“THE EAGLE WITH THE GOLDEN WREATH” IN LONDON
There are thirteen of Napoleon’s Eagles in England, among the trophies
of the British Army at Chelsea Royal Hospital; or, to speak strictly,
twelve Eagles and a “dummy” Eagle, the later reproduction of a very
famous trophy, gone now, unfortunately, to the melting-pot of a
thieves’ kitchen. It is with the dummy Eagle, as it may be called
for short, without disrespect to its gallant custodians, and five of
the twelve Eagles at Chelsea, that we are for the immediate moment
concerned. That represents the first of Napoleon’s trophies won by
British soldiers in hand-to-hand fight--the once celebrated “Eagle with
the Golden Wreath.”
The story opens on Saturday morning, May 18, 1811, a day that was a
great occasion for Londoners. For the first time, on that Saturday,
trophies taken from Napoleon were publicly displayed in the British
Capital, and no pains were spared to make the most of the event. An
elaborate and dramatic ceremonial was ordained for the occasion by the
authorities at the instance of the Prince Regent. It was like nothing
else of the kind ever witnessed or heard of in England before.
[Sidenote: WHAT LONDON HAD SEEN BEFORE]
On many another day in bygone times London had been the scene of
stately martial pageants in which the victor’s spoils from many
battlefields were borne in triumph, amid blare of trumpets and
clash of drums, to be deposited with due ceremony in their allotted
resting-places. So had it been when the Marlborough trophies from
Blenheim and Ramillies, the captured flags from Dettingen, Louisburg,
and Minden, were borne along the crowded streets, preceded by bands
playing triumphant music and accompanied by armed escorts of Foot and
Horse. Another Saturday, seventeen years before, May 17, 1794, had been
the last occasion of trophy-flags being displayed in London, when the
captured French Republican standards of the garrison of Martinique were
publicly carried through the streets by Life Guards and Grenadiers,
with the band of the First Guards leading the way and the Tower guns
booming out an artillery _feu de joie_, from St. James’s Palace to St.
Paul’s, to be received at the great west doors of the Cathedral by the
Dean and Chapter, and laid up “as a lasting memorial of the success of
his Majesty’s Arms.” Some of the flags then displayed hang in the Hall
of Chelsea Hospital to-day.
So, too, had it been in London in yet earlier times, in the far off,
unhappy days of Civil War in England, when the citizens of those
periods, in turn, saw the spoils of Bosworth, and of Marston Moor and
Naseby, of Worcester, Preston, and Dunbar, paraded through their midst,
escorted by mail-clad men-at-arms, on the way to be hung up exultingly
in St. Paul’s Cathedral or in Westminster Hall. With his own Royal
banners from Marston Moor and Naseby drooping down overhead from the
roof of Westminster Hall, Charles the First faced his judges and heard
his fate. But never before in London had so elaborately designed a
ceremony attended the display of trophies taken from any enemy, as that
planned for the _Royal Depositum_, as it was officially styled, of the
first of the captured Eagles of Napoleon to be received in England.
There was to be a special display of trophies the London newspapers
announced some days beforehand. The newspapers had not spared
themselves in working up public interest. At the outset they had told
how, on the night of March 24, Captain Hope, First A.D.C. to General
Graham, had arrived in London with the Barrosa despatches and a “French
Eagle with a wreath of gold,” which, it was stated, “the general
trusted his aide de camp might be permitted to lay at his Majesty’s
feet.” Then Londoners were informed that the Barrosa Eagle was a trophy
of unusual importance, and was being kept at the War Office, to be
presented to the Prince Regent at the next _levée_. It was announced a
week later that his Royal Highness had been so desirous of seeing it at
once, that the War Minister, the Earl of Liverpool, instead of waiting
five weeks for the _levée_, had already presented it to the Prince at
Carlton House. On that came the official notification that “the Eagle
with the Golden Wreath,” as the trophy was everywhere styled, together
with a number of other French trophies, which had been previously
received and had been some time stored away at the War Office
pending instructions as to their disposal, would be deposited in the
Chapel Royal, Whitehall, (now the Museum of the Royal United Service
Institution). “The _Royal Depositum_ ceremony will be very grand, and
the martial music appropriate to the occasion, and as the orders have
been issued by direction of his Royal Highness the Prince Regent,
the Chapel will be thronged with nobility.” So one journal notified;
another remarking that “in addition to the great religious and military
ceremony, an anthem is to be performed after the manner of the Te Deum.”
[Sidenote: A GRAND MARTIAL CEREMONY]
Thus popular interest was aroused and kept alive in advance, and the
selected Saturday morning proving fine and pleasant, with the prospect
of a genial and sunny forenoon, Londoners turned out in large numbers
to see the show.
To the Brigade of Guards it fell to carry out the ceremony of the
military reception of the Eagles.
The “Parade in St. James’s Park,” which we know now as the Horse
Guards Parade, was the appointed place for the display, and as the
clock struck nine the preliminaries opened with the arrival of a large
body of Guards’ recruits who were to keep the ground. From quite an
early hour a crowd had been gathering there and along the side of the
Park. Soon afterwards the first of the troops designated to attend the
ceremony began to arrive. These were several companies of the First
Guards and Coldstreamers “in undress, with side arms.” They formed line
along either side of the parade-ground; on one side “extending from
the corner of the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s garden to the Egyptian
gun”; on the opposite side, “from the Admiralty towards the Park.”
To right and left of the archway under the Horse Guards leading to
Whitehall were drawn up the “recruiting parties stationed in the Home
District.”
At a quarter to ten came on the scene the first of the actors in
the day’s proceedings, the “King’s Guard” of the day, “in their
best uniforms, and with sprigs of oak and laurel in their hats.”
Marching up, headed by the combined bands of the First Guards and the
Coldstreamers, with the regimental colour of the First Guards, they
formed on the right, along the open side of the square, facing towards
the Horse Guards. Following them, a few moments later, came the picked
detachment appointed as the “trophy-escort,” furnished jointly by the
grenadier companies of the First Guards and the Coldstreamers. All
were in review-order full dress, “wearing long white gaiters, with oak
and laurel leaves in their hats.” A captain of the First Guards was
in command; and the detachment was made up of two subalterns, four
sergeants, and ninety-six rank and file. They took post on the left
of the King’s Guard. As the trophy-escort halted, up came another
detachment of Guards, a hundred strong, with the Life Guards; marching
across the square and through the Horse Guards archway to line the way
thence to the doors of the Chapel Royal.
[Sidenote: GETTING READY FOR THE PRINCES]
Towards ten o’clock privileged spectators were admitted within the
square, “to stand at an appointed spot”: several veteran generals, “in
their best uniforms and powdered,” as a newspaper reporter remarks;
Lord Liverpool the War Minister; the Earl Marshal; the Speaker; the
Spanish and Portuguese Ambassadors, both gorgeously attired; and “a
number of beautiful and elegant ladies of distinction.”
The Horse Guards clock struck ten, and as the last clanging stroke died
away “the authorities” came clattering on to the ground on horseback:
Sir David Dundas, Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Governor of
Chelsea Hospital, at the head of a number of other plumed and
cocked-hatted generals in full uniform, together with the Head-quarters
Staff at the Horse Guards. Prominent in the glittering array of
gold-laced red coats, “mounted on a cream-coloured Arab,” was General
Sir John Doyle, Colonel of the 87th Royal Irish Fusiliers; the regiment
whose prowess at Barrosa had won the great trophy of the day--“the
Eagle with the Golden Wreath.”
With Royal punctuality, as the clock chimed the half-hour, amid cheers
from the crowd and the spectators filling the windows of the Horse
Guards and Admiralty and other Government offices overlooking the
ground, came riding up the three Princes who were to preside at the
ceremony--the Dukes of York, Cambridge, and Gloucester.
The display began forthwith.
Preceded by the two Guards’ bands playing the “Grenadiers’ March,”
the trophy-escort of grenadiers crossed the Parade at a slow step,
and marched in four divisions, or “platoons,” to the old Tilt Yard
orderly-room under the Horse Guards. There the trophies had been taken
beforehand to be in readiness for the ceremony. The grenadiers halted
before the doors, and the trophies, twelve in number, were brought
out by Lifeguardsmen from the Tilt Yard Guard and committed to the
charge of twelve picked sergeants--six of the First Guards, six of the
Coldstreamers--selected to bear them to the Chapel Royal.
[Sidenote: THE CAPTURED EAGLES TAKE POST]
The trophy-bearers carrying the Eagles then took post according to the
date of the capture of each trophy; the earliest taken of the Eagles
leading. In advance of all, immediately after the band, marched the
three officers with swords drawn; the captain and the two subalterns.
Then, with their flanking grenadiers as escort, a file to each trophy,
came, one after the other, three Battalion Eagles of Napoleon’s 82nd
of the Line, surrendered at the capitulation of Martinique in 1809.
Immediately in rear marched No. 1 platoon of grenadiers; in the
interval between the first trophy-group and the second. That consisted
of the Regimental Eagle of the French 26th of the Line, surrendered at
Martinique at the same time as the Eagles of the 82nd, and then that
of the 66th of the Line, surrendered at the capitulation of Guadaloupe
in 1810, with, just behind them, the all-important trophy of the day,
the first Napoleonic Eagle captured--or, at any rate, taken possession
of--by British soldiers on the battlefield: “the Eagle with the Golden
Wreath”--that Eagle of Napoleon’s 8th Regiment of the Line, won in
hand-to-hand fight by the 87th Royal Irish Fusiliers at Barrosa.
Five of the Eagles had their silken tricolor flags still attached to
the poles. The Barrosa Eagle had none: it showed simply a bare pole
topped by the wreathed Eagle. The wreath, according to a newspaper
reporter present, was “an honour conferred on the regiment for fine
conduct at the battle of Talavera, where they were opposed to the 87th;
and, by a singular coincidence of circumstances, these regiments met in
conflict at Barrosa and recognised each other.” As we shall see, the
statement was a freak of journalistic imagination, without a scrap of
fact behind the story, although, strangely, the legend holds to this
day and reappears periodically in print. Adds the reporter, as to the
appearance of the Eagle, recording this time what he actually saw: “The
Eagle is fixed on a square pedestal, and standing erect on one foot;
the other raised as if grasping something; its wings expanded. It is
about the size of a small pigeon, and appears to be made of bronze, or
of some composition like pinchbeck, gold-gilt.” The “something” which
the talons of the Eagle appeared to be grasping was the “thunderbolt,”
which was missing, having been either knocked out of its place in the
scuffle on the battlefield, or stolen later by somebody for a relic.
The wreath was really of gold. A couple of its leaves picked up on
the field after the battle and given to Major Hugh Gough, the gallant
commander of the 87th at Barrosa, are now in possession of one of that
officer’s descendants.
[Illustration: Plan of the Battle of BARROSA]
The second grenadier platoon divided the Eagles from the first three of
the flag-trophies, borne in file, one by one, in the same way as the
Eagles. The first in date of capture led; a French Republican standard
taken in fight at Sir Ralph Abercombie’s victory at Alexandria, ten
years before, and kept ever since at the War Office: “the Invincible’s
standard.” “As it is falsely called,” adds the reporter; right for
once. “So tattered is it,” he continues, “that the mottoes are
not legible; a bugle in the centre was the only figure we could
distinguish.” Two flags taken by Wellington’s men in the Peninsula
accompanied the Alexandria flag: “a Fort Standard,” as it is described,
and the battalion colour, or “fanion,” of the Second Battalion of
Napoleon’s 5th of the Line.[23]
[Sidenote: THE TROPHY FLAGS PARADED]
In rear of the colour of the 5th marched the third grenadier platoon,
and the last three trophies sent to England by Wellington. Two were
a pair of tattered German standards, the flags of the two battalions
of a Prussian regiment in Napoleon’s service, composed of unfortunate
soldiers levied compulsorily during the French occupation of their
country, and tramped off to Spain to meet their fate under British
bullets. Each flag bore the legend “L’Empereur des Français au Régiment
Prussien” on one side, and “Valeur et Discipline” on the other, and was
mounted on a staff with a steel pike-head instead of an Eagle. They
were silken flags of the ordinary Napoleonic pattern. The third flag
of the group was that of a “provisional regiment”; also with a steel
pike-head to its staff.
From the Tilt Yard orderly-room the trophies and their escort-guard
set off, as before, in slow time, the bands playing “God save the
King!” The sergeants, carrying the Eagles and Flags between the files
of grenadiers, marched in the intervals between the four divisions “in
double open-order with arms advanced.” Right round the square they now
passed, close along the lines of the troops drawn up, “the immense
multitude rending the air with huzzas.” In front of the First Guards,
in front of the recruiting parties, in front of the long line of
Coldstreamers, along each of the three sides of the square, paced the
procession with martial pomp to the stately music of the two bands as
they led the way. Then it proceeded along the fourth side of the square
until it came face to face with the King’s Guard, all standing with
ordered arms, not at the present.
There was a brief pause in front of the Colour of the King’s Guard.
That was the supreme moment of the display. Now took place the formal
act of obeisance to the victors; the formal act of abasement and
humiliation for the vanquished. Amid redoubled cheering from all sides,
the Eagles and the other flags were, one and all, formally dipped and
prostrated. “The captured standards saluted and were lowered to the
ground in token of submission.”
[Sidenote: PROSTRATED IN THE DUST]
The procession turned away in front of the King’s Guard and led round
in front of the three Royal Dukes, seated on their chargers, a little
in advance of the Commander-in-Chief and Horse Guards Staff, at the
centre of the parade-ground. Again, as they now passed before the Royal
trio, the hapless Eagles of Napoleon and the other French flags in turn
were one by one made to pay homage, bowed grovelling to the dust; the
crowd of onlookers shouting themselves hoarse “with,” as we are told,
“truly British huzzas.”
After that the trophy procession marched across to the Horse Guards
archway, and through to Whitehall and the Chapel Royal; between Life
Guards on one side and more Foot Guards on the other, drawn up to keep
a lane open through the immense crowd of people who had gathered there,
and thronged the wide roadway. “The procession,” says our reporter,
“moved off the Parade amid the acclamations of many thousand spectators
and entered the Chapel as the clock was striking eleven, which [_sic_]
was crowded by all the beauty and fashion in Town.” Another reporter
speaks of the Chapel Royal as being “exceedingly crowded in all parts
with nobility and gentlemen and ladies of distinction.”
“The religious part of the ceremony,” we are told, “was solemn and
impressive.” It comprised Morning Prayer and a sermon by the Sub-Dean.
“Previous to the commencement of the Te Deum, a pause was made, when
three grenadier sergeants entered at each door by the sides of the
Altar with the Eagles on black poles about 8 feet high. They took
their stations in front of the Altar. Each party was guarded by a
file of grenadiers, commanded by two officers; the whole of them with
laurel-leaves in their caps as emblems of Victory. At the same instant
the five French flags and Bonaparte’s honourable standard entered
the upper gallery at the back of the Altar, all carried by grenadier
sergeants.
“The whole remained presented for some time for the gratification of
the beholders, after which the Eagles were placed in brass sockets on
each side of the Altar, suspended by brass chains. The five flags
were suspended from the front of the second gallery, and Bonaparte’s
honourable standard placed over the door of the second gallery, behind
the others.”
The trophies, with others won at Salamanca and Waterloo, and
subsequently laid up in the Chapel Royal, were removed later to Chelsea
Royal Hospital, where all, except “the Eagle with the Golden Wreath,”
are now kept treasured amid befitting surroundings.
[Sidenote: STOLEN FROM CHELSEA AT MIDDAY]
“The Eagle with the Golden Wreath” disappeared from Chelsea Hospital
in broad daylight. It was displayed in the Chapel, affixed in front of
the organ-loft over the doorway, until it suddenly vanished from there
a little after midday on Friday, April 16, 1852, in the absence of the
pensioner-custodian of the Chapel during the Hospital dinner-hour. How
it was stolen was apparent; but the thief was never traced. The thief,
attracted undoubtedly by the widely told story that the wreath was of
gold, made his way into the Chapel by the roof, which was undergoing
repairs at the time, to which he got access by a workman’s ladder. He
got inside by the trap-door on the leads above the organ-loft. There,
with a saw, he cut through the Eagle-pole near where it was fastened
to the organ-loft, and, secreting it under his coat, made his escape
by the way he had come, unseen by anybody. The Eagle-pole was found
outside, in front of the building, with the Eagle and wreath wrenched
off. For some reason the Royal Hospital authorities of the day offered
a reward of only a sovereign, and though the London police did their
best, the malefactor was never discovered.[24]
At Barrosa Napoleon’s 8th of the Line was in the French column that
made its attack on the right. It was one of the regiments that charged
forward across the plain at the foot of Barrosa ridge, to break through
General Graham’s second brigade and drive it back to the edge of the
cliffs by the seashore, while the French left attack seized the ridge
itself, and beat back the British first brigade in the act of hastening
to regain that unwisely abandoned position. The Eagle went down in the
fierce counter-attack with which Graham’s men on the plain, the 87th
Royal Irish Fusiliers in the front line, met the French onset.
[Sidenote: “IMPOSSIBLE TO STOP THEM”]
What befell the 8th of the Line is told by one of their own officers in
his _Journal de Guerre_--Lieutenant-Colonel Vigo-Roussillon, in command
of the First Battalion, with which was the Eagle.
Just before the critical moment, says Colonel Roussillon, the 8th,
who were on the flank of the French second line, lost touch with
the regiment next them, and had in consequence to meet the 87th by
themselves. They fired their hardest as the British troops came on,
“but could not stop them, ever advancing to a bayonet attack.”
They came on silently, steadily, irresistibly. “Their officers,” adds
one of Victor’s staff, “kept up all the time the old custom of striking
with their canes those of the men who fell out of the ranks. Our own
non-commissioned officers,” he adds, “placed as a supernumerary rank,
crossed their muskets behind the squads, thus forming buttresses which
kept the ranks from giving way. Several of the French officers, also,
picked up the muskets of the wounded, and flung themselves into the
gaps made in the ranks of the men.”
“I saw the English line,” describes Colonel Roussillon again, “at sixty
paces continuing to advance at a slow step without firing. It seemed
impossible to stop them; we had not sufficient men.”
Apparently he then caught sight of General Graham, leading the British
line.
“Under the influence of a sort of despair, I urged forward my charger,
a strong Polish horse, against an English mounted officer who seemed
to be the colonel of the nearest regiment coming on at us. I got up to
him, and was about to run him through with my sword, when I was held
back by a sense of compassion and abandoned the murderous thought. He
was an officer with white hair and a fine figure, and had his hat in
his hand, and was cheering on his men. His calmness and noble air of
dignity irresistibly arrested my arm.”
Such is the lieutenant-colonel’s own account. But did he really get
quite close to the general? Graham was the last man in the world to let
him get back unfought!
“I then,” as Vigo-Roussillon continues, “quickly galloped back to my
own men, and was riding along the line, telling them to meet the enemy
with our bayonets, and drive them back, when a bullet from an English
marksman broke my right leg.
“I managed to dismount and tried to pass through in rear of the line,
but it was impossible to walk. The ground was covered with thick
bushes, and I was crippled and in great pain. All I could do was to sit
down where I was, calling on the men to fire again. A moment later I
was enveloped in smoke; and at the same instant the English charged in
among us.
“I called out my loudest, cheering on my men; and now two soldiers
tried to lift me up and carry me. But both were shot down.
“For the time we held our own, and kept the enemy back; but some of the
English got round us. Seeing themselves outflanked, the battalion began
to give ground. Then came a second furious charge from the English, and
that broke us.”
[Sidenote: “FIGHTING WITH THEIR FISTS”]
The fight, man to man, went on desperately for several minutes--some of
the British soldiers, as yet another French officers relates, fighting
with their fists. “Many of the Englishmen broke their weapons in
striking with the butts or bayonets; but they never seemed to think of
using the swords they wore at their sides. They went on fighting with
their fists.”
It was in the final _mêlée_ that “the Eagle with the Golden Wreath” was
taken; after a sharp and fierce hand-to-hand fight round it.
Colonel Roussillon himself was at almost the same moment struck
down, and lay insensible for a space among the dead near by. He was
recovering his senses and trying to stand up, when, as he tells, a
British sergeant saw him and ran at him with his halberd. He parried
the thrust, and kept the sergeant off, and then a British officer came
up. To him the Commandant of the First Battalion of the 8th surrendered
his sword.
The fight for the Eagle--on one hand to take it, on the other to keep
it--was furious; desperately and heroically contested by both sides.
First, a gallant Irish boy, from Kilkenny, Ensign Edward Keogh of the
87th, caught sight of it, borne on high above the fray. There had been
no unscrewing of the Eagle of the 8th, no trying to break it from its
pole. “See that Eagle, sergeant!” called Keogh to Sergeant Masterton,
among the foremost, close by his officer; and then he dashed straight
into the thick of the party round the Eagle, sword in hand. The brave
lad cut his way through, with Masterton and four or five privates close
behind him. He got close up to the “Porte-Aigle,” crossed swords with
him, and got a grip of the Eagle-pole. But he could not wrench it from
the no less brave Frenchman’s hands before he went down with half a
dozen musket bullets and bayonet stabs in his body.
Porte-Aigle Guillemin, as the gallant French Eagle-bearer of the 8th
was named, fell dead at the same moment, shot through the head by one
of the British privates.
[Sidenote: HOW THE TUSSLE ENDED]
Instantly other Frenchmen rushed up to save the Eagle, and formed round
it hastily. One of the British privates who seized hold of the staff
was slashed to death, and the French recovered it. The fight round
the Eagle went on for some minutes. In that time no fewer than seven
French officers and sub-officers fell dead in defence of the Eagle.
An eighth officer, Lieutenant Gazan, clung to the pole to the last,
regardless of wounds that nearly hacked him to pieces. Finally the
Eagle was torn from his grasp by Sergeant Masterton, at the end the
sole unwounded survivor of the attacking British party. Gazan “survived
miraculously,” and lived to be decorated by Napoleon for his devoted
courage. Masterton seized the Eagle and kept it. So “the Eagle with the
Golden Wreath” became a British trophy.
From the crossing of the bayonets in the final charge to the taking of
the Eagle, the _mêlée_ lasted about fifteen minutes.
The remnant of the 8th were saved by a rally to the spot by the French
54th, after another regiment, the 47th, had attempted its rescue in
vain. The 47th lost their Eagle in the _mêlée_, but recovered it. “The
man who had charge of it was obliged to throw it away, from excessive
fatigue and a wound,” explains a British officer. The 8th lost at
Barrosa their Colonel (Autié) and the Lieutenant-Colonel of the Second
Battalion, killed; Vigo-Roussillon, of the First Battalion, wounded;
and 17 other officers and 934 of the rank and file killed or wounded.
The _Moniteur_, the official Paris newspaper under the Napoleonic
_régime_, in reporting the battle of April 5, referred to the loss of
the Eagle in these terms: “A battalion of the 8th, having been charged
in wood-covered ground, and the Eagle-bearer being killed, his Eagle
has not been found since.”
The battalion that fared so hardly had to pay the regulation penalty.
Napoleon gave the 8th no other Eagle. He held rigidly to his rule, and
set his face relentlessly against a second presentation. They must
present him first with a standard taken on the battlefield from the
enemy. But with Wellington’s men opposed to them to the end, the 8th
got few chances in that direction. They had to fight without an Eagle
to the close of the Peninsular War.
Two days after Barrosa, when General Graham re-entered Cadiz with the
Spanish army, “the Eagle with the Golden Wreath” was publicly paraded
through the crowded streets, “between the regimental colours,” as the
87th marched to barracks, the church bells ringing triumphantly, and
amid exultant shouts and cheers of the populace, and cries of “Long
live Spain! Death to our oppressors!” At the barracks “we presented the
Eagle to our gallant commander,” says one of the officers.
The Eagle was then sent to England in the custody of the officer
carrying General Graham’s despatch. Its capture is commemorated to this
day by the Royal Irish Fusiliers, who wear “an Eagle with a Wreath of
Laurel” as a regimental badge, while a similar Eagle is embroidered
in gold on the regimental colour. Also, a representation of the
wreathed Barrosa Eagle was granted later on as a special augmentation
to the family arms of the officer who commanded the 87th in the
battle, Major Hugh Gough, on his being raised to the Peerage while
Commander-in-Chief in India after the first Sikh War. “The Aiglers” was
always the regiment’s sobriquet after Barrosa among their comrades in
Wellington’s army; a sobriquet that has endured since then in the form
of “the Aigle-Takers,” although our modern recruits are said to prefer
calling themselves “the Bird-Catchers.”[25]
[Sidenote: ONE OF THE PARIS WREATHS]
It was in this way that the Barrosa trophy Eagle came by its golden
wreath. The decoration, as has been said, had nothing to do with
Talavera.
The wreath was one of those voted by the City of Paris to the regiments
that had gone through the Jena and Polish frontier campaigns, the first
of which was presented to the Imperial Guard. First of all, in the
outburst of patriotic enthusiasm in France at the news of Jena, wreaths
had been voted as decorations for the Eagles, by way of popular tribute
to the regiments which had helped in dealing that staggering blow to
the famous Prussian Army. After the crowning victory of Friedland
which ended the war, in a fresh outburst of enthusiasm, golden wreaths
were voted wholesale for the Eagles of all the corps that had taken
part in the fighting that followed Jena, during the nine months of
war, down to the final day of Friedland. It was a costly guerdon, and
their proposed generosity staggered the Paris municipality when the
estimate was presented. No fewer than 378 wreaths--according to the
official return--had to be provided. But the vote had been carried by
acclamation on its first proposal, and trumpeted all over France. Also,
the Emperor had taken up with the idea warmly. The Paris authorities
dared not back out, and had to go on with it in spite of the cost. They
carried it out with so good a grace that, as the sequel, a suggestion
came from the Tuileries that the Austerlitz battalions of the Grand
Army which had not had the fortune to be in the Jena-Friedland campaign
should receive wreaths as well, an Imperial hint that the authorities,
shrinking from the extra expense, were so slow to fall in with, that
in the end it had to be forced on them, by means of a bluntly worded
letter through the Ministry of War. “Tell the Prefect of the Seine,”
wrote Napoleon to the War Minister, “that I expect wreaths of gold,
similar to those given for Jena and Friedland, to be provided on behalf
of the City of Paris for all the regiments at Austerlitz!”
[Sidenote: ACROSS GERMANY IN CARTS]
The 8th was presented with its wreath in Paris, while on the way to
take part in the Peninsular War. It was one of the regiments of the
First Corps of the Grand Army, which Napoleon hastily recalled from
Germany in the spring of 1808, and hurried across Europe to reinforce
the troops in Spain on the first news of serious trouble being on foot
in that quarter. The whole First Army Corps was recalled; starting
from Berlin, where it had been quartered, and journeying by Magdeburg
and Coblentz. Along the route the unfortunate German burgomasters and
village authorities had to provide, not only provisions day by day, but
transport vehicles for 30,000 soldiers; mostly farm-carts and wagons,
each taking from four to sixteen men. The troops travelled by night and
day, with only two stoppages of fifty minutes each in the twenty-four
hours, for meals, and the authorities of the villages and towns named
as halting-places were compelled to have hot food kept ready so that
the men might fall to instantly on arrival. It was a journey the
soldiers never forgot. The weather was rough and wet, the roads in
places were almost impassable, and the carts continually broke down, in
addition to which the peasant-drivers requisitioned for the conveyances
deserted at every opportunity, usually going off at night with the
horses after cutting the traces, leaving their wagon-loads of sleeping
soldiers stranded by the roadside.
The 8th received its wreath at the Barrier of Pantin, on the outskirts
of Paris. It arrived with the Second Division of the corps, and
the troops were met by the Prefect of the Seine and the Municipal
Council in State, while Marshal Victor, the commander of the Army
Corps, attended the ceremony in full-dress uniform. He replied to the
Prefect’s complimentary address by declaring that “these golden crowns
henceforward decorating the Eagles of the First Corps will to them ever
be additional incentives to victory.” One by one the regiments passed
before the Prefect, who hung round each Eagle’s neck “a wreath of gold,
shaped as two branches of laurel.” A triumphal march into Paris and an
open-air banquet to all ranks in the Tivoli Gardens, with free tickets
to the theatres after it, wound up the day.
All along the line of march through France to the Spanish frontier,
banquets and elaborate festivities welcomed the regiments--and at the
same time, it would appear, gave some of their entertainers more than
they bargained for. The triumphal progress, from all accounts, proved
such hard work for the ladies in the country towns, where public balls
were in the programme every night, that at some places for the later
comers--the 8th and other regiments in the Second Division of Marshal
Victor’s corps--the balls had to be abandoned, “because the ladies were
too tired to dance any more.” It was explained, with apologies, that
they had practically been danced off their feet by the regiments of
the First Division, which had preceded the Second, incessantly passing
through during the previous three weeks, and that “most of the ladies,
through sheer fatigue, had taken to their beds!”
[Sidenote: THEY DID NOT MEET AT TALAVERA]
At Talavera, the 8th, as part of a brigade of three regiments, had a
passage of arms on the battlefield, first with the British 83rd; and
then with the Guards; lastly with the 48th, before whose magnificent
charge in the final phase of the fight they had to give ground. They
did not meet the 87th Royal Irish Fusiliers at all in the battle.[26]