last veteran breathes his final breath, before he closes his eyes for good, he is cursed to live life a living relic, a reminder of a past he can never access, friend and comrade to soldiers he can never meet again, rememberer of stories he can’t share with anyone who was there and knows what it was like…
All that is left now is a worn uniform, dull medals and ancient photographs of an ancient man, a man born when France was ruled by a King and the guillotine had not yet been invented. Napoleon died in 1821 and yet his name and memory echoed through the living memory of his men for nearly another eighty years.
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An exceptional lifespan.
Ping!.................
Well, he was certainly a survivor. It’s a shame he didn’t write a memoir. His heirs could have profited from it.
My grandmothers older sister was born im 1899 and passed away 2003; that’s three centuries. My grandmother, born 1901 only made two centuries.
I wonder 🤔🤔🤔
What if Napoleon had a B-52 at the Battle of Waterloo?
My, my!
Busted!
https://youtu.be/Sj_9CiNkkn4?si=T7eAF5TIQ4RBjKeD
In this context, neither was Napoleon. Herodotus wrote about the Persian campaign into the steppe to teach those darned Scythians a lesson.
Thanks for the ping.
Pretty amazing
The mystery of Waterloo’s last living soldier
This is Louis-Victor Baillot, the oldest surviving combatant from Waterloo. The photograph was taken a year before his death.
By Michael Prodger
https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2015/06/mystery-waterloos-last-living-soldier
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The last WWI veteran, Lazare Ponticelli of France, died on March 12, 2008, at the age of 110. However, the last surviving American WWI veteran, Frank Buckles, died on February 27, 2011, at age 110.
Lazare Ponticelli: He was the last officially recognized WWI veteran and died on March 12, 2008.
Frank Buckles: He was the last surviving American veteran of WWI. He enlisted at 16 and died on February 27, 2011, at age 110.
It is important to distinguish between the last recognized veteran of the war and the last surviving American veteran, as their deaths occurred at different times.
Not quite.
The aims, strategies and organisation of Napoleon and Hitler’s invasions were significantly different.
Napoleon’s primary objective was geopolitical coercion rather than outright conquest: he sought to force Tsar Alexander I’s Russia back into compliance with the Continental System, his economic blockade against Britain, after Russia withdrew from it in 1810. The invasion aimed at a quick military defeat of Russian armies to compel a favorable peace, subordinating Russia within French-dominated Europe without intending to dismantle or occupy the state long-term. Capturing Moscow was not an initial goal but a later fallback after failing to decisively engage Russian forces at the border.
In contrast, Hitler’s aims were ideological, economic, and expansionist: the total annihilation of the Soviet Union as a Bolshevik entity, the seizure of vast territories for Lebensraum (living space) and resources like oil and grain, and the establishment of a German colonial empire in the east. This was a war of extermination and permanent occupation, with plans to resettle Germans and exploit or eliminate Slavic populations.
Napoleon’s strategy centered on rapid forced marches and attrition to provoke a decisive battle early on, relying on overwhelming numbers to dismantle Russian armies through direct confrontations like the Battle of Borodino (a bloody but inconclusive engagement).
Hitler’s Barbarossa, by contrast, was a modern Blitzkrieg operation emphasizing surprise, speed, and encirclement: a three-pronged assault (Army Groups North, Center, and South) along a 1,500-mile front to destroy the Red Army at the frontiers through massive “cauldron” battles, preventing any organized withdrawal eastward. The plan, outlined in Directive No. 21, targeted key objectives like Leningrad, Moscow, and Ukraine in 6-10 weeks, leveraging mechanized warfare to capture resources and industrial centers quickly. Hitler explicitly drew lessons from Napoleon to avoid chasing retreating forces, instead prioritizing immediate annihilation and even delaying a push on Moscow in 1941 to focus on flanks, citing Napoleon’s occupation of the capital as ineffective.
In fact, Hitler was obsessed with Napoleon’s campaign, frequently referencing it and believing he could succeed where the French emperor failed by avoiding a retreat and holding positions during the 1941 Soviet counteroffensives. German military planners also researched the historical precedent, but overconfidence in a quick victory, ideological biases against the Soviet system, and the expectation that the USSR would collapse like Tsarist Russia in World War I led them to ignore key lessons. This hubris, rather than ignorance, contributed to the failure.
AIiiiieeeee.
Petrol. He would run out of fuel.
When studying metallurgy and strength of materials in mechanical engineering, I learnt what a wonder a simple iron nail is.
To extract iron requires specialized knowledge.
And even in Napoleonic times, aluminium was more expensive than gold, which is why the obelisk in DC has an aluminium cap. But modern tech has changed it.
However the modern tech is built on millenia of knowledge and diversified skill.
So plopping a b52 in 1812 would be an initial shock factor but without the ecosystem it would not last. No fuel, no maintenance, no sheet metal, no runways, no asphalt, no aluminium, nothing
Though the scythians were an Iranian speaking people, or at least their elite were. The slavs may have been the farming caste.
Incidentally the Slavic languages are closer to Indo-Iranian languages than they are to Germanic languages
Any sufficiently advanced engineering is akin to magic. Imagine mobile phones in 1812?!?!
You know your Bible. One of the most fascinating verses I read when I was 12, which started my fascination with history was, I think in Joshua, about warriors with bronze swords meeting those with iron swords!! The iron sword cut through the bronze with ease!
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