IN THE HOUR OF DARKEST DISASTER
AFTER MOSCOW: HOW THE EAGLES FACED THEIR FATE
There are seventy-five standards of Napoleon’s Grand Army of 1812 now
in Russia, trophies of the Moscow disaster. Rather more than half of
the number are Eagles. The remainder of the trophies are battalion and
cavalry flags; some French, some the ensigns of allied contingents and
the troops of vassal states of the Napoleonic Empire, compelled to
take a part in the campaign. All the European armies of the period are
represented among the trophies: green and white Saxon flags; blue and
white Bavarian flags; violet and white Polish ensigns; Spanish, Dutch,
and Portuguese colours; Swiss flags; Westphalian and Baden flags of the
Confederation of the Rhine; the red and black of Würtemburg; the yellow
and black of Austria; the white and black of Prussia; the green, white,
and red tricolor of Italy.
They are preserved at St. Petersburg, in the Kazan Cathedral and in the
Cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul. Those in the Kazan Cathedral are
grouped over and round the tomb of the septuagenarian hero, Kutusoff,
who lies buried on the spot where he knelt in prayer before setting
out to take command as generalissimo of the national army. Near by,
suspended against the pillars, are the marshal’s bâton of Davout, and
the keys of Hamburg, Leipsic, Dresden, Rheims, Breda, and Utrecht,
similarly spoils of the Napoleonic war.[32]
[Sidenote: MOST OF THE EAGLES GOT THROUGH]
The actual Eagle trophies number all told between forty and fifty: less
than a third of the total array of Eagles that crossed the Niemen at
the head of their regiments on the outbreak of the war. The majority
of the Eagles of the Grand Army were saved from falling into the hands
of the Russians through the devoted heroism of those responsible for
their safe-keeping amid the horrors of the retreat. Of those at St.
Petersburg, not more than half at most were taken in actual combat,
and they were only yielded up by their bearers with life, being
picked up from among the dead bodies, and carried off by the Russians
on going over the field after the fight was over. Five Eagles only
were surrendered by capitulation. The others were brought in by the
Cossacks, who came upon them while prowling in rear of the retreating
army. They were found, some in hollow trees, where their despairing
bearers had tried to conceal them; some in holes dug with bayonets in
the frozen ground underneath the snow. Others were dragged to light,
broken from their staves, from beneath the coats or from the knapsacks
of officers and men, who had fallen by the way at night and been
frozen to death, during the final stage of the retreat between Wilna
and the Niemen. It is in remembrance of how, to the last, during the
Moscow retreat, in many a dark and hopeless hour, there yet remained
detachments of devoted men, the last remnants of regiments, at all
times ready to stand at bay and sacrifice themselves for the honour of
their Eagles, amidst hordes of disorganised fugitives all round--in
remembrance of that, the army of modern France commemorates on the
colours of certain regiments, as representing corps that bore the same
numbers in Napoleon’s Grand Army in Russia, the names, among others, of
“Marojaroslav,” “Polotz,” “Wiasma,” “Krasnoi,” “La Berezène,” defeats
and disasters though these were.
[Sidenote: WHAT FRANCE REMEMBERS TO-DAY]
The Eagles were under fire for the first time in Russia on July 17,
in the attack on Smolensk on the Dnieper, the ancient Lithuanian
capital, where took place the first important battle of the war. There
the Eagles of Ney’s and Davout’s corps did their part in inciting
the men to add fresh laurels to the fame of their regiments; ever
prominent in the attack, leading charge after charge as the columns
made repeated efforts to storm the fortified suburbs and lofty ramparts
of the citadel. The soldiers did all that intrepidity and desperate
valour might attempt, but in vain. No valour could prevail against
the stubborn endurance of the Russians, who also occupied a strongly
walled position that was practically impregnable. The fierce contest
went on all through a whole day, until nightfall, and then, under cover
of darkness, the defenders silently drew off and retreated beyond the
city, leaving Smolensk in flames. No fewer than 15,000 French and
10,000 Russians fell in the merciless encounter.
Next morning there followed a spectacle hardly ever perhaps paralleled:
the march of the Grand Army through the streets between the still
blazing houses, “the martial columns advancing in the finest order to
the sound of military music.” “We traversed between furnaces,” as an
officer puts it, “tramping over the hot and smouldering ashes, in all
the pomp of military splendour, bands playing and each Eagle leading
its men.”
[Sidenote: WON ON THE BATTLEFIELD]
At Smolensk one regiment won its Eagle, which Napoleon presented at
five o’clock in the morning on July 19, before the paraded battalions
of Davout’s corps. It was the 127th of the Line; a regiment, it is
curious to note, enrolled a few months before, from former Hanoverian
subjects of our own King George the Third, and commanded by French
officers as a regular corps of the French Line. By Napoleon’s latest
ordinance, issued just before the Emperor quitted Paris in May,
the regiments newly raised for the Russian War, of which there were
several, were in each case to win their Eagles on the battlefield. The
Eagle for each regiment was to be provided in advance, but would be
held back, locked up in the regimental chest, until it “should be won
by distinguished conduct.” The 127th won their Eagle at Smolensk, their
brilliant service being specially brought before Napoleon by Marshal
Davout, who, of his own initiative, claimed the Eagle for them from
Napoleon. The regiment bore it with distinction through the hottest of
the fighting at Borodino, carried it all through the disastrous retreat
from Moscow, and preserved it to the end to go through the later
campaign in Germany, and face the enemy after that in the last stand
before Paris in 1814. The Eagle was eventually destroyed by order of
the restored Bourbon Government.
The second great battle-day of the Eagles in the Russian War was
at Borodino, on September 7. There a quarter of a million and more
combatants faced each other: on one side, 132,000 Russians with 640
guns; on the other, 133,000 French with 590 guns. The battle of
Borodino was perhaps the most sanguinary and the most obstinately
contested in history. The opening shots were fired at sunrise. When at
sunset both sides drew sullenly apart, exhausted after twelve hours of
carnage, neither army was victorious. Each held the ground on which it
had begun the battle; 25,000 men lay dead on the field, and 68,000 more
lay wounded, an appalling massacre that staggered even Napoleon.
Amidst the ferocious savagery of the hand-to-hand fighting that
characterised Borodino all over the field, many of the Eagles were
in desperate peril. Several were cut off in the terrible havoc that
the ferocious Russian counter-charges wrought in the French ranks,
and were only saved by the stern fortitude of the soldiers, fighting
at times back to back round the Eagles, keeping off the enemy with
bayonet thrusts till help should come. In one part of the field the
9th of the Line was isolated and for a time broken up and scattered.
The Eagle-bearer was cut off by himself and surrounded. He saved the
Eagle, as he fell wounded. “Amidst the confusion, wounded by two
bayonet thrusts, I fell, but I was able to make an effort to prevent
the Eagle falling into the hands of the enemy. Some of them rushed at
me and closed round, but, getting to my feet, I managed to fling the
Eagle, staff and all, over their heads towards some of our men, whom I
had caught sight of, fortunately near by, trying to charge through and
rescue the Eagle. This was all I could do before I fell again and was
made prisoner.” The brave fellow returned to France two years later,
at the Peace of 1814, and made his way to the regimental dépôt, where
he found barely twenty of his comrades at Borodino left. The rest had
succumbed during the retreat from Moscow. The survivors had brought
back the Eagle to France; only, however, to have to give it up to the
new Minister of War for destruction.
[Sidenote: TWO EAGLES JUST SAVED]
The 18th of the Line, broken in a Russian counter-attack, after
storming one of the Russian redoubts erected to defend part of the
position, rallied with their Eagle in their midst and held their ground
in spite of repeated attacks until help could get through to them. At
the roll-call next morning, 40 officers out of 50, and 800 men out of
2,000 were reported as missing; left dead or wounded on the field.
Another regiment lost its colonel and half one battalion dead on the
field; the Eagle-Guard were all shot down or bayoneted round the Eagle,
which in the end was saved and brought out of the battle by a corporal,
who was awarded a commission by Napoleon in the presence of the remains
of the regiment next day. The Eagle of the 61st of the Line again
was only kept out of Russian hands by the devotion of the men round
it. Napoleon rode past the regiment next day while being paraded for
the roll to be called. Only two battalions were there, and he asked
the colonel where the third battalion was. “It is in the redoubt,
Sire!” was the officer’s reply, pointing in the direction of the Great
Redoubt, round which some of the hardest fighting of the day had taken
place. The battalion had literally been annihilated: not an officer or
a man of the 1,100 in the third battalion of the 61st had returned from
the fight.
A regiment of Cuirassiers lost its Eagle at Borodino: the Eagle had
disappeared in the midst of a fierce _mêlée_, in which the Eagle-bearer
had gone down. The loss was not discovered till later. All, however,
refused to believe that it had been captured: that was incredible.
The dead Eagle-bearer’s body was found after the battle, but no Eagle
was there. Overwhelmed with shame, the regiment had to admit that the
impossible had happened, and during the weeks that they were at Moscow
“they remained plunged in a profound dolour.” The Eagle reappeared in
an extraordinary way. In the retreat, when passing the scene of the
battle, a ghastly and horrible spectacle with its unburied corpses
and the carcasses of horses strewn thickly and heaped up all over the
field, a sudden thought struck one of the officers. Late that night,
he and a brother officer, taking the risk of capture by Cossacks on
the prowl in rear of the retreating army, rode back and found their
way by moonlight to where the Cuirassiers had had their fight and the
Eagle-bearer had fallen. They found the Eagle inside the carcass of
the Eagle-bearer’s horse. It had been thrust in there by the dying
Eagle-bearer through the gaping wound that had killed the horse, as the
only means to conceal it in the midst of the enemy.
[Sidenote: HOW THE EAGLES ENTERED MOSCOW]
The Eagles made their last triumphant entry into a conquered capital
at Moscow on September 14, the Eagle of the Old Guard leading the
way at the head of the grenadiers of the Guard, all wearing for the
day their full-dress parade uniform. As has been said, every officer
and soldier of the Guard, by Napoleon’s standing order, carried a
suit of full-dress uniform in his kit or knapsack on campaign in
readiness for such occasions--“en tenue de parade comme si elle eut
défiler au Carrousel.” They had marched like that with music and
full military pomp twice through Vienna, and through the streets of
Berlin and Madrid; but there was at Moscow a disconcerting and ominous
difference, both in their surroundings and in the reception that they
met. Elsewhere, alike in Vienna, Berlin, and Madrid, the parade march
of the victorious Eagles passed through densely crowded streets of
onlookers, silently gazing with dejected mien at the scene. At Moscow
not a soul was in the streets, at the windows, anywhere; on every side
were emptiness and desolation. The inhabitants had fled the city, and
only deserted houses remained. The first incendiary fires at Moscow
broke out at midnight, within twelve hours of Napoleon taking up his
residence in the Kremlin.
The spell after that was broken. Henceforward victory deserted the
Eagles; the hour of fate was at hand for Napoleon and the Grand Army.
The Fortune of War, indeed, turned against the Eagles even before
Napoleon had quitted Moscow.
Early on October 18, Napoleon, while at breakfast in the Kremlin,
suddenly heard distant cannonading away to the south. He learned
what had happened that afternoon while holding a review of the
Italian Royal Guard. “We hastily regained our quarters, packed up our
parade-uniforms, put on our service kit ... and to the sound of our
drums and bands threaded our way through the streets of Moscow at five
in the afternoon.” During the past five weeks, while all had been
outwardly quiet, the Russian armies had been manœvring to close in
along the only road of retreat open to Napoleon.
[Sidenote: THE FIRST SENT TO THE CZAR]
The nearest of the Russian armies, concentrated to the south-west of
Moscow, struck the first blow on October 18 at daybreak, by surprising
Murat’s cavalry camp near Vinkovo. The results to the French were
disastrous. Two thousand of Murat’s men were killed and as many
more were taken prisoners. Between thirty and forty guns were lost,
and Murat’s personal camp-baggage train, which included “his silver
canteens and cooking utensils, in which cats’ and horse flesh were
found prepared for food”--a discovery that opened the eyes of the
Russians to the precarious position of affairs in Napoleon’s army.
Murat himself, according to one story, “rode off on the first alarm in
his shirt.” He only got away, according to another, by cutting his way
through the Russians sword in hand, at the head of his personal escort
of carabineers. Two Eagles were spoils of the surprise; the first to
fall into Russian hands in the war. They were lost in the general
scrimmage, their bearers being sabred at the outset of the Russian
onslaught. The Eagles were at once sent off to St. Petersburg to be
presented to the Czar Alexander.
On the other hand nine Eagles were saved, their escorts fighting their
way successfully through the Russians.
Many stories are recorded in memoirs of survivors of the Grand Army of
heroic endeavours made repeatedly by officers and men to save their
Eagles from the enemy amid the disasters and horrors of the retreat.
Their devotion and self-sacrifice had their reward in the preservation
of seven Eagles in every ten.
Two Eagles were lost fourteen days after leaving Moscow, in the
disastrous battle at Wiasma on November 2, halfway on the road back to
Smolensk, where the advanced columns of the pursuing Russians attacked
and all but cut the retreating French army in two. The rearguard of
the Grand Army, Marshal Davout’s corps, with the Italian corps of the
Viceroy Eugène Beauharnais, was overpowered and driven in and broken
up; crushed under the overpowering artillery fire of the Russians. They
left behind 6,000 dead, 2,000 prisoners, and 27 guns. Two Eagles were
taken, their regiments being virtually annihilated, but twenty-one
were saved. They were safeguarded through the rout by groups of
brave-hearted officers and men, who beat off the rushes made at them
by the Russian cavalry and the Cossacks. They fought their way through
until they met Ney’s troops, who had heard the firing and turned back,
arriving in time to stem and check the Russian pursuit and enable
what was left of the two shattered army corps to rally under their
protection.
[Sidenote: “WE HAVE DONE OUR DUTY!”]
One infantry regiment at Wiasma perished on the battlefield to a man,
but saved its Eagle. It was the rearmost of all, and was isolated and
surrounded beyond reach of help. In vain its men formed square and
tried to fight their way after the rest through the surging masses of
the Russians. They made their way for a time until the enemy brought
up artillery. A Russian battery galloped up, unlimbered close to them,
and opened fire with murderous effect. The Frenchmen tried desperately
to charge the guns, but were beaten back by a rush of cavalry. At last,
in despair, they formed square and faced the cruel slaughter that the
guns made in their ranks, in the hope that help might reach them. Terms
were offered them and refused. They would not surrender, and fought on
till dusk, when their ammunition gave out. The Russians were closing
round for a final decisive charge on the small handful of survivors,
when the wounded colonel, seeing all was over, made the attempt that
saved the Eagle. The scanty remnant of what had that morning been a
regiment of 3,000 men formed round in a ring, facing towards the enemy
with bayonets levelled. The Eagle-staff was broken up and the fragments
thrust under the ground. With flint and steel a match was lighted and
the silken tricolor consumed. The Eagle was then tied up in a havresac
and entrusted to an old soldier who was known to be a good rider. The
colonel, giving up his own charger to the man, bade him watch his
chance and, as the enemy came on in the dark, dash through them and
ride his hardest. “Carry the Eagle to his Majesty,” were the colonel’s
words. “Deliver it to him, and tell him that we have done our duty!”
The man rode off. He was able to get through the nearest Russians under
cover of the darkness, having to fight his way before he got clear, and
receiving several wounds. Then his horse fell dead from its injuries.
On foot he stumbled on, and before midnight reached, not Napoleon, but
Marshal Ney, to whom he gave up his precious charge. No officer or man
of the others of the luckless regiment was ever heard of in France
again. No prisoners from it ever returned--only the Eagle survived.
Three days after Wiasma the Russian winter suddenly set in on the
doomed host. It brought about at once the disintegration and
disorganisation of the Grand Army. Already, demoralised by their
privation, hundreds of men had fallen out of the ranks, flinging away
their muskets and knapsacks, and straggling along in disorderly groups.
A third practically of the Army ceased to exist as a fighting force
within the first fortnight of the retreat, before the first snows fell.
The others, though, still kept to their duty. Marching in the ranks day
after day, they strove their hardest to beat back the incessant attacks
of the swarms of Cossacks, hovering round on the watch to raid the
baggage-convoys at every block or stoppage on the road. With the coming
of the snow the doom of the Grand Army was sealed. It was impossible to
maintain discipline with the thermometer at twenty degrees below zero.
Men dropped dead from cold by the score every half-mile.
On November 6 the sun disappeared; a grey fog enshrouded everything;
the frost set in; and a bitter north wind in howling gusts swept over
the face of the land; with it came down the snow, falling hour after
hour by day and night without ceasing.
“From that day the Army lost its courage and its military instinct. The
soldier no longer obeyed his officer. The officer separated himself
from his general. The disbanded regiments marched in disorder. In
their frantic search for food they spread themselves over the plain,
pillaging and destroying whatever fell in their way.” So a survivor
wrote.
The snow came down “in large broad flakes, which at once chilled and
blinded the soldiers: the marchers, however, stumbled forward, men
often struggling and at last sinking in holes and ravines that were
concealed from them by the new and disguised appearance of the country.
Those who yet retained discipline and kept their ranks stood some
chance of receiving assistance; but amid the mass of stragglers, the
men’s hearts, intent only on self-preservation, became hardened and
closed against every feeling of sympathy and compassion. The storm-wind
lifted the snow from the earth, as well as that steadily pelting down
from above, into dizzy eddies round the soldiers. Many were hurled to
the ground in this manner, while the same snow furnished them with an
instant grave, under which they were concealed until the next summer
came, to display their ghastly remains in the open air.”
[Sidenote: WHEN THE COSSACKS GOT TO WORK]
The Cossacks redoubled their attacks on the retreating army after
Wiasma. They had harassed the French incessantly from the day after
Napoleon passed Mojaisk, but after Wiasma their audacity increased a
hundredfold. They captured prisoners hourly, from among the stragglers
mostly; in droves, by fifties and hundreds at a time. Day after day
they hung on the flanks, swooping down with loud shouts on the
unfortunate wretches, rounding them up like sheep, and driving them
before them towards their own camps at the points of their long lances.
Many they killed on the spot, or stripped naked to perish in the snow.
Others they drove along to the nearest camp of Kutusoff’s regulars for
the sake of the money reward offered for prisoners brought in alive.
Others again, to save themselves the trouble of driving them all the
way to the army camp, they handed over to peasants in the villages,
selling them at a rouble a head, for the peasants to make sport of
and maltreat or kill. The brutalities and ruthless devastations that
the French army had committed in its advance to Moscow had infuriated
the Russian peasantry. Intent on vengeance they now made use of their
opportunity to the full. They burned alive some of their captives, by
tossing them into pits half filled with blazing pine-logs. Seventy
were done to death in this horrible way in one village. Others they
buried up to their necks in the ground and left to die; or else tied
them to trees for the wolves to tear to pieces.[33] Others they clubbed
or flogged to death, tying down the wretched Frenchmen to logs on
the ground, hounding on the women and children to hammer their heads
to pieces with thick sticks. A common method of Cossacks and peasants
alike for making prisoners was to light great watch-fires at night,
a little way off from the retreating column, and as the frozen and
starving stragglers came crowding up to the blaze they surrounded them
and carried them off wholesale.
After the snow set in, guns and baggage-wagons were abandoned to the
Cossacks at almost every hundred yards. It was impossible for the
weakened and dying horses to drag them along; even to keep their
footing on the frozen ground. Within the first week after Wiasma the
appalling number of 30,000 horses either died of starvation, there
being no way of getting fodder for them because of the snow, or were
frozen to death.
[Sidenote: THE EAGLES OF NEY’S CORPS]
In spite of everything, some of the regiments still kept together and
marched in military formation, with their Eagles at their head; those
in particular of Marshal Ney’s corps. They formed the rearguard and
chief protection to the army from Wiasma onwards; held together by the
heroic example and personality of their indefatigable leader, ever
present where there was fighting, ever calm and confident, and ready
with words of encouragement. Not an Eagle was lost along the line of
march between Moscow and Smolensk by Ney’s men; rallying round them to
beat off the Cossack attacks time and again with the cry, “Aux Aigles!
Voici les Cosaques!”
This incident, not unlike the cuirassier ride to recover the Eagle left
on the field at Borodino, is said to have taken place between Wiasma
and Smolensk. One regiment of Ney’s cavalry missed its Eagle after a
sharp fight on the road, the Eagle-bearer having apparently fallen
during the encounter, unseen by the survivors. That night round the
bivouac fire lots were drawn, and two officers rode back amid blinding
snow squalls to try to find the Eagle. They successfully evaded the
Cossacks and made their way ten miles back to the scene of the combat,
where, after scaring off some wolves, they searched in the snow and
found the dead officer’s body with the Eagle by its side. They brought
it back safely to the regiment and restored it to their comrades. Their
limbs were frost-bitten and rigid from cold, so that they had to be
lifted off their horses, but the brave men were content--they had saved
their Eagle.
[Illustration:
_Photo Alinari._
MARSHAL NEY WITH THE REARGUARD IN THE RETREAT FROM MOSCOW.
From a picture by A. Ivon, at Versailles.]
[Sidenote: SO FAR TEN EAGLES LOST]
At Krasnoi, on November 19, between Smolensk and the Beresina, Napoleon
underwent another severe defeat from the pursuing Russians, 10,000
prisoners and 70 guns falling into the victors’ hands. Two Eagles were
carried off from the battlefield and despatched to St. Petersburg
by special courier, together with Kutusoff’s report to the Czar.
Twenty-seven Eagles, however, got past the Russians, fighting their
way through, thanks to the endurance of brave men who rallied round
them. Krasnoi it was that gave the death-blow to Napoleon’s last hope
of rallying the Grand Army. After it less than 30,000 men remained
under arms with the main column, including the 8,000 survivors of the
Imperial Guard. Up to then, according to the Russian official returns,
80,000 prisoners, 500 guns, and “40 standards and flags of all kinds”
had fallen into the hands of the pursuers. Not more than ten, however,
of the forty standards taken were Eagles: the two taken at Murat’s
surprise at Vinkovo; the two taken at Wiasma; the two taken at Krasnoi;
also two taken before Napoleon reached Smolensk, from a brigade sent
from Smolensk to help him on the road, which blundered into the middle
of the Russian army and had to surrender; and two captured elsewhere,
from the French flanking armies of Marshal Macdonald and Marshal St.
Cyr. An eleventh Eagle was taken in the second battle at Krasnoi,
from Ney’s rearguard; the only Eagle that Ney actually lost in fight
throughout the 600 miles’ march between Moscow and the frontier.
At Krasnoi, Ney’s rearguard, following at a day’s march behind the
rest of the army, found its way barred. The Russians, after defeating
Napoleon’s main column, a day’s march in advance, had waited on the
scene of the former fighting for Ney. They held a position that it was
practically impossible for Ney’s comparatively small force to get past.
After vainly attempting to break through, Ney had to draw back, and
make a forlorn-hope effort to avoid destruction by a long détour, in
the course of which he had to abandon guns, baggage, and horses, and
cross the Dnieper on ice hardly thick enough to bear the weight of a
man.
On the eve of Krasnoi, indeed, the rearguard found itself in so
desperate a position, that Ney ordered all its Eagles to be destroyed.
His regiments had suffered so severely in their continuous fighting,
that it was impossible adequately to safeguard the Eagles. Every
musket and bayonet was wanted in the fighting line. It was impossible
to supply sufficient Eagle-escorts. So far, in spite of the dreadful
straits to which some of the regiments had been reduced, all had
marched openly with their Eagles, and fought round them, guarding them
sedulously by night and day. “When excess of fatigue constrained us to
take a few moments of repose,” describes Colonel De Fesenzac of the 4th
of the Line, “we (what was left of the regiment able to carry arms--not
100 men) assembled together in any place where we could find shelter,
a few of the men standing by to mount guard for the protection of the
regimental Eagle.”
“Then,” describes the colonel, “came the order that all the Eagles
should be broken up and buried. As I could not make up my mind to
this, I directed that the staff should be burned, and that the Eagle
of the 4th Regiment should be stowed in the knapsack of one of the
Eagle-bearers, by whose side I kept my post on the march.” The Eagle
of the 4th, it may be added by the way, was the identical Eagle that
Napoleon had presented to the regiment in place of that lost at
Austerlitz, in exchange for, as has been told, two captured Austrian
flags.
[Sidenote: “THEY OUGHT TO PERISH WITH US”]
Other officers did the same as Colonel De Fesenzac. One officer,
however, the colonel of the 18th of the Line, flatly refused to have
his regimental Eagle either broken up or hidden away. “The Eagle,” he
says in his journal, which still exists, “had throughout, until then,
been carried at the head of the regiment, and I declined to obey the
order on behalf of the 18th. It seemed to us a monstrous ignominy. Our
Eagles were not given us to be made away with or hidden: they ought to
perish with us.” The Eagle of the 18th did actually perish with the
regiment. In the rearguard repulse at Krasnoi the entire regiment was
destroyed, except for some twenty survivors, including the colonel,
severely wounded. “Our Eagle,” says the gallant colonel, proudly
recording its fate, “remained among our dead on the field of battle.”
That Eagle of the 18th was the only one of Marshal Ney’s Eagles to
fall into the hands of the Russians in battle. Some ten of the Eagles
now at St. Petersburg were found on the bodies of officers and men who
had been either frozen to death or had fallen dead on the march during
Ney’s retreat after Krasnoi; they were not taken in fight.
Ney rejoined Napoleon with only 1,500 men left out of 12,000, of which
the rearguard had consisted when it left Smolensk. It was while making
his last effort to get past the Russians after his attempt to break
through at Krasnoi had failed, that Ney, overtaken on the banks of
the half-frozen Dnieper on the evening before he risked his perilous
crossing, and summoned by the Russians to surrender, made that proudly
defiant reply which has ever since been a treasured memory to the
French Army: “A Marshal of France never surrenders!” Six hours later
he had evaded capture and, with the remnant of his corps, was across
the river. All the world has heard how Napoleon, hopeless of seeing him
again, welcomed Ney with the words: “I have three hundred millions of
francs in the vaults of the Tuileries; I would have given them all for
Marshal Ney!”
[Sidenote: ALL KEPT TOGETHER FOR SAFETY]
The remaining Eagles had by now been assembled for preservation under
the protection of what troops of the main column, which Napoleon
accompanied, still continued under arms. Further effort to rally the
shattered host was beyond possibility. Only portions of the two army
corps of Marshals Victor and Oudinot, called in from holding the line
of communications, still retained military formation, together with
the reduced battalions of the Old Guard which had kept near Napoleon
throughout. To save the remaining Eagles, the officers of broken-up and
disbanded regiments, with some devoted soldiers who stood by them, took
personal charge of the Eagles, and carried them with their own hands.
Banding together and marching in company side by side, they tramped on,
plodding through the snow day and night for 200 miles; the collected
Eagles all massed in the centre. They attached themselves to the column
of the Old Guard, and kept their way close by Napoleon.
A survivor of the retreat from Moscow, in his memoirs, describes how he
saw Napoleon and the Eagles pass by him on the way to the Beresina on
the morning of November 25:
“Those in advance seemed to be generals, a few on horseback, but the
greater part on foot. There was also a great number of other officers,
the remnant of the Doomed Squadron and Battalion, formed on the 22nd
and barely existing at the end of three days. Those on foot dragged
themselves painfully along, almost all of them having their feet frozen
and wrapped in rags or in bits of sheep’s-skin, and all nearly dying of
hunger. Afterwards came the small remains of the Cavalry of the Guard.
The Emperor came next, on foot, and carrying a staff. He wore a large
cloak lined with fur, and had a red velvet cap with black-fox fur on
his head. Murat walked on foot at his right, and on his left the Prince
Eugène, Viceroy of Italy. Next came the Marshals Berthier--Prince of
Neufchatel--Ney, Mortier, Lefebvre, with other marshals and generals
whose corps had been annihilated.
“The Emperor mounted a horse as soon as he had passed; so did a few of
those with him: the greater part of them had no horses to ride. Seven
or eight hundred officers and non-commissioned officers followed,
walking in order and perfect silence, and carrying the Eagles of their
different regiments, which had so often led them to victory. This was
all that remained of 60,000 men.
“After them came the Imperial Guard on foot, marching also in order.”
Four Eagles were lost in the fighting at the passage of the
Beresina, where a whole division of Marshal Victor’s corps (General
Partonneaux’s) was cut off and compelled to surrender. On the last
night, when either massacre under the Russian guns or laying down their
arms was all that was left to them, they broke up and buried their
Eagles in the ground underneath the snow. The officers of one regiment,
it is told, broke up their Eagle before burying it, burned the flag
at their last bivouac fire, mixed the ashes with thawed snow, and
swallowed the concoction.
[Illustration: NAPOLEON AND THE “SACRED SQUADRON” ON THE WAY TO THE
BERESINA.
From the picture by H. Bellangé.]
[Sidenote: WHEN THE LAST HOPE WAS GONE]
The little column of officers with their Eagles passed the Beresina
with the Guard, and thus escaped that last catastrophe, the crowning
horror of the bridge disaster, when 24,000 ill-fated human beings were
sent to their account; either killed in the fighting with the Russians,
or drowned in the river, jammed together on the burning bridge, while
the Russian guns from the rear thundered on them with shot and shell.
The officer-escort with the Eagles tramped on until Wilna was reached;
until after Napoleon had left the army and set off for Paris. Then,
on the final falling apart of the remnants of the stricken host,
the officers themselves dispersed, to escape as best they could
individually and get to the Niemen; breaking up the Eagle-poles and
concealing the Eagles and flags in knapsacks or under their uniforms.
The dispersal, says one officer, was at Napoleon’s own instance. “He
ordered all the officers who had no troops to make the best of their
way at once to the Niemen, considering that their services had best be
saved for the future army he was going to Paris to raise and organise.”
That is one story. According to another officer, utter despair at
their frightful position, abandoned by their chief, was the cause of
the break-up at Wilna and the final _débâcle_. “Until then a few armed
soldiers, led by their officers, had still rallied round the Eagles.
Now, however, the officers began to break away, and the soldiers became
fewer and fewer, and those left were finally reduced, of necessity,
some to conceal the Eagles in knapsacks, others to make away with
them.” Some of the officers fell dead on the way to the Niemen, struck
down suddenly by the cold, and their Eagles remained with them. Others
who died, with their last strength tried to put their charges beyond
reach of the enemy by scraping or digging holes in the frozen ground,
and burying the Eagles.[34]
[Sidenote: THE EAGLE OF THE OLD GUARD]
The Eagle of the Old Guard recrossed the Niemen at Kovno, while Ney
was making his final stand, defending the gate of the town; the
marshal fighting musket in hand at the last, with less than twenty
soldiers. That Eagle was still carried openly--the only one still so
displayed--carried defiantly aloft on its staff, borne to the last with
its escort in military formation, in the midst of the ranks of the 400
men of the Old Guard who were all that were able to reach the frontier.
AT BAY IN NORTHERN GERMANY--1813
There were yet dark days in store for the Eagles after the retreat from
Moscow was over. The tale of their misfortunes was not yet ended. There
was yet to be the sequel to the great catastrophe; further humiliations
in the War in Germany of 1813, and the Winter Campaign of 1814 in
Eastern France, which followed as the consequence and result of the
overthrow in Russia.
No fewer than fifteen of the Eagles that the devotion of their officers
brought through the retreat from Moscow are now--making allowance for
difficulties of identification, owing to defective records--among
the trophies of victory to be seen at Berlin and Potsdam, in Vienna,
and also at St. Petersburg. Those in Germany are mostly kept in the
Garrison Church of Potsdam, suspended triumphantly above the vault in
which lies the sarcophagus of Frederick the Great. They were placed
there of set purpose as an act of retribution, as a votive offering
to the _manes_ of the Great Frederick; as a Prussian rejoinder to
Napoleon’s act of wanton desecration after Jena. The four trophy Eagles
at Vienna are in the Imperial Arsenal Museum there. Two of them are the
spoils of Kulm; displayed together with the keys of Lyons, Langres,
Troyes, and the fortress of Mayence, which were surrendered during the
march of the Allies on Paris. The Russian trophy Eagles of 1813 are at
St. Petersburg, displayed with the Eagles which fell into Russian hands
in the retreat from Moscow.
What the annihilation of the Grand Army in Russia meant for Europe,
with what dramatic rapidity its import for the vassal states of
Napoleon was realised and turned to account, is a familiar story.
Prussia led the revolt at once, and all Northern Germany rose in arms
_en masse_ to commence the “War of Liberation,” joining hands with
Russia as the pursuing armies of the Czar crossed the frontier. Then
Austria, after negotiations rendered abortive at the last by Napoleon’s
infatuated pride and overweening self-confidence, threw her sword into
the balance and turned the scale decisively against France. Napoleon’s
hastily raised conscript levies, outnumbered and outmanœuvred, were
defeated on battlefield after battlefield, and driven in rout across
the Rhine to their final surrender at the gates of Paris; and then came
the abdication of Fontainebleau.
[Sidenote: THE EAGLES DIED HARD]
Yet, with all that, in those dark hours of their fate the Eagles died
hard. The trophy-collections of Berlin, Vienna, and St. Petersburg
testify to that. Only a percentage of the Eagles which faced their fate
on the battlefield became spoils to the victors. Marshal Macdonald’s
army, routed by Blücher on the Katzbach, thanks to the devotion of
the regimental officers and some of their men, saved all its Eagles
from the enemy except three. Ney’s army, no less roughly handled at
Dennewitz, managed to retain in like manner all its Eagles except
three. Vandamme’s army, annihilated and dispersed at Kulm, saved its
Eagles all but two. Oudinot was routed at Gross Beeren, with the
loss of guns and many prisoners; Gérard underwent the same fate near
Magdeburg; Bertrand was surprised and defeated with heavier losses
still; but not one Eagle was left as spoil of these disasters in the
hands of the victorious foe.
In one battle the Eagle of Napoleon’s Irish Legion was only just kept
from being to-day among the trophies displayed in the Garrison Church
of Potsdam over the tomb of Frederick the Great. It was immediately
after Macdonald’s defeat on the Katzbach. The Irish Legion was one
of the regiments in one of Macdonald’s divisions, that of General
Puthod. They had had a hard fight of it, and their retreat was barred
by the river Bober in flood. Under stress of the continuous attacks
of the Prussians in ever-increasing force, the 12,000 men of Puthod’s
Division had been reduced to barely 5,000. They had used up their
last cartridges, and had been driven back to the river-bank, where
the Prussian army closed in on them “in a half-moon.” The Prussians
halted for one moment until they realised that the troops before them
had no more ammunition. Then, aware that they had their foe at their
mercy, they rushed forward, cheering exultantly, to deliver the _coup
de grâce_. “All of a sudden,” describes an Irish officer, “30,000 men
ran forward on their prey, of whom none but those who knew how to swim
could attempt to escape.” The greater number of the French, all the
same, jumped into the river, and took the risk of drowning rather than
surrender. Less than five hundred got across the stream, and after
that they had to wade waist-deep for half a mile over flooded marshes
under a pitiless fire from the Prussian batteries. In the end only 150
men reached dry ground alive. Among the survivors were just 40 men of
the Irish Legion, with their Eagle--Colonel Ware, eight officers, the
Eagle-bearer, and thirty privates. The Irish remnant made their way
eventually to Dresden, and reported themselves to Napoleon.
[Sidenote: THE IRISH EAGLE’S FIRST ESCAPE]
That adventure, by the way, was the Irish Eagle’s second escape from
falling into an enemy’s hands since Napoleon presented it to the Legion
on the Field of Mars. On the first occasion it came within an ace of
being now among our British trophy Eagles at Chelsea; of, indeed,
being the first Napoleonic Eagle to be brought as spoil of war to
England. The Irish Legion was in garrison at Flushing in 1809, when the
fortress surrendered to the British Walcheren Expedition. On the night
before the final capitulation, Major Lawless of the Irish Legion took
charge of the Eagle, and in a rowing-boat made a risky passage among
the British ships of war in front of the batteries. He escaped up the
Scheldt to Antwerp, where he delivered the Eagle personally to Marshal
Bernadotte. Napoleon sent for the major to Paris, decorated him for
saving the Eagle, with the Cross of the Legion of Honour, and promoted
him lieutenant-colonel.
In the disaster on the Bober also, a soldier of the 134th of the Line
saved the Eagle of another regiment, the 147th. The two regiments, as
the Prussians charged down on them after their cartridges gave out, in
desperation rushed to meet their assailants with the bayonet. They were
overpowered and hurled back in confusion to the bank of the river, all
intermingled in the _mêlée_. The Eagle-bearer of the 147th fell dead,
shot down, and a Prussian officer made for the Eagle. A soldier of the
134th bayoneted the officer as he got to it, picked up the Eagle, and,
seeing only more Prussians round him, flung himself, still holding on
to the Eagle, into the river. The man could not swim, and was fired at
as he floundered in the water, but he was not hit. Unable to reach the
other side, he somehow got on to a shallow patch, and, still holding
fast to the Eagle, kept his footing there, until, to get away from
the hail of bullets all round him, he again risked drowning by trying
to drift downstream. He managed to keep his head above water, and got
over to a bed of rushes, fringing the farther bank. Creeping in there,
still holding on closely to the Eagle, the brave fellow hid for six
hours until dark, embedded in mud to his armpits most of the time.
After nightfall he worked his way through and crawled ashore. Finally,
after wandering across country for eight days, feeding on berries and
what he could pick up, in constant peril of discovery among the hostile
peasants and parties of Prussian dragoons scouring the district, the
heroic soldier at length found his way to Dresden. There he was brought
before Marshal Berthier, to whom he delivered the Eagle.
[Sidenote: AT THE COST OF HIS LIFE]
At the battle of the Katzbach the colonel of the 132nd of the Line
threw away his life under the mistaken impression that he saw the
Eagle of his regiment captured by the enemy. He was short-sighted, and
suddenly missed it in the middle of a charge. Thinking he saw the Eagle
being carried off by a party of Prussians he rode straight through
the enemy at them, to fall mortally wounded halfway, with his horse
shot beneath him. Some of the men saw the colonel fall, and charged
after him. They got to him and carried him off the field, and in the
retreat until a place of safety was reached, where the survivors of the
regiment had rallied. There the officers came round to bid farewell to
their dying chief. The Eagle-bearer of the regiment was among them,
and he, to the amazement of all, produced the Eagle from his havresac,
broken from its staff, and held it up before the eyes of the dying
colonel. No enemy’s hand, he declared, had contaminated it. Finding
himself and the Eagle, he explained, in imminent danger of capture, he
had wrenched the Eagle off the staff and hidden it--his act causing the
disappearance which the colonel had marked, and which had resulted in
his fatal dash among the enemy.
The 17th of the Line saved their Eagle and themselves after Vandamme’s
defeat at Kulm, and made their way to safety, as one of the officers
relates, after an extraordinary series of adventures. They had joined
Vandamme’s army at the beginning of the first day’s fighting--the
battle lasted three days--coming in after a week’s march from Dresden,
through pouring rain most of the time. They numbered four battalions,
4,000 men in all. Vandamme was successful on the first two days and
the 17th by themselves routed an Austrian regiment and captured a gun.
On the evening of the second day the French advanced again, driving
the enemy before them into the valley of Kulm. They bivouacked on the
ground they had won, anticipating a final triumph on the morrow. But
during that night two Russian and Prussian army corps reinforced the
Austrian columns unknown to the French.
One of the officers of the 17th, Major Fantin des Odoards, during the
night had his suspicions aroused about the enemy, and made a discovery;
but Vandamme would not listen to him.
He was unable to sleep, says Major Fantin, and, learning from a patrol
that mysterious sounds were being heard in the direction in which the
Austrians had retreated, he left the bivouac and went out alone beyond
the outposts, to creep in the dark towards the Austrian watch-fires.
At times, as he crawled forward, describes the major, he lay flat and
listened with his ear to the ground. In the end he felt certain that
he heard the tramp and stir of a vast number of men, and also the
rumble of artillery wheels moving across the front. Apparently, from
the direction the unseen troops were taking, they were marching to cut
off the retreat of the army from Dresden, Napoleon’s base of operations
throughout the campaign.
Major Fantin returned to the bivouac and went at once to report to the
general, finding him asleep. He aroused Vandamme and told what he had
heard and suspected; only, however, to be rebuffed and rudely answered
that he was quite mistaken. Vandamme, a surly and ill-conditioned boor
to deal with at all times, awoke in a vile temper. “You are a fool!”
was what he said in reply. “If the enemy are on the move at all, they
are in retreat, trying to escape me. To-morrow will see them flying, or
my prisoners.” With that Vandamme terminated the interview, and turned
over and went to sleep again.
[Sidenote: HEMMED IN ON EVERY SIDE]
He found out his mistake all too soon. Daylight disclosed dense swarms
of Austrians, Prussians, and Russians in front of Vandamme, on his
flanks, and closing on his rear; outnumbering him nearly four to one.
It was a desperate position, for the only road by which Vandamme
might retreat was held by the enemy. Little time was left to him to
deliberate what to do. He was in the act of forming up his columns in
a mass to try to fight his way through, when the enemy attacked in
overpowering force. Before noon that day, out of 30,000 men, 10,000 had
fallen. Seven thousand more were wounded or prisoners. The rest were
fugitives, flying for shelter and hiding-places in the woods round
the battlefield. All the French guns and baggage had been taken, and
Vandamme himself was a prisoner, together with many officers of rank.
The “annals of modern warfare record few instances of defeat more
complete than that of Vandamme at Kulm.”
The only regiment that kept its order was the 17th, and it before
the crisis had lost heavily. Its colonel and two of the _chefs de
bataillon_ had been killed; the two others were wounded. Only some
1,700 of the 4,000 men remained. It rested with Major Fantin, as senior
officer, to save those that were left and the Eagle.
The 17th were on the extreme right of the battle, where they had been
posted as support to Vandamme’s artillery. They held their ground as
long as possible, but the enemy closed in on them, overlapping them
on both flanks, and then stormed and captured the guns. The 17th were
isolated and in imminent peril--surrender or destruction were the only
alternatives before them.
[Sidenote: “EN HAUT L’AIGLE!”]
Looking round, the major, as he describes, marked a wooded hill some
little way off, and decided to make for that. There was just time
to get away before the enemy closed in on them. He sent off all
his tirailleurs, about 400 men, to skirmish and hold in check the
advancing Austrians. As they went off he shouted to the rest: “En haut
l’Aigle! Ralliement au drapeau!” (“Display the Eagle! All rally to the
standard!”) The men of the regiment formed round him quickly, and the
major pointed out the wooded hill to them with his sword. “All of you
disperse at once,” he told them, “and make your way there as quickly
as you can. You will find the Eagle of the regiment there, and me with
it!” The 17th broke up and scattered, and, under the protection of the
skirmishers, aided by the opportune mist which hung low over the ground
after the heavy rains of the past week, they made off in groups in
the direction pointed out. All just got past the enemy in time, Major
Fantin and two officers accompanying the Eagle.
An hour later, “_nos débris_,” as the major puts it, were straggling up
the hill, where they again rallied round the Eagle. The skirmishers,
cleverly withdrawn at the right moment, evaded the enemy also, and
most of them joined their comrades on the hill, where all silently
drew together. They then moved off, to halt for concealment in a
wooded glade behind. They stayed there, keeping quiet and lying down
beside their arms, for several hours; off the track of the pursuit,
and undiscovered by the enemy. “We were all very hungry and without
anything but what cartridges we had still left.”
At nightfall they moved away in the direction in which Dresden was
judged to be, without having a single map or anything to guide them.
They marched all night, mostly by a forest road, and keeping their
direction by means of occasional glimpses of the stars seen through
rifts in the cloudy sky overhead. More than once they had to halt
as the enemy were heard on the move not far off. They groped their
way forward with extreme caution, not a light being struck, and the
necessary words of command being spoken in an undertone, until after
midnight. Then they suddenly came into the open round a bend of the
road, and discovered, not half a mile off in front, the numerous
watch-fires of a large body of troops. “The column halted at the sight
like one man and stood in absolute silence. Who were those in front of
us? Friends or the enemy?”
Two scouts were sent forward to try to find out. They were away for
half an hour; an interval of intense suspense and anxiety to the
others. At the end of the time the two scouts came rushing back. They
brought unexpectedly good news. It was a French bivouac: that of the
14th Army Corps--Marshal St. Cyr’s. So the 17th and their Eagle were
saved.
Other Eagles that got away from the rout at Kulm and rejoined the army
owed their safety to the determination of small groups of officers and
men who cut their way through the enemy. “Officers fought with their
swords, privates with their bayonets and the butts of their muskets:
and as the struggle was to escape and not to destroy, a push and
wrestle, or a blow, which might suffice to throw the individual struck
out of the way of the striker, prevented in many instances the more
deadly thrust.” Finally, as the 17th had done, they found shelter among
the woods and ravines of the neighbourhood, and lay low there until the
enemy had moved off towards Töplitz, whereupon they made their way to
Dresden. The cavalry saved their Eagles by cutting their way through
the enemy. They suffered heavy losses, but succeeded in their effort.
Their commander, General Corbineau, “presented himself, wounded and
covered with blood, before Napoleon”; it was his arrival that announced
the disaster. The Eagles of the 33rd and the 106th of the Line taken at
Kulm are at Vienna.
[Sidenote: THE EAGLE-TROPHIES OF LEIPSIC]
The three days of battle at Leipsic, between October 16 and 19,
1813, cost Napoleon 60,000 men in killed, wounded, and prisoners,
and 300 guns; but not more than 6 Eagles were among the trophies of
battalion-flags and squadron-colours taken or found on the field, now
at Berlin, Vienna, and St. Petersburg.
One Eagle was lost during the first day’s fighting at Leipsic--taken
on the 16th by Blücher from Ney’s corps; but no others were lost until
the end. The 80,000 men who were able to make good their retreat with
Napoleon across the bridge over the Elster before it was prematurely
blown up, through a non-commissioned officer’s blunder, carried their
Eagles with them. What colour-trophies came into the possession of
the Allies were taken amid the final scenes of carnage; from cut-off
battalions of the three divisions left behind on the right bank of
the river, victims of the destruction of the bridge. They were mostly
captured in the ferocious hand-to-hand fighting which marked the
closing phase of the battle in the suburbs of Leipsic. The French
defended themselves there to the last with the courage of despair among
the fortified villas and loopholed garden walls. “Pressed upon by
superior numbers, and fighting, now in the streets, now in the houses,
now through gardens or other enclosures, the single end which they
could accomplish or which in point of fact they seemed to desire, was
that they might sell their lives at the dearest rate possible.” Two at
least of the Eagles now at Berlin were hastily buried in gardens during
the last stand, and were dug up there later when the ground was being
turned over.
[Sidenote: AMIDST THE ROUT AT LEIPSIC]
Forced to give back before their ever-increasing enemies, not a few
of the French “preferred death to captivity, and fought to the last.
These, retiring through by-lanes and covered passages, made their way
to the river, some where the ruins of the bridge covered its banks,
some above and others below that point, and, plunging into the deep
water, endeavoured to gain the opposite shore by swimming, an attempt
in which comparatively few succeeded.”
The three doomed divisions of Lauriston, Regnier, and Poniatowski, who
were cut off by the blowing up of the bridge, had, as it happened,
not many Eagles among them to lose. They were largely made up of
newly raised conscript regiments to whom Napoleon had not yet awarded
Eagles; regiments not yet entitled to carry Eagles, according to the
later regulations that Napoleon had laid down. Only four of the newly
raised regiments altogether, so far during the campaign in Germany,
had qualified for the honour. They had received their Eagles with the
customary ceremony at the hands of Napoleon: three of them on October
15, the day before the battle of Leipsic opened. The fourth had
received its Eagle at Dresden a month earlier. Two of these four Eagles
only were lost to the enemy at Leipsic.
The Eagle-bearers of four or five other regiments among those cut off
by the bridge disaster tried to swim across the Elster with their
Eagles. Their fate is unknown; probably they were drowned in the
attempt. Other Eagle-bearers, before surrendering, were seen to fling
their Eagles into the river to sink there.
How one Eagle, during the battle on the 18th, was momentarily lost, and
then regained by a splendid act of valour, is told by Caulaincourt,
who was on Napoleon’s staff, and witnessed the gallant deed that
won the Eagle back. In the midst of the fighting, a number of Saxon
regiments abandoned Napoleon’s cause and went over _en masse_ to
the enemy. To signalise their defection they turned on the nearest
French regiment and mobbed it; attacking it at close quarters with
the bayonet. Thrown into confusion by the unexpected onslaught, the
French were for the moment broken and forced back, whereupon the
Saxons, making for the Eagle, got possession of it. “A young officer of
Hussars,” relates Caulaincourt, “whose name I forget, rushed headlong
into the enemies’ ranks. In the charge some of the miserable renegades
had carried off one of our Eagles. The gallant young officer rescued
it, but at the cost of his life. He threw the Eagle at the Emperor’s
feet, and then he himself fell, mortally wounded and bathed in blood.
The Emperor was deeply moved. ‘With such men,’ he exclaimed, ‘what
resources does not France possess!’”
The regiments left by Napoleon to garrison the fortresses in Germany,
at Stettin, at Magdeburg, Torgau, Dantzic, and elsewhere, previous to
surrendering took steps to prevent their Eagles falling into the hands
of their adversaries. In every case they destroyed them, smashing
the Eagles into small fragments, which were either distributed among
officers and men, or else thrown into the ditch of the fortress. In
more than one case they melted the Eagles down, and broke up and
buried the metal, while the flags were burned.
[Sidenote: KEPT FROM THE HANDS OF THE FOE]
At Dresden, where Marshal St. Cyr had to surrender, a month after
Leipsic, the terms granted by the Austrian general conducting the siege
allowed the troops to return to France with their arms, their baggage,
and their Eagles, seven in number. Superior authority, however,
cancelled the privilege. The garrison had already started on their
march when, to their utter consternation, the capitulation was abruptly
annulled by the Austrian Generalissimo, Schwartzenberg, with the result
that the hapless troops were compelled to yield themselves prisoners
at discretion. The soldiers were defenceless and could only submit to
their hard fate. They did not, however, let their seven Eagles pass
into the enemy’s hands. Five of the seven were broken up, and the flags
torn to pieces and divided among the regiments. Two of the Eagles,
those of the 25th of the Line and the 85th, were concealed intact by
two officers, who kept them from discovery for months, while they were
prisoners in Hungary. After the Peace, in the following year, they
brought them back to France--to meet there the doom that awaited all
the Eagles of Napoleon of which the officials of the Bourbon _régime_
got possession.
One memento of the Winter Campaign in Eastern France is now at the
Invalides--the Eagle of the 5th of the Line. It was found in the
river Aube at Arcis after the battle there, which, in its result,
decided the fate of Napoleon; its outcome being the immediate march of
the Allied armies on Paris. The 5th was one of the regiments of the
rearguard column, under Oudinot, half of which was drowned in the river
in trying to get across at night, after stubbornly holding out in the
town all the afternoon in order to enable Napoleon to cross the river
in safety. The 5th was one of the regiments that sacrificed themselves.
Its Eagle-bearer was among the drowned, and his Eagle sank with him. It
remained in the bed of the stream until long afterwards, when it was
accidentally discovered, and fished up.
The 132nd of the Line of the modern army of France commemorates on its
flag a feat of arms done under the Eagle of the old 132nd of Napoleon’s
Army, after having been saved from the Prussians at the Katzbach,
and again at Leipsic. It was in one of the fights in the closing
campaign in Eastern France. The proud legend inscribed in golden
letters, “Rosny, 1814: Un contre huit,” commemorates how the regiment,
single-handed, held at bay and beat off an enemy eight times its force,
saving itself for the third time, and its Eagle.
[Sidenote: THE GRAND ARMY’S LAST PARADE]
The surviving Eagles of the war, the last to face the enemy in the
north of those presented on the Field of Mars, paid their last salute
to the War Lord at Napoleon’s final review of the remnants of the
Grand Army at Rheims on March 15, 1814.
A pitiful, a moving, sight was that hapless military spectacle: the
closing parade before Napoleon of his last remaining soldiers.
This is how Alison describes it: “How different from the splendid
military spectacles of the Tuileres or Chammartin, which had so often
dazzled his sight with the pomp of apparently irresistible power!
Wasted away to half the numbers which they possessed when they crossed
the Marne a fortnight before, the greater part of the regiments
exhibited only the skeletons of military array. In some, more officers
than privates were to be seen in the ranks; in all, the appearance
of the troops, the haggard air of the men, their worn-out uniforms,
and the strange motley of which they were composed, bespoke the total
exhaustion of the Empire. It was evident to all that Napoleon was
expending his last resources. Besides the veterans of the Guard--the
iron men whom nothing could daunt, but whose tattered garments and
soiled accoutrements bespoke the dreadful fatigue to which they had
been subjected--were to be seen young conscripts, but recently torn
from the embraces of maternal love, and whose wan visages and faltering
steps told but too clearly that they were unequal to the weight of the
arms they bore. The gaunt figures and woeful aspect of the horses,
the broken carriages and blackened mouths of the guns, the crazy and
fractured artillery wagons which defiled past, the general confusion
of arms, battalions, and uniforms, even in the best appointed corps,
spoke of the mere remains of the vast military army which had so long
stood triumphant against the world in arms. The soldiers exhibited none
of their ancient enthusiasm as they defiled past the Emperor; silent
and sad they took their way before him: the stern realities of war had
chased away its enthusiastic ardour. All felt that in this dreadful
contest they themselves would perish, happy if they had not previously
witnessed the degradation of France!”[35]
What is indeed the most interesting of all the Eagles, the most famous
battle-standard in the world, which for a time was at the Invalides, is
at present preserved in private hands in Paris--the Eagle of Napoleon’s
Old Guard, the Eagle of the “Adieu of Fontainebleau.” It is treasured
with devoted care in the family of the officer who commanded the
Grenadiers of the Guard in the retreat from Moscow, at Fontainebleau,
and at Waterloo--General Petit. It is kept in the house, in Paris, in
which the old general died, in the room he used as his _salon_. General
Petit refused to be parted from the Eagle of his regiment during his
lifetime; he kept it with him wherever he went, always in his personal
care. It was at the Invalides while General Petit was in residence
there as Governor of the Hospital.
[Sidenote: THE OLD GUARD AT FONTAINEBLEAU]
On that never-to-be-forgotten April forenoon of 1814, in the Court of
the White Horse of the Château of Fontainebleau, Napoleon embraced the
standard, and taking the Eagle in his hands, kissed it in front of the
veteran Grenadiers of the Old Guard. His travelling carriage, to convey
the fallen Emperor on the first stage of his journey to Elba, was in
waiting, close by, ready to start. Twelve hundred Grenadiers of the
Guard stood with presented arms all round the courtyard; drawn up in a
great hollow square as a guard of honour to render to the master they
adored the parting salute.
Napoleon passed slowly round the square and inspected the ranks, man
by man, looking intently into the scarred and war-worn, weather-beaten
old faces, each one of which was familiar to him. Their station on
every battlefield had been close at hand to where he took up his post.
Night after night, in every campaign from Austerlitz to those last
dreadful weeks, he had slept in their midst; his tent always pitched
in the centre of the camp of the Imperial Guard. That had been
Napoleon’s invariable custom in war. They had shared with him that
last forlorn-hope march to save Paris, until, completely worn out and
footsore, exhausted nature forbade their attempting to go farther. With
tears streaming from their eyes the old soldiers, before whose bayonets
in the charge no Continental foe had ever stood, mutely returned
Napoleon’s last wistful, pathetic look of farewell.
He addressed a few touching words to them, standing in the centre of
the square. Next he turned to General Petit, near at hand, and before
them he took the general in his arms, as representing all, and kissed
him on the cheek. “I cannot embrace you all,” exclaimed Napoleon in a
voice broken with emotion, yet which all could hear distinctly, “so I
embrace your General!” Then he motioned to the Porte-Aigle, standing
all the while before him, with the Eagle held in the attitude of salute.
“Bring me the Eagle,” he said, “that I may embrace it also!” “Que
m’apporte l’Aigle, que je l’embrasse aussi!” were Napoleon’s words.
The Porte-Aigle advanced and again inclined the Eagle forward to the
Emperor. Napoleon took hold of it, embraced and kissed it three times,
tears in his eyes, and displaying the deepest emotion.
[Illustration: NAPOLEON’S FAREWELL TO THE OLD GUARD AT FONTAINEBLEAU.
From a print after H. Vernet, kindly lent by Messrs. T. H. Parker, 45,
Whitcomb Street.]
“Ah, chère Aigle,” he exclaimed, “que les baisers que je te donne
retentissent dans la postérité.”
The Eagle-bearer then stepped back a pace.
“Adieu, mes enfants! Adieu, mes braves! Entourez moi encore une fois!”
were Napoleon’s closing words as the historic scene terminated.
The old soldiers all stood utterly broken down, weeping bitter tears,
overcome with grief, as Napoleon made his way to the carriage; the
members of the Household bowing low as he passed, and kissing his hand,
were all also in tears.
Finally, amid a mournful cry of “Vive l’Empereur!” Napoleon drove away.
[Sidenote: ASHES MINGLED WITH WINE]
As soon as Napoleon’s carriage was beyond the precincts, the Grenadiers
of the Guard solemnly lowered the Imperial Standard, flying above the
Château. There, in the courtyard, they burned it. Then, mixing the
ashes in a barrel of wine that was brought out, they handed round the
liquor in bowls and drank off the draught, pledging Napoleon with cries
of “Vive l’Empereur!” So it is related by one who was an eye-witness
and a partaker; one of the officers of the Old Guard.
Kept safely in concealment for ten months by General Petit, during
the Bourbon Restoration period in 1814, the Eagle of the Old Guard
appeared once more after the return from Elba. It faced the enemy for
the last time at Waterloo. Something of that will be said further on.
General Petit kept close beside it all through the retreat, during that
night of horror after Waterloo; a faithful band of devoted veterans
accompanying him and surrounding the Eagle. So it made its final return
to France, to be preserved for the rest of his life by the man who,
above all others, had most right to be custodian of the Eagle of the
Old Guard.
The Bourbon War Minister ordered it to be given up, to be burned
at the artillery dépôt at Vincennes with the other Eagles that the
Restoration officials were able to get hold of. General Petit flatly
and indignantly refused to part with the Eagle of the Old Guard. He was
able, as before, to conceal it successfully, in spite of every effort
to discover its whereabouts, until after the Revolution of 1830. Then,
at the last, it was safe.
[Sidenote: THE FLAG OF THE OLD GUARD]
Faded and frayed away in parts, the gold embroidery on it dulled and
tarnished from the lapse of years, and torn here and there round the
jagged bullet-holes in the silk, is now, in its old age, the Flag of
the Old Guard. As it was at first--as it was when it made its débût at
the opening of its career, on that December afternoon on the Field of
Mars--the flag is of rich crimson silk, fringed with gold, sprinkled
over on both sides with golden bees, and with, at the corners,
encircled in golden laurel-wreaths, the Imperial cypher, the letter
“N.” In shape it was--and of course is still--almost a square: a metre
deep, vertically, on the staff, and some half-dozen inches more than
that lengthwise, horizontally, in the fly. On one side, in the centre,
the Napoleonic Eagle is displayed, a gold embroidered Eagle poised on a
thunderbolt. Inscribed round the Eagle in letters of gold is the legend:
“GARDE IMPÉRIALE
L’EMPEREUR NAPOLÉON
AU 1^{ER} RÉGIMENT DES
GRENADIERS À PIED.”
On the other side are inscribed these fifteen names of Napoleon’s great
days in war, also in golden letters: “Marengo; Ulm; Austerlitz; Jéna;
Berlin; Eylau; Friedland; Madrid; Eckmühl; Essling; Wagram; Vienna;
Smolensk; Moskowa; Moscow.”