The war drama of the Eagles

by Edward Fraser

“Ave Caesar! Morituri te Salutant!”

The Eagles figure in four episodes in the story of Waterloo.

They had their part at the outset in that intensely dramatic display on the morning of the battle, when, before the eyes of Wellington’s soldiers, drawn up with muskets loaded and bayonets fixed, and guns in position ready to open fire, Napoleon passed his army in review; the last parade of the Last Army on the day of its last battle. Said Napoleon himself afterwards, in words that are in keeping with the resplendent spectacle: “The earth seemed proud to bear so many brave men!” (“La terre paraissait orgueilleuse de porter tant de braves!”)

It was a little after nine in the morning that the Last Army of Napoleon moved out from its bivouacs of the night before to take up its station for the battle. This is how a British hussar, who was looking on, describes the opening of the wonderful show: “Marching in eleven columns they came up to the front and deployed with rapidity, precision, and fine scenic effect. The drums beat, the bands played, the trumpets sounded. The light troops in front pressed forward, and the rattle of musketry was followed by the retreat of our horsemen and foot soldiers. Light wreaths of smoke curled upwards into the misty air, and through this thin veil the dense dark columns of the French infantry and the gay and gleaming squadrons of French horse were seen moving into their positions. Before them was the open valley, yet green with the heavy crops; behind them dark fringes of wood, and a thick curtain of dreary cloud.

“The French bands struck up so that we could distinctly hear them. Not long after, the enemy’s skirmishers, backed by their supports, were thrown out; extending as they advanced, they spread over the whole space before them. Now and then they saluted our ears with well-known music, the whistling of musket-balls. Their columns, preceded by mounted officers to take up the alignments, soon began to appear; the bayonets flashing over dark masses at different points, accompanied by the rattling of drums and the clang of trumpets.

“They took post, their infantry in front, in two lines, 60 yards apart, flanked by lancers with their fluttering flags. In rear of the centre of the infantry wings were the cuirassiers, also in two lines. In rear of the cuirassiers, on the right, the lancers and chasseurs of the Imperial Guard, in their splendid but gaudy uniforms: the former clad in scarlet; the latter, like hussars, in rifle-green, fur-trimmed pelisse, gold lace, bearskin cap. In rear of the cuirassiers, on the left, were the horse-grenadiers and dragoons of the Imperial Guard, with their dazzling arms. Immediately in rear of the centre was the reserve, composed of the 6th Corps, in columns; on the left, and on the right of the Genappe road, were two divisions of light cavalry. In rear of the whole was the infantry of the Imperial Guard in columns, a dense dark mass, which, with the 6th Corps and cavalry, were flanked by their numerous artillery. Nearly 72,000 men, and 246 guns, ranged with matches lighted, gave an awful presage of the approaching conflict.”

AS THEY MARCHED ON TO THE FIELD

Napoleon rode out to watch them as they deployed into position. He took his stand at the point where the columns reached the field and wheeled off to right and left to form up in readiness for the signal that should launch their massed ranks forward across the intervening valley against the British position in front. Marshal Soult, Chief of the General Staff, rode close behind Napoleon on one side; Marshal Ney, in charge of the main attack that day, was on the other. In rear followed in glittering array the cavalcade of staff officers, with, dragged along after them, tied by a rope to a dragoon orderly, Napoleon’s Waterloo guide, the innkeeper De Coster.

Hardly had Napoleon himself ever witnessed before the like of the tremendous display of enthusiasm that greeted his presence on the field on the morning of that final day. “The drums beat; the trumpets sounded; the bands struck up ‘Veillons au salut de l’Empire.’ As they passed Napoleon the standard-bearers drooped the Eagles; the cavalrymen waved their sabres; the infantrymen held on high their shakos on their bayonets. The roar of cheers dominated and drowned the beat of the drums and the blare of the trumpets. The ‘Vive l’Empereurs!’ followed with such vehemence and such rapidity that no commands could be heard. And what rendered the scene all the more solemn, all the more moving, was the fact that before us, a thousand paces away perhaps, we could see distinctly the dull red line [“la ligne rouge sombre”] of the English army.”

So one French officer (Captain Martin of the 45th of the Line) describes. The shouts of “Vive l’Empereur!” says another, a veteran of Count d’Erlon’s First Army Corps, “rose more vehemently, louder and longer than I ever heard before, for our men were determined that they should be heard among the brick-red lines which fringed the crest of Mont Saint-Jean.”

It was for the Eagles the counterpart of the Day of the Field of Mars, the culminating act of homage to Napoleon from the soldiers of the Grand Army.

HIS IN LIFE AND DEATH

“The sight of him,” if we may use the words of Lamartine, “was for some a recompense for their death, for others an incitement to victory! One heart beat between these men and the Emperor. In such a moment they shared the same soul and the same cause! When all is risked for one man, it is in him his followers live and die. The army was Napoleon! Never before was it so entirely Napoleon as now. He was repudiated by Europe, and his army had adopted him with idolatry; it voluntarily made itself the great martyr of his glory. At such a moment he must have felt himself more than man, more than a sovereign. His subjects only bowed to his power, Europe to his genius; but his army bent in homage to the past, the present, and the future, and welcomed victory or defeat, the throne or death with its chief. It was determined on everything, even on the sacrifice of itself, to restore him his Empire, or to render his last fall illustrious. Accomplices at Grenoble, Pretorians at Paris, victims at Waterloo: such a sentiment in the generals and officers of Napoleon had in it nothing that was not in conformity with the habits and even the vices of humanity. His cause was their cause, his crime their crime, his power their power, his glory their glory. But the devotion of those 80,000 soldiers was more virtuous, for it was more disinterested. Who would know their names? Who would pay them for the shedding of their blood? The plain before them would not even preserve their bones! To have inspired such a devotion was the greatness of Napoleon; to evince it even to madness was the greatness of his Army!”

SOME WHO HAD MET BEFORE

They knew, too, not a few of them, the stamp of men they were about to meet. Never before that day, of course, had Napoleon met British soldiers on the battlefield; but there were others present who had, and a good many of them.

Many a French regiment at Waterloo had old scores of their own to settle, past days to avenge. The 8th of the Line, the fate of whose “Eagle with the Golden Wreath” at Barrosa has been recorded, were on the field, and dipped their glittering new Eagle, received at the “Champ de Mai,” in salute as they passed Napoleon that morning. So too did the 82nd, whose former battalion Eagles from Martinique are at Chelsea now; the 13th of the Line and the 51st, who lost their regimental Eagles in the Retiro arsenal of Madrid; the 28th, who met their fate, and lost their Eagle under the bullets of the British 28th in the Pyrenees. Others were there who had fought against Wellington in Spain, and, more fortunate, had preserved their Eagles. Among these were the 47th, who on the battlefield at Barrosa lost and regained their Eagle; and the 105th, mindful yet of their terrible Salamanca experience of what dragoon swords in strong hands could do. The 105th were destined, soldiers and Eagle alike, to undergo a fate more fearful still, ere the sun should set that day.

Two of the regiments that paraded before Napoleon to meet the soldiers of Wellington had met under fire the sailors of Nelson at Trafalgar: the 2nd of the Line, now in Jerome Bonaparte’s division of Reille’s Army Corps, and the 16th, serving with the Sixth Corps. A third regiment, the 70th, which did duty as marines at Trafalgar, was with Grouchy, not many miles away; as was the 22nd of the Line, whose Eagle, taken at Salamanca, is at Chelsea Hospital, and the 34th, whose drum-major’s staff is to this day a prized trophy of the British 34th (now the First Battalion of the Border Regiment), won in Spain, when, as it so befell, two regiments bearing the same number crossed bayonets on the battlefield.[42]

The famous 84th of the Line were at Waterloo, with their proud legend, “Un contre dix,” restored at the “Champ de Mai,” flaunting proudly on their new silken flag as the Eagle bent in salute to Napoleon; also, the hardly less widely renowned 46th, the corps of the First Grenadier of France, La Tour d’Auvergne, whose name was called at the head of the list at that morning’s roll-call and answered with the customary answer, “Dead on the Field of Honour”; also, too, Napoleon’s former-time favourite, the 75th, mindful still on that last day of their glorious youth when “Le 75me arrive et bât l’ennemi”—a motto that an earlier colonel of the corps had proposed once to replace on the flag by “Veni, Vidi, Vici.”

The Old Guard paraded in their fighting kit, with, as usual, in their knapsacks their full-dress uniforms, carried in readiness to be put on for Napoleon’s triumphal entry into Brussels.

Drouet d’Erlon rode past at the head of the First Army Corps; Count of the Empire in virtue of his rank as a general; once upon a time the little son of the postmaster at Varennes, where Louis Seize and Marie Antoinette so pitifully ended their attempted flight, harsh old Drouet, ex-sergeant of Condé dragoons, from whom he inherited his talent for soldiering. General Reille led past the Second Corps. He, curiously, had had something of a naval past. He had hardly forgotten that other battle-day morning, when he galloped on to the field of Austerlitz, and reported himself to the Emperor as having come direct from Cadiz, put ashore from the doomed French fleet of Admiral Villeneuve just a week before it sailed to fight Trafalgar. Both Reille and his men, above all others, were burning with excitement and eagerness that day to get at the enemy. They had missed taking part either at Ligny or Quatre Bras, through contradictory orders which had kept them marching and counter-marching between the two battlefields; unable to reach either in time. Smarting under the reproach that they had been useless in the campaign, though the pick of the Line was in their ranks, the men one and all were burning to retrieve their reputation.

Count Lobau—he took his name from the island in the Danube which played so vital a part in the battle of Aspern—was at the head of the Sixth Corps, the third of Napoleon’s grand divisions of the army at Waterloo. Formerly General Mouton, Napoleon renamed him when he made him a Count for his skill and heroism at Aspern. “Mon Mouton,” said Napoleon of him once as he watched the general in action, “est un lion.”

NAPOLEON IN HIGH SPIRITS

Napoleon himself was in the highest spirits, full of pride and confidence. In that mood had he announced his intention of holding the review. There was no need to hurry, he said; Blücher and Wellington had been driven apart. The parade would pass the time while waiting for the soaked ground to get dry, and make it easier for the guns to move from point to point. And there was also this. The spectacle would have assuredly a disquieting effect on the Dutch and Belgians in Wellington’s army. Many of the men in front of him had served with the Eagles in former days: all stood nervously in awe, it was notorious, of the mighty name and reputation of Napoleon. Hesitating, as some were known to be, between their fears and their patriotism, the influence of the imposing spectacle might well—believed Napoleon—turn the scale and induce them to come over.

This was Napoleon’s plan for the battle, as outlined that morning to his brother Jerome. First would be the general preparation for attack by a tremendous cannonade all along the line from massed batteries. On that, the two army corps of D’Erlon and Reille would advance simultaneously and assault in front, supported by cavalry charges of cuirassiers. Then, if the English had not yet been beaten, would follow the final assault, the crushing blow that it would be impossible to resist; to be delivered by the remaining army corps of Lobau and the Young Guard, supported by the Middle Guard and the Old Guard. So Napoleon planned to fight and win at Waterloo.

“THE GAME IS WITH US”

Of the ultimate issue of the day he flattered himself there could be no two opinions. “At the last I have them, these English!” “(Enfin je les tiens, ces Anglais!”) he exclaimed jubilantly as he reconnoitred Wellington’s position in the early morning. At breakfast with the two Marshals, Soult and Ney, he declared that the odds were 90 to 10 in his favour. “Wellington,” he said to Ney, “has thrown the dice, and the game is with us.”

He turned fiercely on Soult, who, knowing the mettle of the British soldier from experience, had entreated him to recall Grouchy’s 30,000 men from watching the Prussians near Wavre.

“You think because Wellington has defeated you, that he must be a very great general! I tell you he is a bad general, and the English are but poor troops! This, for us, will only be an affair of a déjeuner—a picnic!”

“I hope so,” was all that Soult said in reply.

At that moment Reille and General Foy, experienced Peninsular veterans both, whose opinions should have had weight, were announced. Said Reille, in reply to Napoleon’s asking what he thought: “If well placed, as Wellington knows how to draw up his men, and if attacked in front, the English infantry is invincible, by reason of its calm tenacity and the superiority of its fire. Before coming to close quarters with the bayonet we must expect to see half the assaulting troops out of action.”

Interposed Foy: “Wellington never shows his troops, but if he is yonder, I must warn your Majesty that the English infantry in close combat is the very devil!” (“L’infanterie Anglaise en duel c’est le diable!”)

Napoleon lost his temper. With an exclamation of angry incredulity he rose hastily from the breakfast table, and the party broke up.

He spent a great part of the day watching the battle from a little mound, a short distance from the farm of Rossomme; mostly pacing to and fro, his hands behind his back; at times violently taking snuff, occasionally gesticulating excitedly. Near by was a kitchen table from the farmhouse, covered with maps weighted down with stones, with a chair placed on some straw, on which at intervals he rested. Soult kept ever near at hand, and the staff remained a little in rear. It was not until the afternoon was well advanced that Napoleon got again on horseback.

As related by the guide De Coster in conversation with an English questioner a few months after Waterloo, this is what passed:

“He had frequent communications with his aides de camp during the day?”

“Every moment.”

“And when they reported what was going on?”

“His orders were always ‘Avancez!’”

“Did he eat or drink during the day?”

“No!”

“Did he take snuff?”

“In abundance.”

“Did he talk much?”

“Never, except when he gave orders.”

“What was the general character of his countenance during the day?”

WHEN THE LAST CHARGE FAILED

“Riante!—till the last charge failed.”

“How did he look then?”

“Blanc-mort!”

“Did he say ‘Sauve qui peut’?”

“No! When he saw the English infantry rush forward, and the cavalry in the intermediate spaces coming down the hill, he said: ‘A present il est fini. Sauvons-nous!’”[43]