The war drama of the Eagles

by Edward Fraser

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

CHAPTER XI
THAT TERRIBLE MIDNIGHT AT THE INVALIDES

The Battalion Eagles of 1804, those of the second and third battalions withdrawn by the decree of 1808, together with the Light Cavalry (Hussar, Chasseur, and Dragoon) Eagles recalled in the autumn of 1805, and a number of Light Infantry Eagles returned to the Ministry of War at the end of 1807, perished in the flames of the great holocaust of trophy-flags at the Invalides on the night of March 30, 1814, the night of the surrender of Paris to the Allies.

It was on that tragic Wednesday night that the great sacrifice was made, amid the bowed and weeping old soldiers of France, the veterans of a hundred battlefields, on the most terrible and mournful occasion in the wide-ranging annals of the great institution which the Grand Monarque, in the full pride of his power, at the topmost pinnacle of his renown, founded and opened in person with grandiose martial pomp and State display. All was over for France on that night—

“Around a slaughtered army lay,

No more to conquer and to bleed:

The power and glory of the war

Had passed to the victorious Czar.”

The two marshals charged with the defence of Paris, Marmont and Mortier, had on that afternoon placed the submission of the capital in the hands of Alexander of Russia on the heights of Montmartre, whence, and from the Buttes Chaumont and the other northern heights from right to left, 300 loaded cannon pointed threateningly down over the vanquished and panic-stricken city, supported by the bayonets and sabres of 120,000 men, Russians and Prussians, Bavarians, Würtemburgers, and Austrians, flushed and exultant in their hour of supreme triumph, the soldiers of all the nations of the Continent at war with Napoleon.

NAPOLEON WITHIN TWELVE MILES

It was at ten o’clock on that fateful night for France that the great destruction of trophies at the Invalides took place. Napoleon had set his last stake, had attempted his desperate last manœuvre, and had failed. He had been foiled and baffled when within reach almost of his goal. At that very hour indeed, only twelve miles away, he had just been stopped in his wild midnight gallop, his final forlorn-hope effort to reach the capital, by the news that all hope was past, that the worst had happened, that Paris had fallen.

Only forty-eight hours before, on Monday night, at Saint-Dizier, a small town 170 miles away, had Napoleon suddenly realised the gravity of the catastrophe impending over Paris. He was at that moment in the act of dealing the Allies a counter-stroke which he confidently believed would save the situation and bring the enemy’s advance to a general stand. Just a week before, he had abruptly turned back in his retreat towards the capital and had boldly started to march across the rear of the Allies in the direction of the Rhine. He would sever their communications; he would cut the enemy off from their base. Calling out the levée en masse of the peasantry all over Eastern France, and at the same time rallying to him the garrisons of the French fortresses in Alsace and Lorraine, with 100,000 men at his disposal, led by Ney, Macdonald, Victor, and Oudinot, while two other marshals, Marmont and Mortier, held the enemy at bay in front of Paris, he was looking forward to checkmate the Allies at the last moment and paralyse their advance on the capital. It was a daring and masterly project; but the Fortune of War was against Napoleon. He had sent word of his plans to Marie Louise at the Tuileries, together with instructions to his brother Joseph, Governor of Paris, but on the way a Cossack patrol captured the bearer of the vitally important documents. Napoleon’s despatch for once was not in cypher, and its full import was apparent instantly. It was carried to the Czar Alexander, and forthwith laid before a hastily convened Russian council of war. Another letter, taken at the same time, laid bare the critical condition of affairs inside Paris itself; describing how all was in confusion there, and that treachery to the cause of the Empire was at work within the city. The council of war decided to pay no heed to Napoleon’s counter-stroke, and, instead, to march at once on Paris in full force. Marmont and Mortier, it was known, could barely muster 6,000 regulars. With Blücher’s Prussians, at that moment on the point of joining them, the Allies could bring into line not far short of 150,000 men. This final plan was agreed to on the afternoon of Friday, March 24, and the general advance began at once.

NAPOLEON’S BLANK DISMAY

Napoleon knew nothing of what was happening until late on the night of the 27th, the following Monday. Then he was suddenly made aware of the full position. “Nothing,” exclaimed the doomed Emperor in blank dismay, “but a thunderbolt can save us now.” The Allies then had not turned back! The enemy nearest him, whom he had planned to attack next day, believing them to be the Russian main army, was only—he discovered at the last moment—a cavalry division, sent back to delude him and prevent his finding out what was really going on. And the troops advancing on Paris were already three clear days ahead of him! Napoleon counter-marched his whole force at once to hasten to the rescue of the capital. They would take the route by Sens, Troyes, and Fontainebleau, making a sweep to keep clear of the enemy’s columns, and approach Paris by the south bank of the Seine. It was a long march of fully 180 miles, but there was no other way open. Marmont and Mortier, to whom the news of Napoleon’s intended approach was sent off immediately, must manage to hold out in front of the city on the north bank until the Emperor arrived.

Fresh news, however, and yet more serious, as to the imminence of the grave peril threatening Paris, reached Napoleon during Tuesday night. Leaving the army to follow, he pressed forward ahead of the troops by himself in his travelling-carriage, escorted only by the Old Guard. They hurried forward with feverish eagerness all that night and the next day, the men of the Guard panting along at the double in their effort to keep up. With hardly a halt, they struggled along, famishing—most of the men had tasted no cooked food for the past five days—shoeless most of them, plodding and splashing barefoot through the mud, ankle deep; under a pitiless downpour of rain all the time. By Wednesday evening, the 30th, they had reached Troyes, after a forty miles march without a stop. There, still worse news reached Napoleon. Marmont and Mortier had been disastrously defeated at Meaux, and in consequence their defence of the northern heights outside the city was all but hopeless.

AT FULL GALLOP FOR PARIS

Napoleon, on that, abandoned his travelling-carriage for a light post-chaise, which set off at a gallop. He must now risk a ride practically unattended, in the desperate hope of being able to evade hostile patrols and get by stealth into the city. Once there, he would himself take charge of the defence. The men of the Old Guard were left behind at Troyes. They were worn out and unable, from sheer exhaustion, to go a step farther. Only a troop of Cuirassiers rode with the post-chaise, and most of these had to give up and drop back as the chaise raced forward, Napoleon himself from time to time calling from the windows to the postillions to keep on flogging the horses and go faster and faster. At every stopping-place to change horses the Emperor sent off a courier to tell Paris to hold out; and at each post-house he received still more alarming messages from the city. Now he heard that the Empress and his little son had had to fly from Paris. Then he learned that the whole city was in a state of complete panic, with affrighted peasants from all round crowding in; the shops and banks all shut; the theatres closed, a thing that had not happened even at the height of the Reign of Terror; everywhere chaos and hopeless despair. After that came the news that the enemy were advancing so fast that they were expected at any moment before the City barriers.

At ten o’clock Napoleon arrived at the village of Fromenteau, near the Fountains of Juvisy, twelve and a half miles from Paris. The post-chaise had to stop there again for a relay of fresh horses. As it drew up, a party of soldiers passed by, coming from the direction of the capital. Not knowing who was in the chaise, some of them shouted out to the occupants, Napoleon, and Caulaincourt, who had been riding with the Emperor: “Paris has surrendered!”

The dread news struck Napoleon like a bullet between the eyes. “It is impossible! The men are mad!” he hissed out, gripping at the cushions of his seat. Then he turned to his companion: “Find an officer and bring him to me!”

One rode up, as it happened, at that moment, a General Belliard. Napoleon questioned him eagerly, and he gave the Emperor sufficient details to leave no doubt of what had befallen. Great drops of sweat stood on Napoleon’s forehead. He turned, quivering with excitement, to Caulaincourt. “Do you hear that?” he ejaculated hoarsely, fixing a gaze on his companion under the light of the lamps, the bare memory of which made Caulaincourt shudder ever after to his dying day.

They left the chaise, and looking across the Seine Napoleon saw to the north and east, in the direction of Villeneuve Saint-Georges, the glare of the enemy’s watch-fires. Marshal Berthier now came up in a second post-chaise which had been following the Emperor’s. Speaking excitedly, Napoleon declared that he would go on to Paris. He set off walking rapidly along the road in the dark, leaving the horses to be put to and the post-chaise to pick him up. Berthier and Caulaincourt attended him, and General Belliard and some dragoons followed at a few paces behind. Napoleon rejected every remonstrance and refused to turn back. “I asked them,” exclaimed Napoleon, talking half to himself, half to his companions, “to hold out for only twenty-four hours! Miserable wretches! Marmont swore that he would be cut to pieces rather than yield! And Joseph ran away: my own brother! To surrender the capital to the enemy: what poltroons!” So he went on in a breathless torrent of words. He added finally: “They have capitulated: betrayed their country; betrayed their Emperor; degraded France! It is too terrible! Every one has lost his head! When I am not there they do nothing but add blunder to blunder.”

“MISERABLE WRETCHES!”

But to go on, with Paris in the hands of an army of 150,000 men, was out of the question. Napoleon had to bow to the inevitable. He at length yielded to the protests of the others. He stopped beside the Fountains of Juvisy. “He sat down on the parapet of one of the fountains,” described Labédoyère, an eye-witness, “and remained above a quarter of an hour with his head resting on his hands, lost in the most painful reflections.” Then he rose, went back to the post-chaise, and, telling General Belliard to rally all the men he could at Essonne, set off to drive to Fontainebleau. He reached there at six next morning.

Between ten o’clock on Wednesday night and six o’clock on Thursday morning the tragedy at the Invalides was enacted. Its opening scene took place just as Napoleon’s post-chaise was drawing up in the village of Fromenteau. Its final scene took place just as the post-chaise was entering the courtyard of Fontainebleau.

The Capitulation of Paris was signed before the Barrier of La Villette at five in the afternoon. Its first article laid down that the French army must evacuate Paris within twelve hours: before five o’clock next morning. The last clause recommended the city to the mercy of the Allied Sovereigns, and of the Czar Alexander in particular.

All day long the booming of cannon and rattle of musketry had dinned in the ears of the trembling and terrified Parisians, ever steadily drawing nearer. The marshals, Marmont and Mortier, had made their last stand, and, resisting desperately to the last, in a struggle in which the Allies lost two to every one of the defenders, so ferocious was the contest, had been beaten back into the city. They carried back with them, so gallantly had they counter-attacked at one point, the standard of the Second Squadron of the Russian Garde du Corps—now a trophy in the present collection at the Invalides.

BEYOND ALL HOPE NOW

The outnumbered and exhausted troops could make no further fight, although, to the end, many of the soldiers were for holding out to the last cartridge. The Générale had beaten to arms at two in the morning; at six, with sunrise, the enemy’s guns opened fire; from then until late in the afternoon the fighting had gone on incessantly.

All was over by four o’clock. From east to west, from Charenton and Belleville, right round to Neuilly, the Allies, the Russians, Blücher’s Prussians, and the Austrians, had captured every position capable of defence, one after the other, by sheer weight of numbers, and had carried at the point of the bayonet every place of vantage held by the French. Woronzeff and the Prince of Würtemburg had stormed Romainville, La Villette, and La Chapelle. Langeron and the Russian Imperial Guard were masters of the heights of Montmartre and the Buttes Chaumont, looking down directly on Paris. Eighty-six guns had been taken from the marshals since the morning; nearly six thousand soldiers and National Guards had fallen, killed or wounded, facing the foe. A six-miles long line of batteries and battalions on the side of the Allies had closed in to within short musket range of the Paris barriers. Already the Russian cannon were opening fire on the city, and their shells were bursting over the central streets of Paris; falling, some in the Chaussée d’Antin and on the Boulevard des Italiens.

At four o’clock Marmont, who had been the soul of the defence, fighting, now on horseback, now on foot, using his sword at times—“the marshal was seen everywhere in the thickest of the fight, a dozen or more soldiers were bayoneted at his side, and his hat was riddled with bullets”—at four o’clock Marmont repassed within the barriers to announce that further defence was impossible. He was scarcely recognisable, we are told—“he had a beard of eight days’ growth; the great-coat which covered his uniform was in tatters; from head to foot he was blackened with powder-smoke.” Then had to be done the only thing that was left to do. Marmont and Mortier held a hasty conference, and after it a trumpeter and an aide de camp carrying a white flag rode out through the firing line to the nearest advanced post of the Allies. The officer was taken before the Czar Alexander on the plateau of Chaumont, and Paris surrendered. The last sounds that were heard on the French side as the firing ceased came from a battalion of the Imperial Guard which had been serving under Marmont, from a scanty remnant of veterans stubbornly resisting at bay to the last—shouts of “Vive l’Empereur!”

THE FLAG OF THE POLYTECHNIC

The old pensioners of the Invalides manfully did their duty, and bore their part in the defence all day, as well as they were able. All who could carry a musket had gone out to the barriers; others did their best by helping to bring up ammunition. Most of them fought at the Barrière du Trône on the Vincennes road, assisting the brave lads of the Polytechnic School to hold the post and man a battery of eight-and-twenty cannon in front of the barrier; until a headlong charge of Russian cavalry, Pahlen’s dragoons with some Cossacks, swooped down from the flank, annihilating the devoted band of gunners. Those of the boys who were left, however, saved the school flag, presented to the Polytechnic just ten years before by the Emperor with his own hand, on the Day of the Eagles on the Field of Mars. With the Invalides’ veterans and some of the National Guards, the survivors held the barrier throughout the day to the end, beating back repeated attempts of the Russians to storm the gate. The lads, finally, after learning that Marmont had capitulated, made their way back to the school, and there burned their precious standard to save it from falling into the enemy’s hands. Those who were left of the veterans hastened back to the Invalides at the same time, overcome with anxiety to learn what was to happen to their own priceless treasures within the Hospital, the trophy flags. There were at the Invalides at that time, by one account, 1417 trophy flags; according to another account—which included apparently in the total the returned Battalion and Light Infantry and Cavalry Eagles—altogether 1,800 standards.

Within the walls of the Invalides all was deep gloom and hopeless despondency among those in charge. Even at nightfall, as it would appear, the authorities had not made up their minds how the trophies were to be disposed of.

It is a hapless and pitiful story from first to last. Some time previously, while the Allied armies were still being kept at bay on the plains of Champagne, the Governor of the Invalides, old Marshal Serrurier, a distinguished veteran of the Revolutionary Army, had applied to the Minister of War for instructions as to the disposal of the trophies at the Invalides in the event of the enemy advancing on Paris. The only answer he received was a formal letter to the effect that the matter would have to go before the Emperor. At that time Napoleon was in the midst of his last forlorn-hope attempt to stem the tide of invasion; in the midst of a life-and-death struggle, fighting desperately day after day at one place or another. The Ministry of War apparently pigeon-holed the application after that, and forgot all about the trophies at the Invalides until the actual day of the attack on Paris—until that Wednesday forenoon.

FORGOTTEN UNTIL TOO LATE

Then, when already Marmont’s outer line of defence had been forced, and the last fight for the inner heights overlooking the city was raging furiously, almost within sight from the Invalides, a letter from the War Minister was handed to Serrurier. It “trusted that the Marshal had taken steps for the safety of the trophies; especially for the preservation of Frederick the Great’s sword. The flags,” continued the letter, “had best be detached from their staves, and rolled up carefully. The War Minister is sure that your Excellency will do all that is possible. The road to the Loire is open.” Such were the instructions sent to the Invalides after the eleventh hour! Then, during the afternoon, when the enemy’s bombshells, fired from the plateau of Chaumont, were falling in the heart of the city, a single artillery wagon, or fourgon, a vehicle barely large enough to remove a small percentage of what there was to carry away, drew up at the main gates of the Invalides. It brought also ten more trophy flags, collected from somewhere in Paris. In the general confusion nobody, it would seem, even inquired what they were or where they came from. The driver’s instructions were merely that “they were to go away with the Invalides trophies.” The ten flags were taken out and stacked in a corridor for the time being, while the fourgon waited unheeded at the gate until after dark.

What steps Marshal Serrurier took during the afternoon to secure adequate transport is unknown; or, indeed, what he did with himself all that time. The Governor was seen just before the dinner-hour in the Corridor d’Avignon, in an out-of-the-way part of the building, in conference with the Lieutenant-Governor and an adjutant-major. Another officer, Adjutant Vollerand, was with them, holding in his hands Frederick the Great’s sword and sash. Apparently they did not want to be observed, and were discussing how to hide the relics or bury them within the precincts of the Invalides. After that nothing more was seen of Serrurier at the Invalides until between nine and ten at night, some hours after the Capitulation, and when it had become known that the Allies intended to occupy Paris in force, and that their troops would enter and take possession of the city early next morning. Then the Governor reappeared.

A few minutes after nine o’clock the veterans of the Invalides, who had been restlessly pacing about the halls and corridors during the evening, or standing about in dejected groups in the courtyards, not knowing what they were to do, were suddenly summoned to muster at once in the Grand Court, or Cour d’Honneur. All turned out from the wards and paraded, forming up by the light of lanterns. All but those who were bedridden were brought out, the maimed and cripples being led out, or hobbling out on their crutches, together with the survivors of those who had fought so gallantly at the barriers during the day, their faces still begrimed with powder-smoke, their clothes torn and stained, some without their hats, their arms in slings, or with bandages over recent wounds. Then the tall, spare figure of the Governor, a grim, hard-featured old warrior, white-haired, over seventy years of age, was seen emerging from his quarters, with the senior staff-officers of the Hospital following in rear. Serrurier harangued the pensioners briefly. He told them that the enemy would enter the city next day and would present themselves at the Invalides to enforce the giving up of the trophies. What did the men of the Invalides desire should be done?

“LET US BURN THEM HERE!”

There was a pause for a moment; a dead silence, as the old soldiers gazed dumbfoundedly at one another. Then one man stepped out to the front and spoke up for the rest. A battle-scarred old sergeant-pensioner of the Grenadiers of the Old Guard answered the Governor on behalf of his comrades, his reply, greeted as it was by vociferous shouts of approval on every side, voicing the unanimous wish of the veterans. “If they will not let us keep our banners, let us burn them here! We will swallow the ashes!” The order to make a bonfire of the trophies then and there was issued forthwith.

Anything that came to hand for fuel was eagerly seized, and a great pile speedily made of broken-up stools and mess-tables and forms, hauled out from the barrack-rooms withindoors. They were stacked in a heap just in front of the pedestal on which it had been intended to erect an equestrian statue of the heroic Marshal Lannes, who died from his wounds at Aspern in the arms of Napoleon. Meanwhile, parties of men ran inside with ladders, and set to work to strip the dining-halls and the Chapel of the rows of flags hanging up there. They bore them outside, roughly bundled together in their arms; some, silently, with frowning, stern-set faces and set teeth; others beside themselves with rage, and cursing savagely aloud; others sullenly muttering oaths; not a few of the old fellows with tears streaming down their cheeks. They carried the trophies out and heaped them up into an immense funeral pyre. The battalion and other Eagles shared the fate of the captured trophies—standards, some of these, that had been borne under fire in the thick of triumphant battle at Austerlitz, and Jena, at Auerstadt and Friedland—to save them on the morrow from falling into the hands of those in whose defeat and humiliation they had had their part. The fire was lighted and the masses of tattered silk blazed up furiously. When the flames were at their fiercest, Marshal Serrurier stepped forward and with his own hand flung into the midst of the fiery mass the sword of Frederick the Great.

For half the night the veterans stood round and watched the flames complete the work of destruction. They stood massed round in a densely packed throng of sullen, gloomy, brokenhearted men. They stayed there until long after midnight, gazing, in a state of dull despair, at the fire; while some now and again stirred up the glowing fuel and made the flames leap up afresh, roaring and crackling and casting a dull red throbbing glare over the old walls and rows of windows all round, and gleaming on the lofty gilded dome of the Invalides, in itself an intended memento of victory. On first seeing the golden domes of the Kremlin as he approached Moscow, Napoleon had sent orders to Paris to have the dome of the Invalides gilded as a memorial of his achievement of the goal of the campaign! Most of the veterans stood there throughout the greater part of that cold March night, watching until the fire had died down and only a great heap of smouldering cinders remained; all that was left of the trophies of victorious France.

THE TROPHIES OF TWO CENTURIES

Among the vast array of foreign trophies at the Invalides that perished on that night were English flags nearly two centuries old, the remains of the spoil of some forty-four English banners of Charles the First’s soldiers, triumphantly carried to Paris from the Ile de Rhé in November 1627 and hung in Notre Dame. Others flags destroyed there, too, dated from the wars of the Grand Monarque; spoils won on the battlefield by the famous Condé and Turenne; also trophies taken from William the Third at Steenkirk and Landen and elsewhere; the British and Dutch and Danish and Bavarian ensigns won by Turenne’s great successor, Marshal Luxembourg, “le Tapissier de Notre Dame,” as they dubbed him at Versailles, for the almost innumerable trophies sent by Luxembourg to be hung up in the Cathedral of Paris, with State processions and Te Deums in the presence of the King. Other British battle-spoils, the trophies of France, which passed out of existence at the Invalides on that night were these: a flag taken at Fontenoy by the Irish Brigade; the regimental colours surrendered by the garrison of Minorca which Admiral Byng failed to rescue; those of another British garrison of Minorca of the time of the Great Siege of Gibraltar, when France, for the second time, wrested the island from England; four British and Hessian regimental flags surrendered to Washington at Yorktown and sent by Congress as a gift to the King of France; flags taken by the French from British West India garrisons in the same war; besides British naval ensigns also taken during the American War, with other British ship-flags, some of which indeed dated from the earlier battle times of Duguay Trouin and Jean Bart. Destroyed at the Invalides also on that Wednesday night was a British naval ensign from Trafalgar. It had been hoisted on board one of Nelson’s prizes, the Algéciras. In the storm after the battle the ship was in imminent peril of wreck, and the French prisoners on board were liberated in order to help to save her. They used their freedom to overpower the small British prize-crew and carried the vessel off into Cadiz, whence the British ensign, hoisted originally in triumph over the French tricolor during the battle of two days before, on the Algéciras being captured, was sent as a trophy to Paris. There were also destroyed at the Invalides at the same time the ensign of Lord Cochrane’s famous brig-of-war, the Speedy, captured in the Mediterranean in 1801, and those of three British line-of-battle ships, the Berwick, the Swiftsure, and the Hannibal, taken within the previous twenty years.

SPOILS TAKEN IN NAVAL FIGHTS

Most of the trophies won by Napoleon and the Grand Army all over Europe, and by the Armies of the Republic and Consulate before that, perished in the holocaust: the spoils of Valmy and Fleurus and Jemmapes; of Hohenlinden; of Dego and Mondovi; of Rivoli and Montenotte; of Castiglione, Lodi, and Arcola; of Zurich and Marengo, and other victories. On that night, too, passed out of existence the famous flag of the Army of Italy presented by Napoleon, and bearing inscribed on it the names of eighty triumphs on the battlefield and the detailed record of the taking of 150,000 prisoners, 170 standards, 550 siege-guns, and 600 pieces of field artillery; the Horse-tail banners of the Mamelukes, taken by Napoleon at the battle of the Pyramids; the historic standard of the Knights of St. John, won in hand-to-hand fight outside the main gate of Valetta. Most of the 340 Prussian standards Napoleon sent to Paris after the Jena campaign, together with the sword and Black Eagle sash of Frederick the Great, as well as the recovered French trophies of the Seven Years’ War, originally won by Frederick at Rosbach, the standards of Frederick the Great’s Guards, and Austrian spoils taken by the Prussians at Leuthen, Kolin, and Hohenfriedburg, all of which had been carried off to Paris by Napoleon—these were among the war-treasures destroyed at the Invalides on that night. With them went into the flames the Grand Army’s Russian trophies from Eylau and Friedland, the Austrian trophies from Eckmühl and Wagram, besides many Spanish and Portuguese trophies taken before Wellington landed in the Peninsula to turn the tide of war.

AFTER DUPONT’S SURRENDER

One French Eagle which perished on that night was the survivor of a disaster: Dupont’s surrender at Bailen in Andalusia in 1808,[36] at the outset of the Spanish insurrection; that cruel humiliation for the arms of France, the news of which came on Europe with all the startling effect of a thunderclap, and drove Napoleon nearly frantic in his furious indignation. It had been one of three Eagles taken by the Spaniards, that of the 24me Légère, and had been recovered by the daring of an officer of the regiment, one of the prisoners, Captain Lanusse. Confined in a prison-hulk at Cadiz, he escaped to shore one night, managed to find out where his regiment’s flag was kept, displayed as a Spanish trophy, got hold of it, and then made his way outside the city into the lines of the besieging French army. There he presented the Eagle to Marshal Soult, who forwarded it direct to Napoleon. Lanusse, as his reward, was promoted a chef de bataillon of the 8th of the Line, and fell to the bayonet of a British soldier of the 87th Royal Irish Fusiliers at Barrosa. The recovered Eagle Napoleon sent to the Invalides.

By morning all that remained of the proud trophies of France at the Invalides was a heap of grey ashes, fragments of charred flag-poles, and scraps of partly molten metal. The débris was raked up at daylight, and shovelled into the artillery fourgon of the previous afternoon, which had been standing all night outside the main gate of the Invalides. The artillery wagon drove off with it to the Seine near by and emptied the heap into the river. That was the end of the night’s destruction.

ALL THAT WAS DREDGED UP

Some portion of the débris was recovered from the Seine a year afterwards, and is preserved in the Chapel of the Invalides now. In June 1815 a workman, doing some repairs by the riverside, discovered a portion of a flag under water, and on hearing of that, two patriotic young Frenchmen, an engineer and a journalist, privately set to work soon afterwards to see if they could fish up anything that might be worth preserving. At the time the Allies were in possession of Paris, during the second occupation, after Waterloo, and the two young men had to proceed cautiously. They were successful in the end in recovering portions of 183 trophies, metal spear-head ornaments, from ensign-staves mostly. Seventy-eight were later identified as of Austrian origin; one as part of a British flag; two as having belonged to Russian standards; various fragments as the remains of thirty-nine Prussian standards; four from Spanish flags with Bourbon fleurs-de-lis; and two fragments of Turkish standards from Egypt. The remainder of the salvage it was impossible to identify.

That the great sacrifice had not been made in vain, was speedily apparent. In the course of the morning after the bonfire, a little before noon on Thursday, March 31, within two hours of the entry into Paris of the vanguard of the Allied armies, a Russian aide de camp presented himself at the Invalides, and, in the name of the Allied sovereigns, demanded a statement of the trophies kept there. The officer came up on horseback, accompanied by a mounted man of the National Guard, and an armed escort of Russian dragoons. The main gate was open as usual, and the Russian officer rode through without taking notice of the gate-sentry’s challenge. He was only stopped by a rush of the pensioners’ day-guard, called out by the sentry’s shout of alarm—“Aux armes!” The guard turned out and faced the aide de camp with lowered halberds. The Russian colonel protested, but the officer on duty refused to let him pass without orders from his own chief, and General Darnaud, the Lieutenant-Governor, was sent for. That officer came, and the Russian dismounted and explained his mission. He had orders, he said, to “take cognisance” of the trophies of the Invalides. General Darnaud replied bluntly: “Very good, I will permit you to visit the Hôtel. Come with me!” The general added: “As to the trophies, sir, we have dealt with them according to the laws of war!” “On en avait agi suivant les lois de guerre!” were his words. The Russian did not seem to grasp the general’s meaning, and stood still for a moment, staring blankly at him. On that, Madame Darnaud, the Lieutenant-Governor’s wife, who had followed into the courtyard immediately after her husband, interposed. She addressed the officer, speaking volubly and angrily, but only to draw down on herself from the Russian the uncivil rejoinder that he had not come there to talk to a woman! After that, the general, accompanied by some of the men of the main guard with shouldered halberds, formally conducted the officer inside the Invalides, the party taking their way along the colonnade round the Court of Honour, in the midst of which could be seen the wide burnt-out space where the fire had been, the pungent smell of the fumes from which still hung about the place, and so into the Chapel of St. Louis. There the scene that met the Russian aide de camp’s eyes seemed to stagger him: bare blank walls, the gallery stripped and defaced; with empty and broken metal sockets here and there to show where the flags had been fastened up. The interior had been entirely cleared from end to end along the sides. It was absolutely unrecognisable to any who had seen it before. The Russian officer, who had visited the Invalides six or seven years previously, after Tilsit, could only gaze round dumbly, utterly taken aback. He muttered something, but did not speak aloud. Then, glaring round savagely into the eyes of those about him, he turned away abruptly, and was conducted to the Outer Court, where he remounted his horse, and rode off hastily in the direction whence he had come.

THE WALLS STRIPPED AND BARE

All Napoleon’s trophies, however, did not perish at the Invalides. Some of the Grand Army’s captured flags, as it so chanced, escaped destruction on that night, and are at the Invalides now. They are in the Chapel and in the Salle Turenne, besides half a hundred in the Crypt, grouped round Napoleon’s tomb. The forty-five Austrian flags taken at Ulm are beside Napoleon’s tomb, with nine other flags. Presented by the Emperor to the Senate, as has been told, the Ulm trophies, during the night of March 30, were hastily taken down from where they had been hung in the Grand Salon for the past nine years, and hidden in a vault below. They made a second public appearance on the occasion of Napoleon’s funeral at the Invalides in 1840, when they were placed at the head of the coffin. They have ever since been kept beside the tomb.

The Austerlitz trophies met another fate. Kept at Notre Dame, they disappeared mysteriously from there in the early morning of the day of the entry of the Allies into Paris. At three in the morning of March 31 an urgent message from the Prefect of the Seine was delivered at Notre Dame, calling on the Cathedral authorities to take down and conceal the Austerlitz trophies at once. The Chapter met hastily in the Archbishop’s room, and the flags were all down within half an hour. They have never been seen since, nor was their fate ever accounted for.

HOW FIFTY-ONE FLAGS WERE SAVED

At the Luxembourg Palace were displayed 110 trophies, the spoils of the Eagles, won from all the nations of Europe and presented to the Corps Legislatif by Napoleon. They were safely removed on the night of March 30, and were hidden securely. Brought out and set up again a year later, on Napoleon’s return from Elba, the authorities forgot about hiding them again in the confusion after Waterloo. As the result more than half of them are now in Berlin. Blücher sent a party of staff officers to seize the entire collection, but a sharp-witted functionary hoodwinked the Prussians on their arrival. They went back to get written orders, and before they returned, as many as possible of the trophies had been pulled down and got out of the way. One of the attendants managed the affair on his own initiative, a hall-porter named Mathieu. He was able to save and hide as many as fifty-one of the flags, and they have since been forwarded to the Invalides. The other fifty-nine trophies the Prussians seized and carried off. Two Austrian standards taken by Napoleon at Marengo escaped destruction by having been previously lent from the Invalides to an artist, Charles Vernet, for a battle-picture he had been commissioned to paint for Napoleon. They were in Vernet’s studio in March 1814. His son, Horace Vernet, returned them in later days to the Invalides, where they now are.

In addition, it would seem, at least a moiety of the Invalides trophies were kept back at the last moment by some of the veterans themselves. Several of the old soldiers, it would appear, after stripping down the flags from the walls, instead of carrying all out into the courtyard to the bonfire, retained and hid a few of them on their own account, to smuggle them outside afterwards and keep them in concealment.[37]

CHAPTER XII
THE EAGLES OF THE LAST ARMY

The Eagles came back to France with the return of Napoleon from Elba; to lead the last Army to the campaign of the Hundred Days.

They “flew from steeple to steeple across France,” in Napoleon’s expressive phrase, “from the shores of Fréjus until they alighted on the towers of Notre Dame.” The enthusiasm that greeted their reappearance spread like wild-fire; it blazed up like an exploding magazine. The rapturous acclamation and enthusiasm with which the Eagles were welcomed back was the measure of the prevailing discontent and resentment among the soldiers at the harsh and unworthy treatment they had received during the ten months of the restored régime.

The Army had come off badly by its change of masters. The Bourbons had done all in their power to alienate its regard; as much through malice in not a few cases, as through downright stupidity.

“Of all the institutions of France the most thoroughly national and the most thoroughly democratic was the Army; it was accordingly against the Army that the noblesse directed its first efforts. Financial difficulties made a large reduction in the forces necessary. Fourteen thousand officers and sergeants were accordingly dismissed on half-pay; but no sooner had this measure of economy been effected than a multitude of emigrants who had served against the Republic in the army of the Prince of Condé or in La Vendée were rewarded with all degrees of military rank.... The tricolor, under which every battle of France had been fought from Jemmapes to Montmartre, was superseded by the white flag of the House of Bourbon, under which no living soldier had marched to victory.... The Imperial Guard was removed from service at the Palace, and the so-called Military Household of the old Bourbon monarchy revived, with the privileges and the insignia belonging to the period before 1775.”

The abolition of the Eagles was the preliminary step of all. A justifiable measure, no doubt, from a political point of view, it touched to the quick the military instinct of the nation. And on that followed the abolition of the national tricolor in favour of the old Bourbon white flag.

EVERY ONE TO BE DESTROYED

Within three weeks of the Farewell of Fontainebleau the Eagles of the Army, with the tricolor standards, were officially proscribed; the order went forth to send them to Paris forthwith for destruction in the furnaces of the artillery dépôt at Vincennes. On May 12 it was notified that the white Bourbon flag was again to be the standard of the Army, with a brass fleur-de-lis at the head of the colour-staff in place of the Eagle.

Every regiment was required to send its Eagle to the Ministry of War in Paris on receipt of the order. No allowances or exceptions were made; although in several instances officers urgently petitioned to be allowed to retain their Eagles with the corps, if only as mementoes of feats of arms achieved by the regiments in battle. Every request was rejected, whatever the circumstances. There were reasons of State policy no doubt, as has been said, against the general retention as regimental standards of military insignia so intimately associated with Napoleon; but in certain instances, at least, indulgence might reasonably have been extended to the applications. There were personal and romantic associations connected with some of the Eagles, specially endearing them to the soldiers, for which privilege might well have been accorded. One very hard case may be cited as typical of others: that of the Eagle of the 25th of the Line.

The Eagle of the 25th had been carried under fire in some twenty battles and all through the Moscow campaign; and had notable battle-scars to show for its distinguished services. One leg and one wing of the Eagle had been shot away in action, and there were five bullet-holes in its metal body. Its maimed appearance, indeed, had attracted Napoleon’s attention at a review, and he had stopped while riding past the regiment and taken the Eagle into his hands, examining it with extreme interest and putting his fingers into the bullet-holes, finally returning it to the Porte-Aigle with a deep bow of respect. The regiment almost worshipped their Eagle on its own account, for what it had gone through; but it had further undergone yet more surprising adventures. The 25th had been in the garrison of Dresden in 1813 when Marshal St. Cyr had to capitulate to the Austrians. On the night before the surrender the Eagle-staff was broken up and burned, and the few strips of ragged silk that remained of the shot-torn regimental tricolor flag were tied under an officer’s uniform for secret conveyance out of the city. The shattered Eagle broke in two while being removed from its staff, and its two fragments were concealed under the petticoats of two vivandières who were to convey it in that manner to the regimental dépôt in France. Under the capitulation the garrison was granted the honours of war and a safe-conduct back to France. The terms, however, were annulled by the Allied Sovereigns then advancing, after Leipsic, to invade France, and in the outcome all the regiments, after they had started for France, were made prisoners and marched away to be interned in Hungary. The major of the 25th got back the two fragments of the Eagle, stowed them away under his uniform, and kept them about him by day and night for five months; until finally, on his release after Napoleon’s abdication, he brought the Eagle back across the Rhine, “wrapped up like contraband.”

“SEND IT TO PARIS FORTHWITH!”

On the 25th receiving the order to send in its Eagle for destruction, he wrote personally to the Minister of War—General Dupont, of Bailen notoriety, as has been said—who had never forgiven Napoleon’s harsh usage of him, and now took every opportunity of paying back old scores on the heads of his former comrades in arms. The major wrote setting forth in detail the story of the regimental Eagle, relating its exceptionally interesting career and its battle damages, also how he had preserved it after Dresden, and implored the War Minister, in the name of the regiment, that they might retain the two fragments to be kept in the regimental “Salle d’Honneur” as an honoured relic. The reply was a peremptorily worded command to send the Eagle to Paris forthwith for destruction with the other Eagles of the Army. The major, in the circumstances, considered himself compelled to comply. He summoned the officers to his quarters, where they “paid their last adieux to the object of veneration, and then, in their presence, the Eagle fragments were packed in a box, and despatched to the Ministry of War.”

The story, with others to the same effect, went the round of every barrack-room in France, and wherever it was told, there were angry murmurings and increased discontent.

By no means all the Eagles of the Army, it would appear, were given up to the authorities in Paris. Not a few colonels flatly refused to comply with Dupont’s order, taking the risk of prosecution or of being turned out of the service summarily—a certainty in any event under the new régime, as the majority of the senior regimental officers anticipated, and as actually came to pass. General Petit of the Grenadiers of the Old Guard, as has already been said, refused to give up that famous Eagle, and concealed it successfully; and not a few other officers did the same with the Eagles of their corps. Others destroyed their regimental Eagles and either burned the silken tricolor flags, or cut them up; dividing the ashes or fragments among their comrades.

Their Eagles taken away, it was next made known to the Army, that the “battle honours” and war distinctions of the various corps, won under Napoleon, would not appear on the new regimental flags when issued. “Austerlitz,” “Jena,” “Friedland,” and the other names of pride to the Grand Army, were henceforward to be erased from military recognition. The new flags, when publicly distributed in September 1814, showed each a blank white field, with on it only an oval shield, bearing the three fleurs-de-lis, the Royal Bourbon cognisance, and the name of the corps—its new name, revived from Army Lists of the Old Monarchy, a name long since forgotten and totally unfamiliar.

NO MORE REGIMENTAL NUMBERS

The regimental numbers of the Grand Army, ennobled by glorious campaigns, immortalised by their associations of victory and brilliant feats of arms, instinct with a renown acquired on a hundred battlefields all over Europe, were at the same time done away with by a stroke of the War Minister’s pen. That proved the most unpopular measure of all; the cruellest of blows to the esprit de corps and pride of the former soldiers of Napoleon. It was felt as a gratuitous insult; it was perhaps the most deeply resented injury of all. In future, in place of their treasured regimental numbers, the various corps of the Army, horse and foot, were to be known by departmental or territorial names—meaningless to nine soldiers out of ten, and without traditions—or else by the names of royal princes and princesses, and titled personages, remembered only, some of them, as having fled on the battlefield before the national armies. Bercheney and Chamborant Hussars, Orléans Dragoons and Chasseurs, Regiments d’Artois, de Berri, d’Armagnac, d’Angoulême, de Monsieur, d’Anjou, and so forth—what traditions had designations such as these to compare with, to mention in the same breath with, the traditions immortally associated with the numbers, familiar as household words wherever French soldiers met together, of the dragoon and chasseur regiments which Murat had led at Austerlitz, of the dashing hussars of Lassalle, of the cuirassiers whose resistless onset had swept the field at Jena, of the horsemen at the sight of whose sabres before their gates Prussian fortresses had surrendered at discretion? It came with a sense of personal degradation, as a sort of desecration on the men of regiments like the 75th of the Line, or the 32nd, the 9th Light Infantry or the 84th, or the 35th, or “Le terrible 57me”—to be labelled and hear themselves officially addressed on parade as “Beauvoisis” or “Auxerre” or “Nivernais,” by the name of some prosaic locality, or the style of some ancient aristocrat, their titular colonel.[38]

AT THE HEAD OF THE “ELBA GUARD”

Napoleon announced the return of the Eagle in his first address to the Army, sent off on his landing to be distributed broadcast among the soldiers. “Come and range yourselves under the banners of your chief.... Victory shall march at the pas de charge: the Eagle with the national colours shall fly from steeple to steeple to the towers of Notre Dame!”

The first of the regimental Eagles to make its appearance in France accompanied Napoleon from Elba and landed with him. It was the Eagle of the six hundred veterans of the Old Guard who, as the “Elba Guard,” had volunteered to share Napoleon’s exile, and had formed his personal escort. It figured in the historic scene at Grenoble a week after the landing, where Napoleon, on meeting the first soldiers sent to arrest his advance, by the magic of his presence and the sight of the Eagle borne behind him, so dramatically won over to his side the former 5th of the Line, the first regiment of the Army to throw in its lot with Napoleon after Elba. The Eagle that had its part on the historic occasion—with its silken tricolor flag, embroidered with silver wreaths and scrollery, and golden bees, crowns and Imperial cyphers, and inscribed “L’Empereur Napoléon à la Garde Nationale de l’Ile Elba”—is now in private possession in England. It fell by some means into the hands of a Prussian soldier at the occupation of Paris after Waterloo and was sold a few weeks later to a visitor to Paris. In the dramatic scene of the meeting of Napoleon with the 5th of the Line, General Cambronne, Commander of the Elba Guard, bore the Eagle a few paces behind Napoleon and held it up appealingly to the regiment.

“LET ANY WHO WISHES—FIRE!”

The 5th of the Line, says one story, vouched for by an eye-witness, was marching out to block a narrow gorge through which ran the road Napoleon was known to be taking. At some little way off, his party was seen approaching, he himself being readily recognised by his small cocked hat and redingote gris. Immediately the men were formed up across the road, and, as Napoleon came nearer, they were ordered to make ready and present. They did so: the muskets came up and were levelled. Then came a pause; dead silence; an interval of breathless suspense. Napoleon’s own action decided the issue. Stepping rapidly forward, opening and throwing back his great-coat as he did so, he called aloud to the regiment: “Soldats, voilà votre Empereur! Que celui d’entre vous qui voudra le tuer, faire feu sur lui!” (“Soldiers, here is your Emperor! Let any one who wishes to kill him fire on him!”) A Royalist officer hastily called out the order: “Le voilà! donnez feu, soldats!” But not a shot came. The next instant, with shouts of “Vive l’Empereur!” the soldiers lowered their muskets, broke their ranks, and rushed forward to surround Napoleon and welcome him in a frenzy of enthusiasm.

According to another story, this is what took place. Before the word “Fire!” could be given, Napoleon had stepped forward, close up to the muzzles of the levelled muskets. With a smile on his face he began in his usual colloquial, familiar way when talking to the men: “Well, soldiers of the 5th, how are you all? I am come to see you again: is there any one of you who wishes to kill me?” Shouts came in reply of “No, no, Sire! certainly not!” The muskets went down; Napoleon passed along the ranks, inspecting the men just as of old; after that the regiment faced about, took the lead of the party, and, with Napoleon in the middle and the “Elba Guard” bringing up the rear, all marched on towards Grenoble.

MARSHAL NEY’S DILEMMA

There, meanwhile, events had been moving rapidly. The commandant of the garrison was an émigré officer, but most of the troops had been won over for Napoleon by Colonel Labédoyère, at the head of the 7th of the Line. The commandant ordered the gates to be closed, which was done; also the cannon on the ramparts to be loaded. That order was duly obeyed; “but the men rammed home the cannon-balls first, before putting in the powder, so that the guns were useless.” Labédoyère marched out with his regiment to meet Napoleon, the band playing, “and carrying the Eagle of the regiment, which had been concealed and preserved.” They met Napoleon a short distance from Grenoble and, with the 5th, led the way in, arriving after dark. “On Napoleon’s approach, the populace thronged the ramparts with torches; the gates were burst open; Napoleon was borne through the town in triumph by a wild and intermingled crowd of soldiers and workpeople.”[39]

Napoleon entered Paris on the night of March 20. The Eagles made their first appearance in the capital next day. They had been officially restored as the standards of the Army by an Imperial decree issued on March 13 from Lyons.

AT THE FIRST REVIEW IN PARIS

Paris saw them again first at the review of the garrison of the capital which Napoleon held within twenty-four hours of his arrival; on the Place du Carrousel, in front of the Tuileries. There too the Imperial Guard, reconstituted that same morning, made their public reappearance. In the midst of the brilliant scene, as Napoleon was ending the address of personal thanks for their loyalty that he made to the assembled troops in dramatic style, suddenly General Cambronne marched on to the parade at the head of the Elba Six Hundred, with drums beating and escorting the former Eagles of the Guard. Drawing up in line ceremoniously, the “Elba Guard” halted before Napoleon, saluting and dipping the Eagles forward. A frantic roar of enthusiastic cheering greeted the salute of the Eagles.

Napoleon took instant advantage of the first pause as the cheering subsided. Pointing to the veterans just arrived, and standing with the Eagles ranged in front of them, held on high at arm’s-length by their bearers, he again addressed the assembled troops. “They bring back to you the Eagles which are to serve as your rallying-point. In giving them to the Guard, I give them to the whole Army. Treason and misfortune have cast over them a veil of mourning; but they now reappear resplendent in their old glory. Swear to me, soldiers, that these Eagles shall always be found where the welfare of the nation calls them, and those who would invade our land again shall not be able to endure their glance!” “We swear it! We swear it!” was the answer that came back amid tumultuous shouts from every side.

ONCE MORE THE FIELD OF MARS

The Eagles restored by proclamation as the standards of the Army, and the regiments reconstituted by their old numbers, to the unbounded gratification of the soldiers everywhere, another Imperial proclamation announced that Napoleon would once again personally distribute new Eagles to the regiments. The ceremony of the Field of Mars of ten years before would be repeated. The Emperor, with his own hand, would present each Eagle to a regimental deputation, which would specially attend in Paris to receive it. To give the utmost possible éclat also to the proceedings on the occasion, just as the former presentation of the Eagles had been made an integral feature of the Coronation celebration, so now the forthcoming distribution would take place at the same time that Napoleon renewed his Imperial oath of fidelity to the Constitution, as reshaped by the “Acte Additionel,” which had been drafted to comply with the political exigencies of the moment.

The date provisionally fixed was towards the end of May. By that time the returns of the Plébiscite voting, to authorise the re-establishment of the Empire, would be known. The historic event takes its name of the “Champ de Mai” from the date proposed for it, although, in actual fact, the ceremony took place on June 1. The place appointed was where the former distribution of the Eagles had been made, the Field of Mars, the wide open space in front of the Military School, and the display was to be on no less grandiose scale than its predecessor.

Immense wooden stands were erected all round the Field of Mars, with tiers of benches, to seat, it was calculated, as many as two hundred thousand people. In front of the Military School was set up an Imperial throne, under a canopy of crimson silk, and elevated on a gorgeously decorated platform. Napoleon was to take his new Imperial oath from the throne, and thereupon formally attach his signature to the “Acte Additionel.” There was to be a religious service also, and for that an altar was erected at one side of the throne, raised on steps and draped in red damask, picked out with gold. The balconies and stands all round were draped and hung with tricolor flags, festooned amid gilded Eagles, and heraldic insignia, and emblematic figures meant to typify the prosperity and glory awaiting France under the returned Imperial régime. As on the previous occasion, all the celebrities of France were invited, and had their allotted places on the stands nearest the throne. As before, too, the central arena was packed with a dense array of troops; the deputations called up to receive the Eagles, the massed battalions of the Imperial Guard, and detachments of all the regiments of the garrison of Paris. It was a radiantly fine summer’s day, and the display offered a spectacle of surpassing brilliance. Says one of the officers: “The sun flashing on 50,000 bayonets seemed to make the vast space sparkle!”

A hundred cannon fired from the Esplanade of the Invalides ushered in the day of the “Champ de Mai.” Again, at ten o’clock, the artillery thundered forth as Napoleon quitted the Tuileries in State to take his way to the Field of Mars, “amid prodigious crowds of spectators applauding enthusiastically,” along the Champs Elysées and across the Pont d’Jéna.

NINE MARSHALS TAKE PART

Nine of the marshals who had cast in their lot with the returned Emperor rode on either side of Napoleon’s coach: Davout, Minister of War, who had not yet sworn allegiance to the Bourbons; Soult, the newly appointed Chief of the Staff of the Army; Serrurier, Governor of the Invalides; Brune and Jourdan; Moncey and Mortier; Suchet and Grouchy. Ney was absent; Napoleon had refused to see him. Ney’s widely reported speech to Louis XVIII., that he would “bring the bandit to Paris in an iron cage,” had not been forgiven. Murat was in disgrace for his recent blundering move in Northern Italy, which had vitally affected Napoleon’s plans. His desertion during the closing campaign, when Napoleon was at bay after Leipsic, moreover, was beyond condonation. Of others who had been at Napoleon’s side on the Field of Mars ten years before, Lefebvre and Masséna professed to be too old and infirm for service in the field, although Masséna was still nominally on the Active List, and had been in command for King Louis at Toulon. He was due in Paris to meet Napoleon, but his fidelity was more than doubtful: “gorged with wealth, Masséna thought only of preserving it.” Augereau kept in the background, Napoleon refusing to have more to do with him. Berthier, on that very morning, was lying dead at Bamberg in Bavaria; whether victim of an accident or suicide has never been made clear. Lannes and Bessières were in their graves, fallen on the field of battle. Bernadotte, King of Sweden, was actively on the side of the enemy. Marmont, Oudinot, Macdonald, and Victor, marshals of later creation, had left France in company with the Bourbon princes. Old Kellerman and Perignon, “Honorary Marshals” of 1804, had not come forward again, remaining in seclusion; nor had St. Cyr, “the man of ice,” another marshal since the Field of Mars, who was staying at home with studied indifference, “occupying himself on his estate with his hay crops and playing the fiddle.”

THE “MAN OF SEDAN” WAS THERE

Napoleon was accompanied in the State coach by three of his brothers—Lucien, Joseph, and Jerome. This time there was of course no Empress present. Josephine was dead: Marie Louise was holding back elsewhere. None of the Bonaparte princesses appeared in the procession. The only one attending the “Champ de Mai” came as a spectator: Hortense Beauharnais, the daughter of Josephine and wife of Louis Bonaparte. She had gone on in advance to the Military School and was seated among the exalted personages awaiting Napoleon there; accompanied by her two boys (one the future Third Napoleon, the “Man of Sedan”). She seemed most interested, as we are told, in the sketch-book she brought with her to draw a picture of the scene.

Napoleon alighted in the First Court of the Military School, being acclaimed on all sides as he made his appearance with vociferous shouts of “Vive l’Empereur!” Preceded by palace grandees and Court officials, who had alighted from their carriages in advance and formed up to receive him, he entered the building and passed on through to take his seat on the throne. “He had the air of being in pain and anxious,” describes an onlooker. “He descended slowly from his carriage while a hundred drums beat ‘Au Champ.’ Then, advancing quickly, returning the salutes of the assemblage at either side with bows, he proceeded to the throne, and sat down, gazing round at the people in their dense masses as he did so. Jerome and Joseph seated themselves on the right; Lucien on the left; all three clad in white satin with black velvet hats with white plumes. Napoleon himself had on his Imperial mantle of ermine and purple velvet embroidered with golden bees.”

For a time the thundering cannon salutes and acclamations of the people that hailed Napoleon’s appearance on the daïs were deafening. Bowing repeatedly on every side, he took his seat on the throne, while all present stood and remained uncovered. The guns then ceased, the music of the bands and the drummings and trumpetings of the battalions died away into silence. On that the ceremony of the day opened with the celebration of High Mass by the Archbishop of Tours.

The religious portion of the pageant, we are told, “seemed to arouse no interest in Napoleon. His opera-glass wandered all the time over the immense multitude before him.” His attention was not recalled until the Mass was over, when the delegates from the Electoral College, marshalled by the Master of the Ceremonies, ascended the platform, and ranged themselves before the throne. A Deputy stepped forward, and after deep obeisance, in a loud resonant voice read an address teeming with sentiments of patriotic attachment and expressing inviolable fidelity towards the Emperor personally. Napoleon seemed to listen with interest, “marking his approbation with nods and smiles.” The Deputy ceased speaking amidst rapturous applause, and then Arch-Chancellor Cambacérès, resplendent in a gorgeous orange-yellow robe, stood forward in front of Napoleon to notify officially the popular acceptance of the new national Constitution. He declared the total of the votes given in the Plébiscite to show a clear million in favour of the restoration of the Empire. There was a flourish of trumpets, and forthwith the chief herald proclaimed that the “Additional Act to the Constitution of the Empire” had been agreed to by the French people.

NAPOLEON SIGNS THE ACT

Again from all round thundered out an artillery salute, and the whole assembly rose to their feet and cheered. A small gilded table was brought forward and placed before Napoleon, who, the Arch-Chancellor holding the parchment open, and Joseph Bonaparte presenting the pen, publicly ratified the Act with his formal signature. The air resounded once more with the cannon firing and noisy acclamations on all sides.

Napoleon rose, when at length the cheering ceased, to address the assembly with one of his most impassioned dramatic harangues. “Emperor, Consul, Soldier, I hold everything from the people! In prosperity and in adversity; in the field, in the council; in power, in exile, France has been the sole and constant object of my thoughts and actions!” So he began. He closed in the same vein: “Frenchmen! my will is that of my people; my rights are theirs; my honour, my glory, my happiness, can never be separated from the honour, glory, and happiness of France!”

Again came the outburst of rapturous applause. It subsided, and the Archbishop of Bourges, as Grand Almoner of the Empire, came forward. Kneeling before Napoleon he presented the Book of the Gospels, on which Napoleon solemnly took the Imperial Oath to observe the new Constitution. There only remained for Arch-Chancellor Cambacérès and the principal officers of State to take their oaths of allegiance to the Constitution and the Emperor, and after that a solemn Te Deum closed the political ceremony.

It was now the turn of the Eagles and the Army. The civilian personages withdrew from the steps of the throne; the electoral deputations fell back; leaving a clear open space in front. Immediately, as if by magic, the Eagles suddenly appeared; long rows of them flashing and glittering in the brilliant sunshine. They were brought forward in procession, advancing in massed rows “resplendent and dazzling like gold.” Carnot, Minister of the Interior, the “Organiser of Victory” of the Armies of the Revolution, headed the procession, “clad in a Spanish white dress of great magnificence,” carrying the First Eagle of the National Guard of Paris. Next him came Marshal Davout, Minister of War, carrying the Eagle of the 1st Regiment of the Line, and then Admiral Decrès, Minister of Marine (as representing the French Navy), carrying the Eagle of Napoleon’s 1st Regiment of Marines. General Count Friant (he fell at Waterloo), as Colonel-in-Chief, bore the Eagle of the Imperial Guard. Other officers of exalted rank bore other Eagles.

SPRINGING FORWARD TO MEET THEM

Napoleon’s demeanour, hitherto, for most of the time, formal and apathetic, altered instantaneously at the appearance of the Eagles. “He sprang from the throne, and, casting aside his purple mantle, rushed forward to meet his Eagles”; amid a sudden hush that seemed to fall over the whole assembly at the sight. Then the momentary silence was broken. An enthusiastic shout went up as the Emperor, pressing forward impetuously, as though electrified with sudden energy, took up his station immediately in front of the array of soldiers, the élite of the veterans of the old Grand Army left alive, as they stood there formed up in an immense phalanx. To the sound of martial music the regimental deputations forthwith moved up and advanced to pass before him. Napoleon, with a gesture of deep reverence, took each Eagle into his own hands from the officer who had been carrying it, and then delivered it with stately formality to its future regimental bearer as the deputations in turn filed past him.

He had a word for the men of every corps as each set of ten officers and men drew up before him. To some he said, glancing at the number of their regiment on their shakos, “I remember you well. You are my old companions of Italy!” or, “You are my comrades of Egypt!” and so on. Others he reminded of past days of distinction. “You were with me at Arcola!” he said to one group, or “at Rivoli!” “at Austerlitz!” “at Friedland!” to others, as might be—his words, we are told, “inspiring the men with deep emotion.” For each of the National Guard deputations he had also their little speech. To one detachment for instance, as it came up, he said: “You are my old companions from the Rhine; you have been the foremost, the most courageous, the most unfortunate in our disasters; but I remember all!”

The last Eagle presented, Napoleon called on the soldiers to take the Army Oath of fidelity to the Standard, using his customary Eagle oration formula.

“Soldiers of the National Guard of the Empire!” he began, “Soldiers of my Imperial Guard! Soldiers of the Line on land and sea! I entrust to your hands the Imperial Eagle! You swear here to defend it at the cost of your life’s blood against the enemies of the nation. You swear that it will always be your guiding sign, your rallying point!”

AMIDST A TUMULT OF ENTHUSIASM

Some of those nearest interrupted Napoleon with shouts of “We swear!” He went on: “You swear never to acknowledge any other standard!” The shouts of “We swear!” again broke in vociferously.

Napoleon again went on: “You, Soldiers of the National Guard of Paris, swear never to permit the foreigner to desecrate again the capital of the Great Nation! To your courage I commit it!” Cries of “We swear!” repeated continuously amidst a tumult of clamour, once more burst forth.

Napoleon continued and concluded, turning to his favourite Pretorians: “Soldiers of the Imperial Guard, swear to surpass yourselves in the campaign which is now about to open, to die round your Eagles rather than permit foreigners to dictate terms to your country!” He ceased after that, and once again the air vibrated with shouts of “We swear! We swear!” and ejaculations of “Vive l’Empereur!” from the soldiers and the throng of onlookers cramming the stands around.[40]

The military finale of the day was the march past of the assembled troops before the Emperor, in slow time, headed by the Eagles. “Nothing could have been more imposing,” says one of the spectators, “than this concluding display in the magnificent pageant. Amid the crash of military music, the blaze of martial decoration, the glitter of innumerable arms, 50,000 men passed by. The immense concourse of beholders, their prolonged shouts and cheers, the occasion, the Man, the mighty events which hung in suspense, all concurred to excite feelings and reflections which only such a scene could have produced.” On the other hand, we have this from a colder critic of the scene: “The display was without heart, and theatrical; the vows of the soldiers were made without warmth. There was but little real enthusiasm: the shouts were not those of future victors of another Austerlitz and Wagram, and the Emperor knew it!” Which are we to believe?

According to Savary, who was close beside him, Napoleon, for his part, was satisfied with the enthusiasm of the soldiers. “The Emperor left the Field of Mars confident that he might rely on the sentiments then manifested towards him, and from that moment his only care was to meet the storm that was forming in Belgium.”

ON THE REGIMENTAL PARADES

The new Eagles left Paris that night with their escorts. Each, on its arrival where its regiment was stationed, was received with elaborate ceremony, and formally presented on parade to the assembled officers and men; a religious service being held in addition in some cases, at which all were sworn individually to give their lives in its defence. This, for instance, is what took place with one regiment, the 22nd of the Line, stationed with the advanced division of Grouchy’s Army Corps on the Belgian frontier at Couvins, near Rocroy, in the Ardennes. “The new Eagle,” describes one of the officers, “all fresh from the gilder’s shop, was solemnly blessed in the church of Couvins; then each soldier, touching it with his hand, swore individually to defend it to the death. After the religious service the regiment formed in square, and the colonel delivered an address, in which he recalled the old glories of the 22nd of the Line, and expressed his conviction that the regiment would worthily uphold the old-time fame of the corps in the coming campaign. The glowing language was received with great emotion, and as of happy augury for the future.”[41]

CHAPTER XIII
AT WATERLOO