The war drama of the Eagles

by Edward Fraser

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]

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.”

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.

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.

Photo Alinari.

MARSHAL NEY WITH THE REARGUARD IN THE RETREAT FROM MOSCOW.

From a picture by A. Ivon, at Versailles.

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.

“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!”

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.

NAPOLEON AND THE “SACRED SQUADRON” ON THE WAY TO THE BERESINA.

From the picture by H. Bellangé.

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]

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.