Chapter XIV: After the Downfall (1)

The remnant of the Waterloo army, as mustered and officially reported to Paris on July 1, 1815, after it had been withdrawn by convention with the Allies beyond the Loire, numbered some 23,000 of all arms.[46] The soldiers had their Eagles with them. The Eagles were still the standards of the army, although all was over with Napoleon, and he had set out on his flight from Malmaison to the coast near Rochfort--to find the _Bellerophon_ awaiting him there.

[Sidenote: PRESENTED AFTER WATERLOO]

The last occasion on which an Eagle of Napoleon’s Army had its part on parade was one day, near the Loire, with a regiment not at Waterloo. It was when the news of Napoleon’s abdication reached its colonel. He was Colonel Bugeaud of the 14th of the Line, in after years the famous Marshal who gained Algeria for France. As it happened, the 14th had not long received their Eagle from the “_Champ de Mai_.” It had been brought by the deputation of the regiment sent to Paris to receive it at the hands of the Emperor, but had not yet been formally presented on parade, owing to the regiment being on the march from the south-eastern frontier of France. The 14th joined the rallied remnants of the Waterloo army to the south of the Loire, and there Colonel Bugeaud made the presentation of the Eagle. For the occasion he made use of the Napoleonic formula of address at such ceremonies, but with a variation to suit the altered situation. He took the opportunity to remind the regiment that, if the Chief had fallen, they yet owed allegiance to their country. “Soldiers of the 14th,” began the colonel, “here is your Eagle. It is in the name of the nation that I present it to you. If the Emperor, as it is stated, is no longer our Sovereign, France remains. It is France who confides this Eagle to you as your standard; it is ever to be your talisman of victory. Swear that as long as a soldier of the 14th exists no enemy’s hand shall touch it!” “We swear it!” responded the soldiers all together, and then the officers stepped forward in front of the ranks, waving their swords and again shouting, “We swear it!”

The end for the Eagles of Napoleon came on August 3, 1815. On that day the Ministerial decree was promulgated, abolishing them and the tricolor flag, and disbanding the entire Army. The white Bourbon flag was restored once more, with a new form of Army organisation, which substituted “Departmental Legions” in the place of regiments. As in the year before, it was notified that all Eagles were to be sent to the Artillery dépôt at Vincennes for destruction there, according to law--the metal of the Eagles to be melted down, their silken tricolor flags to be burned.

The date of the final disbandment was fixed for September 30, and in almost every case there was a pathetic scene when the hour came for the soldiers to take their last farewell of their Eagles. “On the day of the disbandment,” describes one officer, speaking of his own regiment, “we all paraded, and the roll was called for the last time. Then the Eagle was passed solemnly down along the line, the band playing a funeral march. The officers and soldiers, all in tears, after saluting it, embraced and kissed the Eagle. It was then escorted back to the colonel’s quarters to be packed up in a box and forwarded, according to the official instructions, by carrier to the Ministry of War, thence to go to Vincennes.”

From a picture by R. Demoraine.]

[Sidenote: ON THE DAY OF THE LAST PARADE]

In a few cases, where the senior officers knew that they had nothing to hope for in the way of consideration from the new _régime_, the Eagles were publicly broken up at the last parade by the colonels themselves, with a blacksmith’s hammer or pioneer’s hatchet, and the silken tricolor flags cut to pieces, after which the metal fragments, together with the shreds of the flags, were distributed as keepsakes among officers and men. That being done, all silently dispersed, never to reassemble. In some other cases, as had happened a twelvemonth previously, the Eagles disappeared before the last parade--the officers in the various regiments having arranged for one of themselves to retain the Eagle of the corps privately, either by agreement or after drawing lots.

It was in this way that what Napoleonic Eagles and flags are now at the Invalides came to be there. They were kept hidden by their possessors until after the Revolution of July, 1830, and then, on the formation of the present collection of standards and trophies being officially sanctioned, most of those at present exhibited were brought to light and presented, either by those who had been treasuring them in secret, or by their heirs and families.

Three Waterloo Eagles are at the Invalides: those of the 2nd Grenadiers of the Guard, and of the 25th and 26th of the Line; these last two of the regiments in the columns charged by the Scots Greys and the Royals. In addition to the Eagles, there are at the Invalides several standards that saw service on the battlefield under Napoleon and survived the vicissitudes of war: seven flags of infantry, and as many of artillery, one cuirassier standard, and five other cavalry standards. Most of these originally bore Eagles on their staves, but those Eagles are now wanting.[47]

FOOTNOTES

[1] “The Eagle for each standard,” said Napoleon, going into details with Berthier, “must be made ‘strong and light’--‘_Il convient de la rendre à la fois solide et légère._’” “An Eagle looking to its left, with wings half expanded, and with its talons grasping a thunderbolt, as in the old Roman standard,” was the approved design: the bird measuring eight inches from head to feet, and in the spread of its wings from tip to tip, nine and a half inches. Below the thunderbolt, as base and support, was a tablet of brass, three inches square; bearing in raised figures the number of the regiment. The weight of the whole--the Eagle was to be of copper, gilded over--was just three and a half pounds avoirdupois, and a stout oaken staff was provided, eight feet long and painted _bleu impérial_, to which the silken regimental colour was attached; the flag being thirty-five inches along the staff and thirty-three lengthwise, in the fly.

[2] The drawings made and laid before Napoleon at Saint-Cloud are in existence, preserved among the archives of the Ministry of War in Paris.

[3] All armies, as a fact, owe to Napoleon the introduction of the practice of inscribing on the colours of a regiment the names of battles in which that regiment has won honour; nowadays an essential feature of the war-flags of all nations. It originated after Napoleon’s first campaign as General Bonaparte, at the head of the Army of Italy; and, together with the inscriptions of quotations of passages from his despatches, was introduced by him as a device to aid in developing military spirit and a sense of _esprit de corps_ among the soldiers. The Directory promptly censured the innovating young general for acting without having first referred the matter to Paris. They sent orders that all such inscriptions were to be forthwith deleted from the flags. Napoleon, however, refused to obey; and the regiments of his Army supported him. One and all protested against the removal of their titles to fame, the first appearance of which on their flags had been hailed with enthusiasm. In the result the Directory deemed it advisable to accept the situation; and after that, in turn, the flags of the regiments of the other Republican armies elsewhere were authorised to display similar decorations of their own. The practice in due course was adopted in the other armies of Europe.

[4] The sending of an invitation to the Pope had been finally decided on in July, after a series of protracted discussions in the Imperial Council of State.

[5] One of the Eagles so presented by Napoleon on that afternoon is now at Madrid. It is a trophy that is absolutely unique. Upwards of a hundred and thirty of Napoleon’s Eagles, the spoils of war, now decorate cathedrals, chapels, and arsenals in the capitals of Europe; but there is only one French naval Eagle now in existence, the trophy at Madrid; the Eagle of a line-of-battleship named the _Atlas_.

Every French line-of-battleship was represented on the Champ de Mars and received its Eagle. “Tous les vaisseaux,” to quote the words of M. Le Brun, in his _Guerres Maritimes de France_, “étaient gratifiés d’une aigle et d’un drapeau à leur nom, donnés par l’Empereur à son couronnement, ou avaient assisté et prêté serment des députations du port et de l’Armée Navale; chaque vaisseau avait envoyé sa députation composée de trois officiers, trois officiers mariners, et quatre gabiers ou matelots.”

The Eagle of the _Atlas_ was received on the Field of Mars by the ship’s deputation of three officers, three warrant officers, and four seamen, sent from Toulon, where the _Atlas_ then was in harbour with Admiral Villeneuve’s fleet, which Nelson was watching. The _Atlas_ crossed the Atlantic in the Toulon fleet with Nelson in pursuit, returned to Europe, fought in the indecisive battle off Cape Finisterre in July 1805, and was so shattered in the fight, in which the ship only just escaped capture, that she was left behind for repairs at Ferrol when Villeneuve put to sea finally, to meet his fate at Trafalgar. The _Atlas_ had to remain there and fell into the hands of the Spaniards in 1808, at the time of the national uprising against Napoleon. Thus the naval Eagle passed into Spanish possession.

The crew of the _Atlas_ were taken by surprise, while the ship was in dock at Ferrol, by the Spanish regiment of Navarre in garrison there when the news of the Rising of May 2 at Madrid reached Galicia. They were trapped and pounced down upon. The ship was seized by a sudden assault, the officers and men being made prisoners to the provincial Junta, before they had a chance of concealing or making away with their Eagle.

In other cases elsewhere, undoubtedly, the naval Eagles were somehow disposed of surreptitiously. It is very remarkable that not a single French naval Eagle came into British hands on board the thirty odd ships of the line which we captured between 1805 and 1814 during the war with Napoleon. At Trafalgar, according to a French officer on board the French flagship, the _Bucentaure_, they had one. Describing the approach of the _Victory_, at the outset of the battle, says the officer: “A collision appeared inevitable. At that moment Villeneuve seized the Eagle of the _Bucentaure_ and displayed it to the sailors who surrounded him. ‘My friends,’ he called out, ‘I am going to throw this on board the English ship! We will go and fetch it back or die!’ (‘Mes amis, je vais la jetter à bord du vaisseau Anglais! Nous irons la reprendre ou mourir!’) Our seamen responded to these noble words by their acclamations.” Admiral Villeneuve, all the same, did not throw any Eagle on board the _Victory_; nor was one found in the _Bucentaure_ during the forty-eight hours that the ship was in our possession after the battle, previous to her wreck in the storm at the entrance to Cadiz harbour. None too were found on board any of Nelson’s other prizes. As to that, also, what was done with, or became of, the Eagles of the five battalions serving as marines in the French fleet at Trafalgar, officers and men of which were taken prisoners by us--those of the 2nd of the Line, the 16th, 67th, 70th, and 79th?

At the Field of Mars all eyes were on the six hundred and fifty officers and men of the Naval Brigade as they marched round the arena to receive their Eagles. Soldiers everybody was familiar with. There was nothing particular about them which had not been seen before. But a French sailor was not often seen away from his port; and to Paris man-of-war’s men were things quite new and strange. And, besides, were they not “nos braves marins,” who were going to clear the way for the “Invasion Flotilla” and the “Army of England”; to strike the blow that should sweep from the path of the Emperor “ce terrible Nelson!” One and all gazed in wonder at the sailors: the captains in their long, swallow-tailed blue coatees barred with gold lace, white breeches, and high top-boots; the sprightly “_aspirants_,” or midshipmen, in cut-away jackets and little round hats with turned-up brims; the showy “Marins de la Garde,” wearing broad-topped shakos edged with yellow braid, over which tall red tufts nodded, red-cuffed and yellow-braided blue jackets, and blue trousers striped with yellow; the other sailors of the fleet in massed squads, in shiny black flat-brimmed hats, blue jackets studded with brass buttons, red waistcoats, red, white, and blue striped pantaloons, wide in the leg, “a l’Anglaise,” and shoes with round steel buckles. Such a sight the good people of Paris had never witnessed before, and they gazed at it rapturously with all their eyes, and shouted their loudest “Vive la Marine!”

There was too, in addition to the sailors, one Eagle deputation the strange appearance of which attracted special curiosity and interest that afternoon. Everybody gazed in wonder at a group of strapping-looking foreigners of all ages who marched along by themselves, got up as light infantrymen, with green tufted shakos and bright green uniforms. They belonged to one of the Emperor’s newest creations; and were the Eagle escort of Napoleon’s “Irish Legion.” They had come to the Field of Mars to receive the only Eagle that Napoleon ever gave to a foreign regiment in his service, with a flag designed specially for them, of “Irish Green,” as it was described, of silk, fringed with gold cord, inscribed on one side in letters on gold: “Napoléon, Empereur des Français, à la Legion Irlandaise,” and bearing on the other a golden harp, uncrowned, and the words “L’Indépendance d’Irlande.” Two ex-patriated men of good Irish family, refugees escaped from the penalty of treason under English law for their part in the Rising of ’98, seven years before, headed the deputation; a Captain Tennant and a Captain William Corbet. In the ranks of the regiment the deputation represented marched other Irish refugees, who had shed English blood at Wexford and Enniscorthy; fugitives from political justice before that who had had a part in the attempted raids of Hoche and Humbert; “Wild Geese” who had made their flight overseas after the fiasco of 1803; and a sprinkling of French-born Irish, some of whom had worn the red coat of the old Irish Brigade in the Royal Army of France, grandsons of the men of Fontenoy. Napoleon had enrolled his Irish Legion just a twelvemonth before, in view of a descent on Ireland from Brest simultaneously with the crossing of the Straits of Dover from Boulogne. At the request of those who first came forward to enlist, he had uniformed the corps in the “national” green, in place of the former red coat which had been the historic colour of the old French-Irish regiments ever since James the Second, under the Treaty of Limerick, carried over to France the remains of the army that had fought for him at the Boyne. The Eagle the Irish Legion received on the Field of Mars faced Wellington in Spain, and narrowly escaped falling into Blücher’s hands in Germany in 1813. It was hidden away after Fontainebleau, and reappeared during the “Hundred Days,” finally to disappear after Waterloo.

[6] Pigtails, too, were missing; for the first time at a military display of the kind in Paris. Even the soldiers of the Revolution, the rank and file, had kept up the old style of clubbed-hair. The new _régime_, however, had altered all that. “Le petit tondu” (“The little shorn one”), a camp-fire nickname for Napoleon, from his close-cropped head, had made every soldier cut his hair short; by a general order of six months before. The order, it may be mentioned incidentally, at first nearly raised a riot in the Imperial Guard, and led to a number of duels between “les canichons,” the “lap-dogs” or “poodles,” as the men who obeyed the order at the outset were sneeringly dubbed by comrades who refused to do so, and the others.

[7] Ney rode up to head the 6th Light Infantry at the outset, immediately after a chaffing challenge to Murat. The two, who had been operating together during the previous days, had had some difference over their methods of attack. Said Murat arrogantly on one occasion, after Ney had been laboriously trying to get into his brother-marshal’s head an elaborate scheme of his proposed tactics: “I don’t follow your plans. It is my way not to make mine till I am facing the enemy!” Ney, on the morning of Elchingen, got his chance to pay Murat back. They were together, riding close to Napoleon, with all the staff near by, and not far from the Danube bank. As the guns began to open, Ney suddenly turned and laid hold of Murat’s arm. Giving his colleague a rough shake, before the Emperor and everybody, Ney exclaimed: “Now, Prince, come on! Come along with me! and make your plans in the face of the enemy!” The astonished Murat drew himself back, whereupon Ney spurred up his horse and dashed forward; “galloping off to the river-bank, he plunged into the water up to his horse’s belly amidst a shower of cannon-balls and grape, to direct the mending of the bridge.” That done, he galloped on to head the leading column of attack across the bridge.

[8] Napoleon himself, it so chanced at the outset, heard the fierce cannonading from afar, and, becoming suddenly alarmed at what might be happening, was thrown into a fever of anxiety over it; into a state of violent agitation. It was on the evening of November 11. Napoleon just then was on his way to take up his quarters at the Abbey of St. Polten, whence only a few miles intervened between him and Vienna. As he was nearing St. Polten he was suddenly alarmed by “the smothered, distant echo of heavy firing, which was not even interrupted by night.” So one of the aides de camp on the Emperor’s staff, De Ségur, describes. “What unforeseen danger could suddenly have overtaken Mortier? It was almost certainly he who, going forward with an advanced guard of five thousand men, had unexpectedly come across Kutusoff with forty thousand. It was impossible, though, at first, to imagine the destruction of the marshal and his unhappy division.”

At St. Polten they listened, and in the end feared for the worst.

“One could only offer up prayers and await the decision of fate! The wide and deep Danube separated us from the marshal. This stream had just delivered over to the enemy one of Mortier’s generals, who in despair had tried to make his escape in a boat. Everything announced a catastrophe: the Emperor no longer doubted it. In his anxiety, as he drew nearer to the sound of the combat, while advancing from Moelkt to St. Polten, the fear of a reverse usurped the place of Napoleon’s former confidence of victory. Now, his agitation increasing with the noise of the firing, he despatched everybody for news: officers, aides de camp; every officer who happened to be near him. With his mind full of Mortier’s peril he suspended the progress of the invasion. He stopped Bernadotte and the flotilla behind at Moelkt. He recalled Murat, dashing on for the gates of Vienna; and Soult, following Murat. Not indeed until three on the next afternoon, the 12th of November, was Napoleon’s anxiety allayed by the arrival of an aide de camp from Mortier.”

[9] It was to one of these retreating columns that the historic “Ice Disaster” happened. Every one knows the story, as related in Napoleon’s Austerlitz Bulletin, and mentioned also by Ségur, Marbot, and Lejeune in their memoirs, how a column from the Russian left wing tried to escape over the frozen surface of the lake of Satschan, how Napoleon turned a battery on them while in the act of crossing the ice and broke it, and how “thousands of Russians, with their horses, guns, and waggons, were seen slowly settling down into the depths.” The actual facts are recorded in the recently discovered report of the “Fischmeister” (or overseer) of the Carp Fishery of Satschan Lake, setting forth the results of draining off the water in the spring of 1806. There were found at the bottom, recorded the Fischmeister, twenty-eight cannon, one hundred and fifty dead horses, but only three human corpses. The column, it would appear, had been composed of five batteries of artillery, and when the ice was broken, the guns, all but the two nearest the shore, sank through and dragged the horses with them to the bottom; but the gunners, it would seem, were all able to scramble out, except the three unfortunates who had been either hit by French round-shot, or were entangled in the harness of their teams. The loss of human life was therefore, presumably, only three men out of the five hundred or so who must have been riding on, or with, the guns.

[10] Incidentally, that Christmas Day morning of the Schönbrunn review has an interest for us in this country. Napoleon left the palace for the review in a vile temper, which no doubt was one reason why he vented his spleen so savagely on the unfortunate soldiers of the 4th in his speech of censure. This was probably the prime cause. Late on the night before, on Christmas Eve, a courier from Paris had arrived at the Imperial head-quarters, bringing the defeated Admiral Villeneuve’s Trafalgar despatch, his “Compte Rendu,” written while Villeneuve was a prisoner on his way to England, and dated from “A bord de la frégate Anglaise _Euryalus_--le 15me Novembre 1805.” It had been sent to France under a flag of truce, as an act of international courtesy, and the Minister of Marine forwarded it to Napoleon. The news of the disaster had reached the Emperor some five weeks before, at Znaim in Moravia, a fortnight before Austerlitz; first, from some Austrian officers taken prisoners by Augereau in the Tyrol, then from the English papers. It had been enough then to give him a bad night, and make him morose for a week. Now that he learned the story from his own admiral, it made him more furious than ever. The original despatch received by Napoleon at Schönbrunn that Christmas Eve exists, with its pathetic closing appeal, the pitiless response to which sent Admiral Villeneuve to a suicide’s grave. “Profondément pénétré,” it ran, as written by Villeneuve’s own hand, “de toute l’etendue de mon malheur et de toute la responsibilité que comporte un aussi grand désastre, je ne désire rien tant que d’être bientôt à même d’aller mettre aux pieds de S.M. ou la justification de ma conduite ou la victime qui doit être immolée, non a l’honneur du pavillon, qui, j’ose le dire, est demeuré intact, mais aux manes de ceaux qui auroient péri par mon imprudence, mon inconsidération ou l’oubli de quelqu’un de mes devoirs.”

[11] The spectacles which Marshal Davout wore at Auerstadt--an extremely primitive-looking pair of goggles in thick-rimmed frames--were picked up on the field, and are treasured to this day by the family of the present Duc d’Auerstadt.

[12] Gudin’s division was officially returned as having lost 124 officers and 3,500 men.

[13] Davout’s cocked hat, with one end shot away and a bullet-hole through the crown, is now one of the battle relics of Napoleon’s wars kept at the Invalides.

[14] In his instructions to Ney in regard to the trophies taken, Napoleon wrote this, specially with reference to a number of flags belonging to Prussian regiments elsewhere which had been temporarily stored at Magdeburg: “Les drapeaux prussiens pris dans l’arsenal de Magdeburg ne signifient rien: donnez l’ordre qu’ils soient brûlés, mais vous ferez porter en triomphe par votre premier division les drapeaux pris à la garnison, pour être remis par vous à Berlin à l’Empereur. On ne doit porter en triomphe que les drapeaux pris les armes à la main, et brûler ceux pris dans les arsenaux.”

[15] The _Moniteur_ made this notification in addition: “The Emperor has ordered a series of eight pictures, sixteen feet by ten, each, with life-size figures, from MM. Gérard, Lethière, Gautherot, Guérin, Hennequin, Girodet, Meynier, and Gros. The pictures are intended for the galleries of the Tuileries, and will depict the most memorable events of the campaign in Germany.” They are now in the Louvre, badly “skied,” and only paid heed to by the batches of recruits who from time to time are conducted round to see them under the guidance of under-officer instructors as lecturers.

[16] The hat that Napoleon wore at Eylau is kept in the little crypt beside Napoleon’s tomb in the Invalides. It is the identical one represented in the colossal picture of the battle by Gros, to be seen at the Louvre, and was given to Gros for the picture. At the second Funeral of Napoleon in 1840, it figured beside the coffin, with the Emperor’s decorations and the sword Napoleon wore at Austerlitz.

[17] A gallant young officer of the Guard was the first man to break through the Russian line in front. With half a dozen grenadiers he made a dash forward, just as the chasseurs made their attack. Captain Ernest Auzoni--that was the young officer’s name--caught sight of a Russian flag a few paces from him, and, calling on the men of his company, led straight at it, cutting his way through. “Courage!” he shouted. “Brave comrades! Follow me!” Auzoni, describes Caulaincourt, “rushed forward sword in hand, followed by his company, and penetrated the compact centre of the Russian column: his sudden assault broke their ranks, and our grenadiers burst in through the passage opened to them by the brave Auzoni.”

Napoleon, from his post near at hand, was also an eye-witness of the captain’s daring. On the Russians falling back after the routing of the column, as the Guard were re-forming for a fresh advance, he summoned Auzoni and the men of his company before him. “Captain Auzoni,” began Napoleon as they stood in front of him, “you well deserve the honour of commanding my ‘veteran’ _vieux moustaches_; you have most nobly distinguished yourself. You have won an officer’s cross and an annuity of two thousand francs. You were made captain at the beginning of the campaign, and I hope you will return to Paris with still higher rank. A man who earns his honours on the field of battle stands very high in my estimation!” Turning then to the soldiers, Napoleon added: “I award ten crosses to your company!” With an enthusiastic cheer the company marched off to rejoin their comrades, and as Caulaincourt puts it, “the same men advanced to meet the enemy’s fire with a degree of courage and enthusiasm which is impossible to describe.”

The brave young Guardsman captain, though, did not see Paris again. Auzoni met his fate at Eylau. He fell later in the day, in another charge, in which he took a second Russian flag. Napoleon himself discovered him, lying at the last gasp among the mortally wounded on the field. It was next day, as Napoleon, in accordance with his invariable practice, was riding over the scene of the battle.

“Near a battery which had been abandoned by the enemy,” to use again the words of Caulaincourt, “about 150 or 200 French grenadiers were lying dead, surrounded by four times their number of Russians. They were lying weltering in a river of blood, amid broken gun-carriages, muskets, swords, and other _débris_. They had plainly fought with the most determined fury, for every corpse showed numerous and horrible wounds. A feeble cry of ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ was heard as we rode up. It came from the middle of this mountain of dead, and all eyes were turned instantly to the spot whence the voice proceeded. Half concealed beneath a tattered flag lay a young officer whose breast was decorated with an order. He was still alive, and, though covered with many wounds, as we stopped by him he managed to raise himself so as to rest on his elbow. But his handsome face was overcast with the livid hue of death. He recognised the Emperor, and, in a feeble, faltering voice, exclaimed: ‘God bless your Majesty! Farewell, farewell! Oh, my poor mother!’ He turned a look of supplication towards the Emperor, and with that, with the words on his lips, ‘To my country, to dear France--my last thoughts!’ he fell back dead.

“Napoleon seemed riveted to the spot. ‘Brave men!’ he exclaimed. ‘Brave Auzoni! Noble young fellow! Ah, this is a frightful scene! The annuity shall go to his mother: let the order be presented for my signature as soon as possible!’ Then, turning to Surgeon Ivan, who accompanied him, he said: ‘Examine poor Auzoni’s wounds and see what can be done for him!’ Nothing however, could be done: the brave youth was beyond medical aid.”

[18] The Old Guard was recruited from the _élite_ of the Line. After every battle soldiers who had been particularly prominent in the fighting were specially transferred to the Old Guard; a form of advancement much coveted among the rank and file. At all times there was great competition to enter the Guard, and every regimental colonel kept “waiting lists,” in anticipation of vacancies, on which names were sometimes down for years. Service in the Old Guard meant, in addition to the prestige of enrolment in so favoured a corps, life amid the gaieties and pleasures of Paris, with increased pay and personal privileges; and the highly estimated honour of a special weekly inspection by the Emperor himself in the Courtyard of the Carrousel, at which Napoleon invariably walked in and out among the ranks, talking to the men; and any Guardsman who had a grievance might then personally lay it before the Emperor. The private in the Guard drew seven sous a day as compared with the one sou pay of the private of the Line. Off duty, the private of the Guard ranked on an equality with a sergeant of the Line, and in army social circles was entitled to be addressed by the Linesmen he met as “Monsieur.”

Only men of unblemished record were qualified for admission to the Old Guard. A colonel of a Line regiment on one occasion sent a man into the Guard who turned out a _mauvais sujet_. Napoleon ordered the unfortunate colonel to be publicly reprimanded on parade, and confined to his quarters for three days; and further had his name and offence put in General Army Orders, issued for universal circulation from the War Office, and posted up at the head-quarters of every regiment throughout the service.

[19] Baron Lejeune, on the Imperial staff at Wagram, who was clever with his pencil, was specially desired by Napoleon to design the costume for the Eagle-Guard, as he himself relates. “Anxious to confer distinction on those brave fellows who had taken part in the actual defence of the flag, the Eagle of their regiment, Napoleon conceived the idea of giving them a costume and equipment which should mark them out as specially honoured, and at the same time be suitable to the duties they had to perform. The Emperor therefore sent for me and asked me to make a sketch of a costume such as he wished to give to what he called his ‘Eagle-Guard,’ or those non-commissioned officers whose office it was to surround and defend the actual standard-bearers. The chief weapons of each were to be a pistol, a sword, and a lance, so that in the heat of the battle they would never have to trouble themselves about loading a gun. There was to be gold on their epaulettes, sword-belts, and helmets. I made a drawing and took it to the Emperor, and he sent it to the Minister of War with his own instructions on the subject.”

[20] Colonel Lejeune was again called in to design the decoration for the Order, and has recorded what Napoleon said to him. “‘The Order of the Golden Fleece,’ he said, ‘is typical of victory; my Eagles have triumphed over the Golden Fleeces of the King of Spain and the Emperors of Germany, so I mean to create for the French Empire an Imperial Order of the Three Golden Fleeces. The sign of this order shall be my own Eagle with outspread wings, holding in each of its talons one of the ancient Golden Fleeces it has carried off; whilst hanging from its beak it will proudly display the Fleece I now institute.’ He then took a pen and roughly marked out the size I was to make my drawing.... I made the drawings as desired, and he issued the order accordingly. The institution of the new Order was duly announced in the _Moniteur_; but the terms of the treaty of peace compelled him to suppress a distinction the chief aim of which had been to humiliate the conquered countries of Spain and Austria.”

[21] They were to be merely identifying tokens. “If by misfortune,” Napoleon went so far as to say, “fanions should fall into the enemy’s hands, it will be apparent from their plain appearance that their capture is a matter of no account.” “Une affaire sans conséquence” were Napoleon’s words.

[22] It was during the battle at Ratisbon that Napoleon, according to the story, was wounded for the only time in his life, and had to dismount, and, in the sight of the dismayed soldiers, have his wound dressed by a surgeon, the news causing consternation through the ranks of the whole army far and wide. Indeed, only this year there was placed in the Army Museum at the Invalides, as an historic relic of the highest interest, “the fragment of a shell that struck Napoleon at Ratisbon on the 23rd of April, 1809, and gave him the only wound he ever received in battle.” The truth is revealed in M. Combes’ journal, which, after telling how Napoleon carefully concealed everything which might detract from his reputation among his soldiers for invulnerability, enumerates his wounds in detail. After his death half a dozen scars were found on his body. There was the mark of a wound on his head, a hole above his left knee, either from a bayonet or a lance, the mark of the injury received at Ratisbon, another on one hand, and on the body the scars of sword cuts and slashes.

[23] As to this last trophy, it was unfortunate from our point of view--since Fate willed that the 5th of the Line should lose its colours to an enemy--that one of the original Battalion Eagles of the corps had previously, in accordance with Napoleon’s order of 1808, been returned to Paris. The half-winged Eagle of the 5th would have made a notable trophy for Chelsea Hospital. While heading an attack on an Austrian field-work in Masséna’s battle at Caldiero on the Venetian frontier in November 1805, the Eagle was smashed from its staff by a grape-shot and dashed violently to the ground, with one wing shattered. At the same time the battalion recoiled before the terrific fire with which its charge was met. The Eagle saved the honour of the corps. Picking its battered remains up and waving it at arm’s-length above his head, with a shout of “Come on, comrades! follow the Eagle,” one of the officers rushed with it through the _mêlée_ to the front and led the forlorn-hope onset that stormed the post. After that, the Eagle, lashed to the stump of its broken pole, went through the battle to the end, doing its part in rallying the battalion round it, to keep at bay greatly superior numbers of the enemy until relief arrived. There had been almost a mutiny in the 5th in 1808 when they were ordered to return their battle-scarred ensign to the Invalides, but the order was obeyed. Otherwise the half-winged Eagle would have been at Chelsea now.

[24] The present imitation Eagle at Chelsea was specially cast in brass from a mould of one of other trophies; one of the Eagles of the 82nd being used as the model. The imitation wreath was made from a sketch by an old officer of the Hospital staff. The Eagle and wreath were specially reproduced in order that the Barrosa Eagle trophy should be represented among the Peninsular and Waterloo Eagles displayed together at the head of the catafalque on the occasion of the lying-in-state at Chelsea of the remains of the Duke of Wellington, seven months after the theft. The dummy is in the Chapel at Chelsea now, with a brass tablet beneath it notifying that it is not the original Eagle, set up where the Barrosa Eagle used to be, in front of the organ-loft. The existing staff, however, is genuine. It is the Eagle-pole that the thief threw away in his fright; the staff actually borne by the Porte-Aigle of Napoleon’s 8th of the Line under fire at Austerlitz and Friedland; the identical staff inclined in salute with the Eagle to Napoleon on the throne on the Day of the Eagles on the Field of Mars.

[25] In a letter from an officer of the 87th, published in the London papers, it is stated that the regiment also captured the Eagle of the French 47th, but “the man who had charge of it was obliged to throw it away, from excessive fatigue and a wound. We had been under arms for thirty-two hours before the action began.”

[26] The successor to the 8th of the Line of the Grand Army in the Army of the Third Napoleon was, in its turn, no less unfortunate than its predecessor. The Eagle of the 8th of the Line of the Army of the Second Empire is now at Potsdam, one of the spoils of the war of 1870–1. It was carried through the streets of Berlin in the triumphal parade of the Prussian troops on their return home after the war, and after that, was deposited over the vault of Frederick the Great in the Church at Potsdam in the presence of the old Kaiser Wilhelm, Moltke, Von Roon, and other leaders of the victorious host. It bears these “battle-honours,” inscribed on its silken flag, among them “Talavera”:

“AUSTERLITZ
1805.
FRIEDLAND
1807.
TALAVERA
1809.
ANVERS
1832.
ZAATCHA
1849.
SOLFERINO
1859.”

[27] Southey, in his _History of the Peninsular War_, makes this ugly suggestion in regard to the Eagle trophies of Salamanca: “It is said that more than _ten_ were captured, but that there were men base enough to conceal them and sell them to persons in Salamanca who deemed it good policy, as well as a profitable speculation, to purchase them for the French.” It may be, as to that, that Marmont’s army lost more than the two Eagles now at Chelsea. It is of course possible that camp followers and Spanish peasants of the locality, wandering over the battlefield to strip and plunder the dead on the day after the battle, when Wellington and the army were miles away, picked up Eagles on the scene of so tremendous a disaster for the French. They might easily traffic in them with French agents at Salamanca, well aware of their value if they could be secretly restored to their regiments. It is, however, inconceivable that British soldiers could have acted as alleged and been guilty of the dastardly crime that Southey hints at. Four Eagle-poles, with screw tops and the Eagles gone, were found on the field by British burying-parties; but those were all, and one of the four may have been the pole of the Eagle of the 62nd.

[28] As to Napoleon’s opinion in regard to the preservation of trophies so acquired, see his memo to Ney at Magdeburg, quoted in Chapter V., as footnote to page 141.

[29] Napoleon had given permission to his marshals in Spain to grant colonels of regiments, in certain circumstances, discretionary powers as to the disposal of their Eagles. Colonels were authorised, when their regiments were proceeding on what might be considered “exceptionally hazardous service,” or when operating in difficult country, to keep the Eagles back, and leave them in camp or in a fortress. That is how Wellington in 1812 came to find the Eagles of the 13th and 51st of the Line at Madrid.

[30] On July 28, 1813, in a skirmish in the Pyrenees, the 40th (now the 2nd Somersetshire Regiment) surrounded and captured the French 32nd of the Line, rounding its First Battalion up in a valley and charging it with the bayonet, 24 officers and 700 men being taken. The Eagle had been thrown into a rapid mountain torrent in sight of our men, during the retreat of the 32nd, but it was impossible to prevent it, or to recover the Eagle afterwards.

[31] Others of the Eagles had narrow escapes during the Peninsular War. In the fighting south of the Douro, near Grijon, on the day before Wellington’s passage of the river at Oporto, the 31st Light Infantry all but lost their Eagle on being charged by the British 14th and 20th Light Dragoons. The 31st broke in confusion before the British onset, and only rallied some miles from the battlefield. “Our losses,” described one of the officers, “were very heavy, but our Eagle, which had been in extreme peril in the encounter, was happily saved.” Again, in the pursuit up the mountain side after the defeat of Girard’s Division at Arroyo dos Molinos, the Eagles of the 34th and 40th of the Line escaped capture--although both regiments were all but annihilated--to Marshal Soult’s expressed relief. In reporting the reverse to Napoleon, Soult added this by way of solatium: “L’honneur des armes est sauvé; les Aigles ne sont pas tombés au pouvoir de l’ennemi.” After Talavera, the Eagle of the 25th of the Line was picked up on the battlefield by a party of the King’s German Legion--it was sent to Hanover and is now in Berlin; also, during the battle, the British 29th took two Eagle-poles in a charge, but with the Eagles unscrewed from the tops and removed by the Eagle-bearers at the last moment and carried out of the fight under their coats.

[32] Elsewhere are other permanent trophies of the campaign, spoils of another kind. Nine hundred and twenty-nine of Napoleon’s cannon fell into Russian hands, mostly abandoned during the retreat, without attempt at defence. Of these, most are fittingly kept at Moscow; they number 875, and are exhibited in the arsenal, or mounted as trophies in the public squares in the Holy City. As with the flags, they are not all French. Those bearing the French Imperial cypher, the letter “N” surmounted by the Eagle and Napoleonic crown, number less than a half of the total. The French guns number 365; the bulk of the collection being made up of artillery from allied and vassal states: 189 Austrian cannon, 123 Prussian, 70 Italian, 40 Neapolitan, 34 Bavarian, 22 Dutch, 12 Saxon, 8 Spanish, 5 Polish, with 7 Westphalian, Würtemburg, and Hanoverian pieces. The Prussian and Austrian guns, most of them, it is fair to say, were not captured from the contingents serving with the Grand Army in Russia: they formed part of the artillery marching with Napoleon’s main column; they belonged to the French army, and were manned by French gunners, being spoils from the Austerlitz, Wagram, and Jena campaigns, turned to account to form field batteries for the French army. Innumerable other reminders of the fate of the Grand Army are preserved all over Russia: soldiers’ arms and accoutrements, personal belongings and decorations of French officers and men, fragments of uniforms, helmets, swords and lances, pistols and muskets; relics mostly picked up on battlefields or by the wayside along the route of the retreat. The muskets serve to illustrate incidentally, in the variety of the woods used for their stocks, the makeshifts to which, some time before 1812, the demands of Napoleon’s armaments had reduced France: the musket-stocks of oak, chestnut, elm, beech, maple, of even poplar and deal, tell a tale of exhausted supplies of the walnut and ash woods ordinarily used in the manufacture of firearms.

The total of 75 Eagles and other standards is no extravagantly large array of trophies, remembering the overwhelming nature of the catastrophe to the Grand Army in Russia. Of the 600,000 soldiers who mustered round their regimental colours at the crossing of the Niemen at the outset of the campaign, 125,000 were killed in fight, and 193,048, according to the Russian official returns, were taken prisoners. In round numbers 250,000 died on the line of march during the retreat, from cold, hardships, and starvation, or were killed as stragglers by the Cossacks and peasants. The mementoes also of their grim fate exist to-day in Russia. The graves of most of them may be seen all along the railway line from Wilna to Moscow, which follows closely the route of Napoleon and the Grand Army, over country the same in appearance now as then; a dreary, wind-swept, lonesome plain, broken only by vast stretches of dark, monotonous birch and pine forests, with here and there narrow ravines, and strips of hilly ground, amid which wind chill and sluggish rivers. At intervals huge mounds, looking like embankments or ancient barrows of enormous size, rise over the flat expanse of plain. They are the graves of the French dead. It took three months to destroy the remains of the dead soldiers and of some 150,000 horses which perished in the campaign. The ghastly task was carried out locally by the peasantry, under an urgent Government order, so as to prevent the outbreak of pestilence in the spring from the vast numbers of unburied corpses that strewed the track of the ill-fated host. The bodies, when the snow thawed, were dragged together and collected in heaps each “half a verst long and two fathoms high,” over 500 yards long and some 14 feet high. At first, efforts were made to burn them, but the supply of firewood failed, and the stench all over the country was unbearable. The corpses were then hauled into shallow trenches alongside, and quicklime and earth heaped over them, making the mounds now to be seen along the railway, on either side of the old post-road from Wilna to Moscow, the route of Napoleon’s retreat. In the province of Moscow, 50,000 dead soldiers and 29,000 dead horses were so disposed of before the middle of February; in the province of Smolensk, by the end of the month, 72,000 dead soldiers and 52,000 horses; in the province of Minsk, 40,000 human corpses and 28,000 horses; to which, later on, when the ice had melted, 12,000 more dead soldiers were added, the bodies found in the Beresina; in the province of Wilna, also by the end of February, 73,000 dead soldiers, with 10,000 dead horses. There were, in addition, very many never accounted for: dead stragglers who had perished in the forests, their remains being devoured by the wolves; and those who were massacred--beaten to death, or buried alive, or burned alive--by the peasants in places away from the line of march. Such was the appalling loss of life that attended the Moscow campaign, and which the trophies represent. In the circumstances, in proportion, the toll is hardly a large one.

[33] The wolves killed many of the stragglers as they wandered in search of food or shelter from the cold, away from the retreating columns. They followed in the track of the Grand Army to the last, across Germany to the Rhine. It is the fact, indeed, that the presence of wolves to-day in the forest lands of Central Europe is largely due to the tremendous incursion of ravenous brutes from Russia which swept in huge swarms in rear of Napoleon’s ill-fated host.

[34] Coignet, then a lieutenant of the Old Guard, thus speaks of the horrors of those latter days immediately following the Beresina: “The cold continued to grow more intense; the horses in the bivouacs died of hunger and cold. Every day some were left where we had passed the night. The roads were like glass. The horses fell down, and could not get up. Our worn-out soldiers no longer had strength to carry their arms. The barrels of their guns were so cold that they stuck to their hands. It was twenty-eight degrees below zero. But the Guard gave up their knapsacks and guns only with their lives. In order to save our lives, we had to eat the horses that fell upon the ice. The soldiers opened the skin with their knives, and took out the entrails, which they roasted on the coals, if they had time to make a fire; and, if not, they ate them raw. They devoured the horses before they died. I also ate this food as long as the horses lasted. As far as Wilna we travelled by short stages with the Emperor. His whole staff marched along the sides of the road. The men of the demoralised army marched along like prisoners, without arms and without knapsacks. There was no longer any discipline or any human feeling for one another. Each man looked out for himself. Every sentiment of humanity was extinguished. No one would have reached out his hand to his father; and that can easily be understood. For he who stooped down to help his fellow would not be able to rise again. We had to march right on, making faces to prevent our noses and ears from freezing. The men became insensible to every human feeling. No one even murmured against our misfortunes. The men fell, frozen stiff, all along the road. If, by chance, any of them came upon a bivouac of other unfortunate creatures who were thawing themselves, the newcomers pitilessly pushed them aside, and took possession of their fire. The poor creatures would then lie down to die upon the snow. One must have seen these horrors in order to believe them.... But it was at Wilna that we suffered most. The weather was so severe that the men could no longer endure it: even the ravens froze.”

[35] One of those who presented arms before Napoleon at the Rheims review died, just twenty years ago, as the last French survivor of Trafalgar--André Manuel Cartigny. At Trafalgar he had been a powder-boy on board the celebrated _Redoutable_, from the mizen-top of which the bullet was fired which killed Nelson. He paraded at Rheims among the remnant of survivors of Napoleon’s last battalion left of the Seamen of the Guard, and was present a month later at the historic farewell at Fontainebleau.

[36] General Dupont, an officer of the highest promise and with an exceptionally brilliant record, Ney’s right-hand man, and chief divisional leader on many battlefields, a special favourite also with Napoleon (“a man I loved and was rearing up to be a marshal,” were Napoleon’s words of him), while on the expedition which was to win him the bâton, at the head of 25,000 men, let himself be surrounded and cut off; trapped among the gorges of the Sierra Morena by a horde of peasants backed up by Spanish regulars; and then, in spite of a final chance that offered for him to force his way through, surrendered to the enemy. He had committed “_une chose sans exculpe; une lacheté insultante_,” declared Napoleon in savage fury on hearing of the surrender. Those who had had part in it, declared the Emperor, should “die on the scaffold”--“ils porteront sur l’échaffaud la peine de ce grand crime national!” He had Brigadier Legendre, Dupont’s Chief of the Staff, who had been released on parole, brought before him at Valladolid, and heaped on the wretched, broken man the bitterest reproaches and revilings; beside himself in his wrath. Not a word in reply, in explanation, would he listen to. Before the Imperial Guard on parade, and the assembled Imperial Staff, Napoleon finally gripped the general by the wrist and shook it passionately. An onlooker, another officer, describes the scene: “A nervous contraction of the muscles seemed to seize the Emperor. ‘What, General!’ he ejaculated, his voice quivering with fury. ‘Why did not your hand wither when it signed that infamous capitulation!’” Legendre was cashiered: Dupont (who had been ill and was wounded during the battle) was cashiered, degraded from the Legion of Honour, and kept under police _surveillance_ as long as the Empire lasted.