Mathieu Martinel and the Drowning Soldier
A young French cavalry soldier took a tremendous risk to rescue a drowning man.
1820
A young French cavalry soldier took a tremendous risk to rescue a drowning man.
1820
Mathieu Martinel enrolled in the French army in January 1816, at the age of sixteen. It was a time of relative peace, but opportunities for heroism appeared to come looking for him.
IN 1820, Mathieu Martinel was in Strasbourg when he saw a fellow cavalryman had fallen into the river, right beside the weir of a churning mill-wheel.* Martinel leapt straight into the turbid waters, and grabbed onto the drowning man.
Martinel’s idea was to catch onto a post at the sluice-gate, but he realised that the poor soldier was slipping from his grasp, so he let go of the post and, keeping tight hold of his burden, resigned himself to being swept under the paddles of the wheel.
When he came up on the other side, Martinel was still clutching onto the cavalryman. He dragged the waterlogged and now unconscious soldier to the river-bank, and brought him round.
Yonge says it was the River Ill, which runs through the centre of the town and into the Rhine; the Societé Montyon say it happened somewhere near the Kehl bridge over the Rhine, just to the east of the city.