FOOTNOTES
[1] “The Eagle for each standard,” said Napoleon, going into details with Berthier, “must be made ‘strong and light’—‘Il convient de la rendre à la fois solide et légère.’” “An Eagle looking to its left, with wings half expanded, and with its talons grasping a thunderbolt, as in the old Roman standard,” was the approved design: the bird measuring eight inches from head to feet, and in the spread of its wings from tip to tip, nine and a half inches. Below the thunderbolt, as base and support, was a tablet of brass, three inches square; bearing in raised figures the number of the regiment. The weight of the whole—the Eagle was to be of copper, gilded over—was just three and a half pounds avoirdupois, and a stout oaken staff was provided, eight feet long and painted bleu impérial, to which the silken regimental colour was attached; the flag being thirty-five inches along the staff and thirty-three lengthwise, in the fly.
[2] The drawings made and laid before Napoleon at Saint-Cloud are in existence, preserved among the archives of the Ministry of War in Paris.
[3] All armies, as a fact, owe to Napoleon the introduction of the practice of inscribing on the colours of a regiment the names of battles in which that regiment has won honour; nowadays an essential feature of the war-flags of all nations. It originated after Napoleon’s first campaign as General Bonaparte, at the head of the Army of Italy; and, together with the inscriptions of quotations of passages from his despatches, was introduced by him as a device to aid in developing military spirit and a sense of esprit de corps among the soldiers. The Directory promptly censured the innovating young general for acting without having first referred the matter to Paris. They sent orders that all such inscriptions were to be forthwith deleted from the flags. Napoleon, however, refused to obey; and the regiments of his Army supported him. One and all protested against the removal of their titles to fame, the first appearance of which on their flags had been hailed with enthusiasm. In the result the Directory deemed it advisable to accept the situation; and after that, in turn, the flags of the regiments of the other Republican armies elsewhere were authorised to display similar decorations of their own. The practice in due course was adopted in the other armies of Europe.
[4] The sending of an invitation to the Pope had been finally decided on in July, after a series of protracted discussions in the Imperial Council of State.
[5] One of the Eagles so presented by Napoleon on that afternoon is now at Madrid. It is a trophy that is absolutely unique. Upwards of a hundred and thirty of Napoleon’s Eagles, the spoils of war, now decorate cathedrals, chapels, and arsenals in the capitals of Europe; but there is only one French naval Eagle now in existence, the trophy at Madrid; the Eagle of a line-of-battleship named the Atlas.
Every French line-of-battleship was represented on the Champ de Mars and received its Eagle. “Tous les vaisseaux,” to quote the words of M. Le Brun, in his Guerres Maritimes de France, “étaient gratifiés d’une aigle et d’un drapeau à leur nom, donnés par l’Empereur à son couronnement, ou avaient assisté et prêté serment des députations du port et de l’Armée Navale; chaque vaisseau avait envoyé sa députation composée de trois officiers, trois officiers mariners, et quatre gabiers ou matelots.”
The Eagle of the Atlas was received on the Field of Mars by the ship’s deputation of three officers, three warrant officers, and four seamen, sent from Toulon, where the Atlas then was in harbour with Admiral Villeneuve’s fleet, which Nelson was watching. The Atlas crossed the Atlantic in the Toulon fleet with Nelson in pursuit, returned to Europe, fought in the indecisive battle off Cape Finisterre in July 1805, and was so shattered in the fight, in which the ship only just escaped capture, that she was left behind for repairs at Ferrol when Villeneuve put to sea finally, to meet his fate at Trafalgar. The Atlas had to remain there and fell into the hands of the Spaniards in 1808, at the time of the national uprising against Napoleon. Thus the naval Eagle passed into Spanish possession.
The crew of the Atlas were taken by surprise, while the ship was in dock at Ferrol, by the Spanish regiment of Navarre in garrison there when the news of the Rising of May 2 at Madrid reached Galicia. They were trapped and pounced down upon. The ship was seized by a sudden assault, the officers and men being made prisoners to the provincial Junta, before they had a chance of concealing or making away with their Eagle.
In other cases elsewhere, undoubtedly, the naval Eagles were somehow disposed of surreptitiously. It is very remarkable that not a single French naval Eagle came into British hands on board the thirty odd ships of the line which we captured between 1805 and 1814 during the war with Napoleon. At Trafalgar, according to a French officer on board the French flagship, the Bucentaure, they had one. Describing the approach of the Victory, at the outset of the battle, says the officer: “A collision appeared inevitable. At that moment Villeneuve seized the Eagle of the Bucentaure and displayed it to the sailors who surrounded him. ‘My friends,’ he called out, ‘I am going to throw this on board the English ship! We will go and fetch it back or die!’ (‘Mes amis, je vais la jetter à bord du vaisseau Anglais! Nous irons la reprendre ou mourir!’) Our seamen responded to these noble words by their acclamations.” Admiral Villeneuve, all the same, did not throw any Eagle on board the Victory; nor was one found in the Bucentaure during the forty-eight hours that the ship was in our possession after the battle, previous to her wreck in the storm at the entrance to Cadiz harbour. None too were found on board any of Nelson’s other prizes. As to that, also, what was done with, or became of, the Eagles of the five battalions serving as marines in the French fleet at Trafalgar, officers and men of which were taken prisoners by us—those of the 2nd of the Line, the 16th, 67th, 70th, and 79th?
At the Field of Mars all eyes were on the six hundred and fifty officers and men of the Naval Brigade as they marched round the arena to receive their Eagles. Soldiers everybody was familiar with. There was nothing particular about them which had not been seen before. But a French sailor was not often seen away from his port; and to Paris man-of-war’s men were things quite new and strange. And, besides, were they not “nos braves marins,” who were going to clear the way for the “Invasion Flotilla” and the “Army of England”; to strike the blow that should sweep from the path of the Emperor “ce terrible Nelson!” One and all gazed in wonder at the sailors: the captains in their long, swallow-tailed blue coatees barred with gold lace, white breeches, and high top-boots; the sprightly “aspirants,” or midshipmen, in cut-away jackets and little round hats with turned-up brims; the showy “Marins de la Garde,” wearing broad-topped shakos edged with yellow braid, over which tall red tufts nodded, red-cuffed and yellow-braided blue jackets, and blue trousers striped with yellow; the other sailors of the fleet in massed squads, in shiny black flat-brimmed hats, blue jackets studded with brass buttons, red waistcoats, red, white, and blue striped pantaloons, wide in the leg, “a l’Anglaise,” and shoes with round steel buckles. Such a sight the good people of Paris had never witnessed before, and they gazed at it rapturously with all their eyes, and shouted their loudest “Vive la Marine!”
There was too, in addition to the sailors, one Eagle deputation the strange appearance of which attracted special curiosity and interest that afternoon. Everybody gazed in wonder at a group of strapping-looking foreigners of all ages who marched along by themselves, got up as light infantrymen, with green tufted shakos and bright green uniforms. They belonged to one of the Emperor’s newest creations; and were the Eagle escort of Napoleon’s “Irish Legion.” They had come to the Field of Mars to receive the only Eagle that Napoleon ever gave to a foreign regiment in his service, with a flag designed specially for them, of “Irish Green,” as it was described, of silk, fringed with gold cord, inscribed on one side in letters on gold: “Napoléon, Empereur des Français, à la Legion Irlandaise,” and bearing on the other a golden harp, uncrowned, and the words “L’Indépendance d’Irlande.” Two ex-patriated men of good Irish family, refugees escaped from the penalty of treason under English law for their part in the Rising of ’98, seven years before, headed the deputation; a Captain Tennant and a Captain William Corbet. In the ranks of the regiment the deputation represented marched other Irish refugees, who had shed English blood at Wexford and Enniscorthy; fugitives from political justice before that who had had a part in the attempted raids of Hoche and Humbert; “Wild Geese” who had made their flight overseas after the fiasco of 1803; and a sprinkling of French-born Irish, some of whom had worn the red coat of the old Irish Brigade in the Royal Army of France, grandsons of the men of Fontenoy. Napoleon had enrolled his Irish Legion just a twelvemonth before, in view of a descent on Ireland from Brest simultaneously with the crossing of the Straits of Dover from Boulogne. At the request of those who first came forward to enlist, he had uniformed the corps in the “national” green, in place of the former red coat which had been the historic colour of the old French-Irish regiments ever since James the Second, under the Treaty of Limerick, carried over to France the remains of the army that had fought for him at the Boyne. The Eagle the Irish Legion received on the Field of Mars faced Wellington in Spain, and narrowly escaped falling into Blücher’s hands in Germany in 1813. It was hidden away after Fontainebleau, and reappeared during the “Hundred Days,” finally to disappear after Waterloo.
[6] Pigtails, too, were missing; for the first time at a military display of the kind in Paris. Even the soldiers of the Revolution, the rank and file, had kept up the old style of clubbed-hair. The new régime, however, had altered all that. “Le petit tondu” (“The little shorn one”), a camp-fire nickname for Napoleon, from his close-cropped head, had made every soldier cut his hair short; by a general order of six months before. The order, it may be mentioned incidentally, at first nearly raised a riot in the Imperial Guard, and led to a number of duels between “les canichons,” the “lap-dogs” or “poodles,” as the men who obeyed the order at the outset were sneeringly dubbed by comrades who refused to do so, and the others.
[7] Ney rode up to head the 6th Light Infantry at the outset, immediately after a chaffing challenge to Murat. The two, who had been operating together during the previous days, had had some difference over their methods of attack. Said Murat arrogantly on one occasion, after Ney had been laboriously trying to get into his brother-marshal’s head an elaborate scheme of his proposed tactics: “I don’t follow your plans. It is my way not to make mine till I am facing the enemy!” Ney, on the morning of Elchingen, got his chance to pay Murat back. They were together, riding close to Napoleon, with all the staff near by, and not far from the Danube bank. As the guns began to open, Ney suddenly turned and laid hold of Murat’s arm. Giving his colleague a rough shake, before the Emperor and everybody, Ney exclaimed: “Now, Prince, come on! Come along with me! and make your plans in the face of the enemy!” The astonished Murat drew himself back, whereupon Ney spurred up his horse and dashed forward; “galloping off to the river-bank, he plunged into the water up to his horse’s belly amidst a shower of cannon-balls and grape, to direct the mending of the bridge.” That done, he galloped on to head the leading column of attack across the bridge.
[8] Napoleon himself, it so chanced at the outset, heard the fierce cannonading from afar, and, becoming suddenly alarmed at what might be happening, was thrown into a fever of anxiety over it; into a state of violent agitation. It was on the evening of November 11. Napoleon just then was on his way to take up his quarters at the Abbey of St. Polten, whence only a few miles intervened between him and Vienna. As he was nearing St. Polten he was suddenly alarmed by “the smothered, distant echo of heavy firing, which was not even interrupted by night.” So one of the aides de camp on the Emperor’s staff, De Ségur, describes. “What unforeseen danger could suddenly have overtaken Mortier? It was almost certainly he who, going forward with an advanced guard of five thousand men, had unexpectedly come across Kutusoff with forty thousand. It was impossible, though, at first, to imagine the destruction of the marshal and his unhappy division.”
At St. Polten they listened, and in the end feared for the worst.
“One could only offer up prayers and await the decision of fate! The wide and deep Danube separated us from the marshal. This stream had just delivered over to the enemy one of Mortier’s generals, who in despair had tried to make his escape in a boat. Everything announced a catastrophe: the Emperor no longer doubted it. In his anxiety, as he drew nearer to the sound of the combat, while advancing from Moelkt to St. Polten, the fear of a reverse usurped the place of Napoleon’s former confidence of victory. Now, his agitation increasing with the noise of the firing, he despatched everybody for news: officers, aides de camp; every officer who happened to be near him. With his mind full of Mortier’s peril he suspended the progress of the invasion. He stopped Bernadotte and the flotilla behind at Moelkt. He recalled Murat, dashing on for the gates of Vienna; and Soult, following Murat. Not indeed until three on the next afternoon, the 12th of November, was Napoleon’s anxiety allayed by the arrival of an aide de camp from Mortier.”
[9] It was to one of these retreating columns that the historic “Ice Disaster” happened. Every one knows the story, as related in Napoleon’s Austerlitz Bulletin, and mentioned also by Ségur, Marbot, and Lejeune in their memoirs, how a column from the Russian left wing tried to escape over the frozen surface of the lake of Satschan, how Napoleon turned a battery on them while in the act of crossing the ice and broke it, and how “thousands of Russians, with their horses, guns, and waggons, were seen slowly settling down into the depths.” The actual facts are recorded in the recently discovered report of the “Fischmeister” (or overseer) of the Carp Fishery of Satschan Lake, setting forth the results of draining off the water in the spring of 1806. There were found at the bottom, recorded the Fischmeister, twenty-eight cannon, one hundred and fifty dead horses, but only three human corpses. The column, it would appear, had been composed of five batteries of artillery, and when the ice was broken, the guns, all but the two nearest the shore, sank through and dragged the horses with them to the bottom; but the gunners, it would seem, were all able to scramble out, except the three unfortunates who had been either hit by French round-shot, or were entangled in the harness of their teams. The loss of human life was therefore, presumably, only three men out of the five hundred or so who must have been riding on, or with, the guns.
[10] Incidentally, that Christmas Day morning of the Schönbrunn review has an interest for us in this country. Napoleon left the palace for the review in a vile temper, which no doubt was one reason why he vented his spleen so savagely on the unfortunate soldiers of the 4th in his speech of censure. This was probably the prime cause. Late on the night before, on Christmas Eve, a courier from Paris had arrived at the Imperial head-quarters, bringing the defeated Admiral Villeneuve’s Trafalgar despatch, his “Compte Rendu,” written while Villeneuve was a prisoner on his way to England, and dated from “A bord de la frégate Anglaise Euryalus—le 15me Novembre 1805.” It had been sent to France under a flag of truce, as an act of international courtesy, and the Minister of Marine forwarded it to Napoleon. The news of the disaster had reached the Emperor some five weeks before, at Znaim in Moravia, a fortnight before Austerlitz; first, from some Austrian officers taken prisoners by Augereau in the Tyrol, then from the English papers. It had been enough then to give him a bad night, and make him morose for a week. Now that he learned the story from his own admiral, it made him more furious than ever. The original despatch received by Napoleon at Schönbrunn that Christmas Eve exists, with its pathetic closing appeal, the pitiless response to which sent Admiral Villeneuve to a suicide’s grave. “Profondément pénétré,” it ran, as written by Villeneuve’s own hand, “de toute l’etendue de mon malheur et de toute la responsibilité que comporte un aussi grand désastre, je ne désire rien tant que d’être bientôt à même d’aller mettre aux pieds de S.M. ou la justification de ma conduite ou la victime qui doit être immolée, non a l’honneur du pavillon, qui, j’ose le dire, est demeuré intact, mais aux manes de ceaux qui auroient péri par mon imprudence, mon inconsidération ou l’oubli de quelqu’un de mes devoirs.”
[11] The spectacles which Marshal Davout wore at Auerstadt—an extremely primitive-looking pair of goggles in thick-rimmed frames—were picked up on the field, and are treasured to this day by the family of the present Duc d’Auerstadt.
[12] Gudin’s division was officially returned as having lost 124 officers and 3,500 men.
[13] Davout’s cocked hat, with one end shot away and a bullet-hole through the crown, is now one of the battle relics of Napoleon’s wars kept at the Invalides.
[14] In his instructions to Ney in regard to the trophies taken, Napoleon wrote this, specially with reference to a number of flags belonging to Prussian regiments elsewhere which had been temporarily stored at Magdeburg: “Les drapeaux prussiens pris dans l’arsenal de Magdeburg ne signifient rien: donnez l’ordre qu’ils soient brûlés, mais vous ferez porter en triomphe par votre premier division les drapeaux pris à la garnison, pour être remis par vous à Berlin à l’Empereur. On ne doit porter en triomphe que les drapeaux pris les armes à la main, et brûler ceux pris dans les arsenaux.”
[15] The Moniteur made this notification in addition: “The Emperor has ordered a series of eight pictures, sixteen feet by ten, each, with life-size figures, from MM. Gérard, Lethière, Gautherot, Guérin, Hennequin, Girodet, Meynier, and Gros. The pictures are intended for the galleries of the Tuileries, and will depict the most memorable events of the campaign in Germany.” They are now in the Louvre, badly “skied,” and only paid heed to by the batches of recruits who from time to time are conducted round to see them under the guidance of under-officer instructors as lecturers.
[16] The hat that Napoleon wore at Eylau is kept in the little crypt beside Napoleon’s tomb in the Invalides. It is the identical one represented in the colossal picture of the battle by Gros, to be seen at the Louvre, and was given to Gros for the picture. At the second Funeral of Napoleon in 1840, it figured beside the coffin, with the Emperor’s decorations and the sword Napoleon wore at Austerlitz.
[17] A gallant young officer of the Guard was the first man to break through the Russian line in front. With half a dozen grenadiers he made a dash forward, just as the chasseurs made their attack. Captain Ernest Auzoni—that was the young officer’s name—caught sight of a Russian flag a few paces from him, and, calling on the men of his company, led straight at it, cutting his way through. “Courage!” he shouted. “Brave comrades! Follow me!” Auzoni, describes Caulaincourt, “rushed forward sword in hand, followed by his company, and penetrated the compact centre of the Russian column: his sudden assault broke their ranks, and our grenadiers burst in through the passage opened to them by the brave Auzoni.”
Napoleon, from his post near at hand, was also an eye-witness of the captain’s daring. On the Russians falling back after the routing of the column, as the Guard were re-forming for a fresh advance, he summoned Auzoni and the men of his company before him. “Captain Auzoni,” began Napoleon as they stood in front of him, “you well deserve the honour of commanding my ‘veteran’ vieux moustaches; you have most nobly distinguished yourself. You have won an officer’s cross and an annuity of two thousand francs. You were made captain at the beginning of the campaign, and I hope you will return to Paris with still higher rank. A man who earns his honours on the field of battle stands very high in my estimation!” Turning then to the soldiers, Napoleon added: “I award ten crosses to your company!” With an enthusiastic cheer the company marched off to rejoin their comrades, and as Caulaincourt puts it, “the same men advanced to meet the enemy’s fire with a degree of courage and enthusiasm which is impossible to describe.”
The brave young Guardsman captain, though, did not see Paris again. Auzoni met his fate at Eylau. He fell later in the day, in another charge, in which he took a second Russian flag. Napoleon himself discovered him, lying at the last gasp among the mortally wounded on the field. It was next day, as Napoleon, in accordance with his invariable practice, was riding over the scene of the battle.
“Near a battery which had been abandoned by the enemy,” to use again the words of Caulaincourt, “about 150 or 200 French grenadiers were lying dead, surrounded by four times their number of Russians. They were lying weltering in a river of blood, amid broken gun-carriages, muskets, swords, and other débris. They had plainly fought with the most determined fury, for every corpse showed numerous and horrible wounds. A feeble cry of ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ was heard as we rode up. It came from the middle of this mountain of dead, and all eyes were turned instantly to the spot whence the voice proceeded. Half concealed beneath a tattered flag lay a young officer whose breast was decorated with an order. He was still alive, and, though covered with many wounds, as we stopped by him he managed to raise himself so as to rest on his elbow. But his handsome face was overcast with the livid hue of death. He recognised the Emperor, and, in a feeble, faltering voice, exclaimed: ‘God bless your Majesty! Farewell, farewell! Oh, my poor mother!’ He turned a look of supplication towards the Emperor, and with that, with the words on his lips, ‘To my country, to dear France—my last thoughts!’ he fell back dead.
“Napoleon seemed riveted to the spot. ‘Brave men!’ he exclaimed. ‘Brave Auzoni! Noble young fellow! Ah, this is a frightful scene! The annuity shall go to his mother: let the order be presented for my signature as soon as possible!’ Then, turning to Surgeon Ivan, who accompanied him, he said: ‘Examine poor Auzoni’s wounds and see what can be done for him!’ Nothing however, could be done: the brave youth was beyond medical aid.”
[18] The Old Guard was recruited from the élite of the Line. After every battle soldiers who had been particularly prominent in the fighting were specially transferred to the Old Guard; a form of advancement much coveted among the rank and file. At all times there was great competition to enter the Guard, and every regimental colonel kept “waiting lists,” in anticipation of vacancies, on which names were sometimes down for years. Service in the Old Guard meant, in addition to the prestige of enrolment in so favoured a corps, life amid the gaieties and pleasures of Paris, with increased pay and personal privileges; and the highly estimated honour of a special weekly inspection by the Emperor himself in the Courtyard of the Carrousel, at which Napoleon invariably walked in and out among the ranks, talking to the men; and any Guardsman who had a grievance might then personally lay it before the Emperor. The private in the Guard drew seven sous a day as compared with the one sou pay of the private of the Line. Off duty, the private of the Guard ranked on an equality with a sergeant of the Line, and in army social circles was entitled to be addressed by the Linesmen he met as “Monsieur.”
Only men of unblemished record were qualified for admission to the Old Guard. A colonel of a Line regiment on one occasion sent a man into the Guard who turned out a mauvais sujet. Napoleon ordered the unfortunate colonel to be publicly reprimanded on parade, and confined to his quarters for three days; and further had his name and offence put in General Army Orders, issued for universal circulation from the War Office, and posted up at the head-quarters of every regiment throughout the service.
[19] Baron Lejeune, on the Imperial staff at Wagram, who was clever with his pencil, was specially desired by Napoleon to design the costume for the Eagle-Guard, as he himself relates. “Anxious to confer distinction on those brave fellows who had taken part in the actual defence of the flag, the Eagle of their regiment, Napoleon conceived the idea of giving them a costume and equipment which should mark them out as specially honoured, and at the same time be suitable to the duties they had to perform. The Emperor therefore sent for me and asked me to make a sketch of a costume such as he wished to give to what he called his ‘Eagle-Guard,’ or those non-commissioned officers whose office it was to surround and defend the actual standard-bearers. The chief weapons of each were to be a pistol, a sword, and a lance, so that in the heat of the battle they would never have to trouble themselves about loading a gun. There was to be gold on their epaulettes, sword-belts, and helmets. I made a drawing and took it to the Emperor, and he sent it to the Minister of War with his own instructions on the subject.”
[20] Colonel Lejeune was again called in to design the decoration for the Order, and has recorded what Napoleon said to him. “‘The Order of the Golden Fleece,’ he said, ‘is typical of victory; my Eagles have triumphed over the Golden Fleeces of the King of Spain and the Emperors of Germany, so I mean to create for the French Empire an Imperial Order of the Three Golden Fleeces. The sign of this order shall be my own Eagle with outspread wings, holding in each of its talons one of the ancient Golden Fleeces it has carried off; whilst hanging from its beak it will proudly display the Fleece I now institute.’ He then took a pen and roughly marked out the size I was to make my drawing.... I made the drawings as desired, and he issued the order accordingly. The institution of the new Order was duly announced in the Moniteur; but the terms of the treaty of peace compelled him to suppress a distinction the chief aim of which had been to humiliate the conquered countries of Spain and Austria.”
[21] They were to be merely identifying tokens. “If by misfortune,” Napoleon went so far as to say, “fanions should fall into the enemy’s hands, it will be apparent from their plain appearance that their capture is a matter of no account.” “Une affaire sans conséquence” were Napoleon’s words.
[22] It was during the battle at Ratisbon that Napoleon, according to the story, was wounded for the only time in his life, and had to dismount, and, in the sight of the dismayed soldiers, have his wound dressed by a surgeon, the news causing consternation through the ranks of the whole army far and wide. Indeed, only this year there was placed in the Army Museum at the Invalides, as an historic relic of the highest interest, “the fragment of a shell that struck Napoleon at Ratisbon on the 23rd of April, 1809, and gave him the only wound he ever received in battle.” The truth is revealed in M. Combes’ journal, which, after telling how Napoleon carefully concealed everything which might detract from his reputation among his soldiers for invulnerability, enumerates his wounds in detail. After his death half a dozen scars were found on his body. There was the mark of a wound on his head, a hole above his left knee, either from a bayonet or a lance, the mark of the injury received at Ratisbon, another on one hand, and on the body the scars of sword cuts and slashes.
[23] As to this last trophy, it was unfortunate from our point of view—since Fate willed that the 5th of the Line should lose its colours to an enemy—that one of the original Battalion Eagles of the corps had previously, in accordance with Napoleon’s order of 1808, been returned to Paris. The half-winged Eagle of the 5th would have made a notable trophy for Chelsea Hospital. While heading an attack on an Austrian field-work in Masséna’s battle at Caldiero on the Venetian frontier in November 1805, the Eagle was smashed from its staff by a grape-shot and dashed violently to the ground, with one wing shattered. At the same time the battalion recoiled before the terrific fire with which its charge was met. The Eagle saved the honour of the corps. Picking its battered remains up and waving it at arm’s-length above his head, with a shout of “Come on, comrades! follow the Eagle,” one of the officers rushed with it through the mêlée to the front and led the forlorn-hope onset that stormed the post. After that, the Eagle, lashed to the stump of its broken pole, went through the battle to the end, doing its part in rallying the battalion round it, to keep at bay greatly superior numbers of the enemy until relief arrived. There had been almost a mutiny in the 5th in 1808 when they were ordered to return their battle-scarred ensign to the Invalides, but the order was obeyed. Otherwise the half-winged Eagle would have been at Chelsea now.
[24] The present imitation Eagle at Chelsea was specially cast in brass from a mould of one of other trophies; one of the Eagles of the 82nd being used as the model. The imitation wreath was made from a sketch by an old officer of the Hospital staff. The Eagle and wreath were specially reproduced in order that the Barrosa Eagle trophy should be represented among the Peninsular and Waterloo Eagles displayed together at the head of the catafalque on the occasion of the lying-in-state at Chelsea of the remains of the Duke of Wellington, seven months after the theft. The dummy is in the Chapel at Chelsea now, with a brass tablet beneath it notifying that it is not the original Eagle, set up where the Barrosa Eagle used to be, in front of the organ-loft. The existing staff, however, is genuine. It is the Eagle-pole that the thief threw away in his fright; the staff actually borne by the Porte-Aigle of Napoleon’s 8th of the Line under fire at Austerlitz and Friedland; the identical staff inclined in salute with the Eagle to Napoleon on the throne on the Day of the Eagles on the Field of Mars.
[25] In a letter from an officer of the 87th, published in the London papers, it is stated that the regiment also captured the Eagle of the French 47th, but “the man who had charge of it was obliged to throw it away, from excessive fatigue and a wound. We had been under arms for thirty-two hours before the action began.”
[26] The successor to the 8th of the Line of the Grand Army in the Army of the Third Napoleon was, in its turn, no less unfortunate than its predecessor. The Eagle of the 8th of the Line of the Army of the Second Empire is now at Potsdam, one of the spoils of the war of 1870–1. It was carried through the streets of Berlin in the triumphal parade of the Prussian troops on their return home after the war, and after that, was deposited over the vault of Frederick the Great in the Church at Potsdam in the presence of the old Kaiser Wilhelm, Moltke, Von Roon, and other leaders of the victorious host. It bears these “battle-honours,” inscribed on its silken flag, among them “Talavera”:
“Austerlitz
1805.
Friedland
1807.
Talavera
1809.
Anvers
1832.
Zaatcha
1849.
Solferino
1859.”
[27] Southey, in his History of the Peninsular War, makes this ugly suggestion in regard to the Eagle trophies of Salamanca: “It is said that more than ten were captured, but that there were men base enough to conceal them and sell them to persons in Salamanca who deemed it good policy, as well as a profitable speculation, to purchase them for the French.” It may be, as to that, that Marmont’s army lost more than the two Eagles now at Chelsea. It is of course possible that camp followers and Spanish peasants of the locality, wandering over the battlefield to strip and plunder the dead on the day after the battle, when Wellington and the army were miles away, picked up Eagles on the scene of so tremendous a disaster for the French. They might easily traffic in them with French agents at Salamanca, well aware of their value if they could be secretly restored to their regiments. It is, however, inconceivable that British soldiers could have acted as alleged and been guilty of the dastardly crime that Southey hints at. Four Eagle-poles, with screw tops and the Eagles gone, were found on the field by British burying-parties; but those were all, and one of the four may have been the pole of the Eagle of the 62nd.
[28] As to Napoleon’s opinion in regard to the preservation of trophies so acquired, see his memo to Ney at Magdeburg, quoted in Chapter V., as [footnote to page 141].
[29] Napoleon had given permission to his marshals in Spain to grant colonels of regiments, in certain circumstances, discretionary powers as to the disposal of their Eagles. Colonels were authorised, when their regiments were proceeding on what might be considered “exceptionally hazardous service,” or when operating in difficult country, to keep the Eagles back, and leave them in camp or in a fortress. That is how Wellington in 1812 came to find the Eagles of the 13th and 51st of the Line at Madrid.
[30] On July 28, 1813, in a skirmish in the Pyrenees, the 40th (now the 2nd Somersetshire Regiment) surrounded and captured the French 32nd of the Line, rounding its First Battalion up in a valley and charging it with the bayonet, 24 officers and 700 men being taken. The Eagle had been thrown into a rapid mountain torrent in sight of our men, during the retreat of the 32nd, but it was impossible to prevent it, or to recover the Eagle afterwards.
[31] Others of the Eagles had narrow escapes during the Peninsular War. In the fighting south of the Douro, near Grijon, on the day before Wellington’s passage of the river at Oporto, the 31st Light Infantry all but lost their Eagle on being charged by the British 14th and 20th Light Dragoons. The 31st broke in confusion before the British onset, and only rallied some miles from the battlefield. “Our losses,” described one of the officers, “were very heavy, but our Eagle, which had been in extreme peril in the encounter, was happily saved.” Again, in the pursuit up the mountain side after the defeat of Girard’s Division at Arroyo dos Molinos, the Eagles of the 34th and 40th of the Line escaped capture—although both regiments were all but annihilated—to Marshal Soult’s expressed relief. In reporting the reverse to Napoleon, Soult added this by way of solatium: “L’honneur des armes est sauvé; les Aigles ne sont pas tombés au pouvoir de l’ennemi.” After Talavera, the Eagle of the 25th of the Line was picked up on the battlefield by a party of the King’s German Legion—it was sent to Hanover and is now in Berlin; also, during the battle, the British 29th took two Eagle-poles in a charge, but with the Eagles unscrewed from the tops and removed by the Eagle-bearers at the last moment and carried out of the fight under their coats.
[32] Elsewhere are other permanent trophies of the campaign, spoils of another kind. Nine hundred and twenty-nine of Napoleon’s cannon fell into Russian hands, mostly abandoned during the retreat, without attempt at defence. Of these, most are fittingly kept at Moscow; they number 875, and are exhibited in the arsenal, or mounted as trophies in the public squares in the Holy City. As with the flags, they are not all French. Those bearing the French Imperial cypher, the letter “N” surmounted by the Eagle and Napoleonic crown, number less than a half of the total. The French guns number 365; the bulk of the collection being made up of artillery from allied and vassal states: 189 Austrian cannon, 123 Prussian, 70 Italian, 40 Neapolitan, 34 Bavarian, 22 Dutch, 12 Saxon, 8 Spanish, 5 Polish, with 7 Westphalian, Würtemburg, and Hanoverian pieces. The Prussian and Austrian guns, most of them, it is fair to say, were not captured from the contingents serving with the Grand Army in Russia: they formed part of the artillery marching with Napoleon’s main column; they belonged to the French army, and were manned by French gunners, being spoils from the Austerlitz, Wagram, and Jena campaigns, turned to account to form field batteries for the French army. Innumerable other reminders of the fate of the Grand Army are preserved all over Russia: soldiers’ arms and accoutrements, personal belongings and decorations of French officers and men, fragments of uniforms, helmets, swords and lances, pistols and muskets; relics mostly picked up on battlefields or by the wayside along the route of the retreat. The muskets serve to illustrate incidentally, in the variety of the woods used for their stocks, the makeshifts to which, some time before 1812, the demands of Napoleon’s armaments had reduced France: the musket-stocks of oak, chestnut, elm, beech, maple, of even poplar and deal, tell a tale of exhausted supplies of the walnut and ash woods ordinarily used in the manufacture of firearms.
The total of 75 Eagles and other standards is no extravagantly large array of trophies, remembering the overwhelming nature of the catastrophe to the Grand Army in Russia. Of the 600,000 soldiers who mustered round their regimental colours at the crossing of the Niemen at the outset of the campaign, 125,000 were killed in fight, and 193,048, according to the Russian official returns, were taken prisoners. In round numbers 250,000 died on the line of march during the retreat, from cold, hardships, and starvation, or were killed as stragglers by the Cossacks and peasants. The mementoes also of their grim fate exist to-day in Russia. The graves of most of them may be seen all along the railway line from Wilna to Moscow, which follows closely the route of Napoleon and the Grand Army, over country the same in appearance now as then; a dreary, wind-swept, lonesome plain, broken only by vast stretches of dark, monotonous birch and pine forests, with here and there narrow ravines, and strips of hilly ground, amid which wind chill and sluggish rivers. At intervals huge mounds, looking like embankments or ancient barrows of enormous size, rise over the flat expanse of plain. They are the graves of the French dead. It took three months to destroy the remains of the dead soldiers and of some 150,000 horses which perished in the campaign. The ghastly task was carried out locally by the peasantry, under an urgent Government order, so as to prevent the outbreak of pestilence in the spring from the vast numbers of unburied corpses that strewed the track of the ill-fated host. The bodies, when the snow thawed, were dragged together and collected in heaps each “half a verst long and two fathoms high,” over 500 yards long and some 14 feet high. At first, efforts were made to burn them, but the supply of firewood failed, and the stench all over the country was unbearable. The corpses were then hauled into shallow trenches alongside, and quicklime and earth heaped over them, making the mounds now to be seen along the railway, on either side of the old post-road from Wilna to Moscow, the route of Napoleon’s retreat. In the province of Moscow, 50,000 dead soldiers and 29,000 dead horses were so disposed of before the middle of February; in the province of Smolensk, by the end of the month, 72,000 dead soldiers and 52,000 horses; in the province of Minsk, 40,000 human corpses and 28,000 horses; to which, later on, when the ice had melted, 12,000 more dead soldiers were added, the bodies found in the Beresina; in the province of Wilna, also by the end of February, 73,000 dead soldiers, with 10,000 dead horses. There were, in addition, very many never accounted for: dead stragglers who had perished in the forests, their remains being devoured by the wolves; and those who were massacred—beaten to death, or buried alive, or burned alive—by the peasants in places away from the line of march. Such was the appalling loss of life that attended the Moscow campaign, and which the trophies represent. In the circumstances, in proportion, the toll is hardly a large one.
[33] The wolves killed many of the stragglers as they wandered in search of food or shelter from the cold, away from the retreating columns. They followed in the track of the Grand Army to the last, across Germany to the Rhine. It is the fact, indeed, that the presence of wolves to-day in the forest lands of Central Europe is largely due to the tremendous incursion of ravenous brutes from Russia which swept in huge swarms in rear of Napoleon’s ill-fated host.
[34] Coignet, then a lieutenant of the Old Guard, thus speaks of the horrors of those latter days immediately following the Beresina: “The cold continued to grow more intense; the horses in the bivouacs died of hunger and cold. Every day some were left where we had passed the night. The roads were like glass. The horses fell down, and could not get up. Our worn-out soldiers no longer had strength to carry their arms. The barrels of their guns were so cold that they stuck to their hands. It was twenty-eight degrees below zero. But the Guard gave up their knapsacks and guns only with their lives. In order to save our lives, we had to eat the horses that fell upon the ice. The soldiers opened the skin with their knives, and took out the entrails, which they roasted on the coals, if they had time to make a fire; and, if not, they ate them raw. They devoured the horses before they died. I also ate this food as long as the horses lasted. As far as Wilna we travelled by short stages with the Emperor. His whole staff marched along the sides of the road. The men of the demoralised army marched along like prisoners, without arms and without knapsacks. There was no longer any discipline or any human feeling for one another. Each man looked out for himself. Every sentiment of humanity was extinguished. No one would have reached out his hand to his father; and that can easily be understood. For he who stooped down to help his fellow would not be able to rise again. We had to march right on, making faces to prevent our noses and ears from freezing. The men became insensible to every human feeling. No one even murmured against our misfortunes. The men fell, frozen stiff, all along the road. If, by chance, any of them came upon a bivouac of other unfortunate creatures who were thawing themselves, the newcomers pitilessly pushed them aside, and took possession of their fire. The poor creatures would then lie down to die upon the snow. One must have seen these horrors in order to believe them.... But it was at Wilna that we suffered most. The weather was so severe that the men could no longer endure it: even the ravens froze.”
[35] One of those who presented arms before Napoleon at the Rheims review died, just twenty years ago, as the last French survivor of Trafalgar—André Manuel Cartigny. At Trafalgar he had been a powder-boy on board the celebrated Redoutable, from the mizen-top of which the bullet was fired which killed Nelson. He paraded at Rheims among the remnant of survivors of Napoleon’s last battalion left of the Seamen of the Guard, and was present a month later at the historic farewell at Fontainebleau.
[36] General Dupont, an officer of the highest promise and with an exceptionally brilliant record, Ney’s right-hand man, and chief divisional leader on many battlefields, a special favourite also with Napoleon (“a man I loved and was rearing up to be a marshal,” were Napoleon’s words of him), while on the expedition which was to win him the bâton, at the head of 25,000 men, let himself be surrounded and cut off; trapped among the gorges of the Sierra Morena by a horde of peasants backed up by Spanish regulars; and then, in spite of a final chance that offered for him to force his way through, surrendered to the enemy. He had committed “une chose sans exculpe; une lacheté insultante,” declared Napoleon in savage fury on hearing of the surrender. Those who had had part in it, declared the Emperor, should “die on the scaffold”—“ils porteront sur l’échaffaud la peine de ce grand crime national!” He had Brigadier Legendre, Dupont’s Chief of the Staff, who had been released on parole, brought before him at Valladolid, and heaped on the wretched, broken man the bitterest reproaches and revilings; beside himself in his wrath. Not a word in reply, in explanation, would he listen to. Before the Imperial Guard on parade, and the assembled Imperial Staff, Napoleon finally gripped the general by the wrist and shook it passionately. An onlooker, another officer, describes the scene: “A nervous contraction of the muscles seemed to seize the Emperor. ‘What, General!’ he ejaculated, his voice quivering with fury. ‘Why did not your hand wither when it signed that infamous capitulation!’” Legendre was cashiered: Dupont (who had been ill and was wounded during the battle) was cashiered, degraded from the Legion of Honour, and kept under police surveillance as long as the Empire lasted.
What became of the other two Eagles, those of the “Garde de Paris” and of the Second Battalion of the 5th Light Infantry, and the fourteen Reserve Battalion flags that were taken at Bailen is unknown. They are not in Spain, although one trophy indirectly associated with the disaster is now at Madrid, the admiral’s flag of Admiral Rosily, who was at Cadiz with the French squadron which Dupont was marching to rescue. It is kept as a trophy in the Museo Naval of Madrid. Rosily had charge of the five French ships of the line which escaped into Cadiz after Trafalgar. When Spain rose against Napoleon, they were placed in danger from the garrison of Cadiz; being at the same time unable to put to sea because a British fleet blockaded the port. Dupont’s army was specially sent to bring away the 4,000 soldiers and sailors on board, who were then to abandon the ships. Just before Dupont reached Bailen, the Spaniards attacked Rosily, bombarding his ships with heavy cannon, and mortars and a gunboat flotilla, and he had to surrender, his admiral’s flag being carried off by the Spaniards, ultimately to find its way to its present resting-place.
[37] Years later these trophies were again brought to light, and by degrees, one at a time, or two or three together, found their way once more to the Hôtel, where they form part of the present collection. Among those now in the Invalides are six of Frederick the Great’s trophies annexed at Berlin by Napoleon in 1806; six Austrian and Bavarian flags, also of the Seven Years’ War period, removed by Napoleon from Vienna; an old German flag taken by Marshal Turenne, and in earlier times hung in Notre Dame; five Austrian colours of unknown origin; one Russian flag-trophy from Austerlitz; one Prussian standard from Jena; and a number of Spanish and Portuguese flags from the Peninsular War.
Three British regimental flags, originally captured by Napoleon’s Polish lancers at Albuera, found their way back in this manner to the Invalides. They were taken at Albuera in the first part of the battle, when, under cover of mist and rain squalls, the French cavalry, circling round one flank, swooped down on the leading British brigade before its regiments could form in square. Of the five other British flags at present in the Invalides, four were taken on March 8, 1814, just three weeks before the burning of the trophies, and had not yet reached Paris. They were taken from us in very tragic circumstances—at the disastrous attempt to storm the fortress of Bergen-op-Zoom; but the details of that painful story nor the identification of the flags do not concern us here. One of the four flags is kept beside Napoleon’s tomb. The fifth flag purports to have been a British sloop-of-war’s red ensign and to have been captured in the Baltic in December 1813, in an action of which the British Admiralty has no record, and the French account is only a tradition. It again, apparently, had not reached Paris by March 1814.
[38] To the Army, Louis XVIII. was only a King imposed on them by their enemies; by the triumphant enemies of France, the European Coalition. He was merely the “protégé of foreign bayonets,” placed over them by the English and Prussians; “l’émigré rentré en croupe derrière un cosaque!” To the soldiers he only personified defeat and disaster; and the memories that they gloried in had been of set purpose obliterated by him and his creatures. The very charter under which he had assumed authority was dated the 19th year of his reign, as though Napoleon had never been. He had proscribed their Eagle standards before which all Europe had trembled. By his ordinances he had abolished and insulted the memory of their victories. In addition he had disbanded and turned adrift their officers, and had left them to starve, without the pay that was their due, in wretchedness and rags.
Fuel was added to the fires of disaffection in the ranks by the tales that went round of every barrack-room of personal ill-usage of and affronts to officers who had won the respect of all on campaign, and before the enemy under fire. Ci-devant colonels and captains in long-forgotten corps of the old-time Royal Army were appointed at one stride Lieutenant-Generals and Major-Generals on the Active List, ousting and sending into unemployment men, whom Napoleon himself had picked out for command, whose names were household words to the Army. In almost every regiment officers who had grown grey in war-service before the enemy, who had won distinction on a hundred battlefields, were shelved; set aside for émigrés, who, a quarter of a century before, had been boy subalterns in the army of the ancien régime, and had not set foot in France since they fled the country at the outbreak of the Revolution. These were brought back and posted wholesale as colonels and chefs de bataillon all through the Army, superseding and driving into poverty veterans who had raised themselves to their ranks and positions through personal merit and war-service, and had qualified step by step in the different grades. At a levée one day, after a review before the Duc de Berri, a grey-headed old regimental officer stepped forward, according to custom, and made a request to have granted to him for his services the Cross of St. Louis. “What have you done to deserve it?” was the Prince’s reply, uttered in a cold and sneering tone. “I have served in the Army of France for twenty years, your Royal Highness!” “Twenty years of robbery!” was the cruel and insolent answer as the Duc de Berri turned his back on the veteran. The words were repeated everywhere among the soldiers and had the worst effect. Another tale that caused deep resentment throughout the Army was that of the treatment which Marshal Ney had received at Court when protesting against rudeness which had been shown by certain ladies of title to his wife one day at the Tuileries. They had openly insulted the Maréchale Ney by making sarcastic and contemptuous comments on her comparatively lowly birth. Marshal Ney personally complained to the King, but was coldly referred to the Court Chamberlain. He laid his complaint before that functionary and was personally rebuffed “in a harsh and insolent manner”—as the only reply to which the Marshal with his wife had withdrawn from Paris altogether. And more than one other officer of eminence, it was told, had in like manner been forced to cease attendance at Court. When the moment came for the reappearance of Napoleon in their midst, the Army was more than ready to receive their old leader with open arms and rally once more to the Eagles.
[39] It was the action of Marshal Ney that sealed the fate of the Bourbon régime.
Ney had accepted the Restoration as bringing peace to exhausted France; he had given in his allegiance to the Bourbons. Angry and sick at heart as he was over the ill-treatment meted out to his brother officers, and the humiliations that the new régime had inflicted on the Army, and sore over personal grievances of his own, he had, in spite of all, loyally held back from intriguing against the restored dynasty. Napoleon’s leaving Elba, when he first heard the news, he condemned outspokenly as a crime against France. Impulsive and headstrong by nature, he forgot his grievances, and hastened to Paris to offer his sword to the King. Napoleon, he said to the King at the interview at the Tuileries, which was immediately granted him, was a madman and deserved to be brought to Paris “like a bandit in an iron cage.” So hostile witnesses at Ney’s court-martial declared, though Ney himself emphatically denied using any words of the kind. His services were accepted gladly, for Ney was the most popular of all the marshals with the soldiers, and he was sent to lead the army against Napoleon. Besançon was proposed as his head-quarters, and he betook himself there.
Almost at once, however, anxieties and doubts beset Ney. On taking up his command he found but few regiments available. He was promised reinforcements, but none arrived, and while he waited, no news of the rapidly altering situation reached him from Paris. Meanwhile the news came steadily in from all sides that the soldiers could not be trusted to oppose Napoleon. Ney was still loyal to the Bourbons, and he moved his troops nearer the line of advance Napoleon was taking; to Lons le Saulnier, midway between Besançon and Lyons. To officers who hinted that the soldiers would not fight if Napoleon appeared, Ney answered angrily: “They shall fight. I will take a musket and begin the firing myself! I will run my sword through the first man who hesitates!”
But events were moving too fast: the tide of Bonapartism was rising visibly on all sides. Napoleon, Ney heard, was being received everywhere with acclamation; the soldiers were said to be declaring for him by thousands. Already in every garrison the soldiers were displaying their old Eagle cap-badges and tricolor cockades. “Every soldier in the Army,” relates Savary in his Memoirs, “had preserved his tricolor cockade and the Eagle-badge of his shako or cap. It was needless for any order to be given for their resumption; that had been done on the first intelligence of the Emperor’s landing in France.” Everywhere too, officers who had kept back and hidden the old regimental Eagles and tricolor standards, were bringing them out openly. In regiments where the Ministerial order had been obeyed and the Eagles sent to Paris for destruction, the soldiers now took out the Bourbon arms from the white flags, substituting a tricolor shield for the royal shield with the three fleurs-de-lis.
Ney next began to doubt what line of conduct he ought to adopt. On one side was his oath of allegiance to the King. On the other was the prospect of a civil war which would be ruinous to France, which he, at the head of his army, had it in his power to prevent. It became borne in on him as his duty to the country in the circumstances to throw his influence on the side of his old comrades and Napoleon. His personal grievances against the Bourbons rankled in his mind, and self-interest urged him to go with the stream; but it was rather a sense of duty and patriotism, to avert a civil war, that impelled Ney to take the action that he did. His final decision was influenced by an insidiously worded letter from Napoleon, playing on Ney’s personal feelings and calling him by his old name of “the Bravest of the Brave.” The letter was brought to him by two secret emissaries on the night of March 13, who urged on the marshal that his soldiers were about to abandon him, and that it was impossible for him single-handed to hope to stem the current of national feeling. That and the letter turned the scale. Ney decided to abandon the cause of the Bourbons.
Assembling his troops on parade next day, he publicly declared for Napoleon in a fiery proclamation addressed to the Army. “Officers, under-officers, and soldiers,” Ney began, reading out the proclamation from on horseback in front of the assembled battalions, “the cause of the Bourbons is lost for ever! The dynasty adopted by the French nation is about to reascend the throne. To the Emperor Napoleon, our Sovereign, alone belongs the right of reigning in our dear country.” The proclamation concluded with these words: “Soldiers, I have often led you to victory. I will now conduct you to that immortal phalanx which the Emperor Napoleon is leading towards Paris. It will arrive there within a few days, when our hopes and our happiness will be for ever realised. Long live the Emperor!”
The declaration came as fire to a train of gunpowder. Ney had hardly uttered a dozen words before frantic exclamations and shouts burst forth; shakos and caps and helmets were raised and waved on muskets and swords, amid tumultuous cries of “Vive l’Empereur!” “Vive le Maréchal Ney!” The men broke their ranks and rushed headlong round Ney, catching hold of him and kissing his hands and feet and uniform: “those not near enough kissing his embarrassed aides de camp.” Shouted some: “We knew you would not leave us in the hands of the émigrés!” The marshal at the close was escorted back to his quarters amid a crowd of excited soldiers cheering frantically.
The scene there was very different. Arrived in his quarters, Ney found himself at once surrounded by a group of anxious and nervous staff-officers and aides de camp. Said some: “You should have informed us of it before, M. le Maréchal! We ought not to have been made witnesses of such a spectacle!” One or two officers protested and resigned on the spot. One aide de camp, indeed, a former émigré, broke his sword in two and flung the pieces at Ney’s feet. “It is easier,” he exclaimed passionately, “for a man of honour to break iron than to break his word.”
“You are children,” was the marshal’s answer. “It is necessary to do one thing or the other. What would you have me do? Can I stop the advancing sea with my hands? Can I go and hide like a coward to avoid the responsibility of events I cannot alter? Marshal Ney cannot take refuge in the dark! There is but one way to deal with the evil—to take one side and avert civil war. So we shall get into our hands the man who has returned, and prevent his committing further follies. I am not going over to a man, but to my country.”
[40] The silken standard flags attached below the Eagles were plainer in design than the flags of 1804 and 1808. They were of the ordinary pattern of the national banner, three vertical bands of colour, edged with golden fringe. Lettered in gold on the white central band of the flag was the Imperial dedication, worded similarly to the inscription on the older flags, and on the reverse the names of the battles in which the corps had taken part—“Austerlitz,” “Jena,” etc.
[41] Napoleon left Paris for the front on the early morning of June 12, after spending several hours in his cabinet, issuing orders and making arrangements for the carrying on of the Government in his absence. Caulaincourt, acting for the time being as Foreign Minister, was with Napoleon until the last moment, and witnessed his departure. “The clock struck three, and daylight was beginning to appear. ‘Farewell, Caulaincourt!’ said the Emperor, holding out his hand to me, ‘Farewell! We must conquer or die!’ With hurried steps he passed through the apartments, his mind being evidently fully taken up with melancholy thoughts. On reaching the foot of the staircase, he cast a lingering look round him, and then threw himself into his carriage and drove away.”
[42] Trafalgar, on the French side, it may be added by the way, had a distinguished representative at Waterloo in the person of the officer at the head of the Artillery of the Imperial Guard, General Drouot. He had fought against Nelson as a major of artillery doing duty in the French fleet. His ship was one of the few that escaped into Cadiz after the battle, whence he was recalled to join the Grand Army in the Jena campaign. Drouot was the officer who, during the retreat from Moscow—where he brought the artillery of the Guard through without losing a gun—“washed his face and shaved in the open air, affixing his looking-glass to a gun-carriage, every day, regardless of the thermometer!”
[43] Napoleon—it may be of general interest to add—passed the whole of the day, between the review in the forenoon and late in the afternoon when he rode forward to witness the Guard start for the last charge, on the ridge of high ground near Rossomme, So the memoirs of the officers of his staff unanimously record. At no time was he near the so-called “observatory,” in regard to which there has recently been a controversy, based on the publication of a letter by the eminent surgeon, Sir Charles Bell, who was at Waterloo, and rendered very valuable service to the wounded. This is the story as told in his letter by Dr. Bell:
“About half a mile of ascent brought us to the position of Bonaparte. This is the highest ground in the Pays Bas. I climbed up one of the pillars of the scaffolding, as I was wont to do after birds’ nests.... We got a ladder from the farm-court; it reached near the first platform. I mounted and climbed with some difficulty; none of the rest would venture.... The view was magnificent. I was only one-third up the machine, yet it was a giddy height. Here Bonaparte stood surveying the field.
“This position of Bonaparte is most excellent; the machine had been placed by the side of the road, but he ordered it to be shifted. The shifting of this scaffolding shows sufficiently the power of confidence and the resolution of the man. It is about sixty feet in height. I climbed upon it about four times the length of my body, by exact measurement, and this was only the first stage. I was filled with admiration for a man of his habit of life who could stand perched on a height of sixty-five feet above everything, and contemplate, see, and manage such a scene.”
Mention of the scaffold-platform is also made by Sir Walter Scott, who rode over the field in August 1815. Sir Walter gives this version, in a letter to the Duke of Buccleuch:
“The story of his (Napoleon’s) having an observatory erected for him is a mistake. There is such a thing, and he repaired to it during the action; but it was built or erected some months before, for the purpose of a trigonometrical survey of the country, by the King of the Netherlands.”
Thomas Kelly, an enterprising London publisher, went further. He had a picture of the erection drawn, and brought it out as a popular print in October 1815, under the title of “Bonaparte’s Observatory to view the Battle of Waterloo.” The print shows a three-tiered structure, apparently quite lately constructed, with three platforms, and ladders leading from one platform to the other. Napoleon himself is depicted on top, his spy-glass at his eye, and with two staff officers in attendance.
There certainly was a structure of the kind on the field. Such a thing, in a dilapidated condition, is to be seen in miniature on the Siborne model of the battlefield at the Royal United Service Institution. It is made to scale, and in its essential features bears out Dr. Bell’s description. It stands close to the “wood of Callois” by the Nivelle road, rather more than a mile to the south of Hougoumont. It has only one platform, whence it would overlook the trees and give a good view of the battle.
On the other hand, in addition to the silence of all Napoleon’s officers on the subject, we have this plain statement from Frances Lady Shelley, an intimate friend of the Duke of Wellington, who was in Paris during the occupation after the battle and was also taken over the battlefield by the Duke of Richmond some three months after Waterloo. It appears in her recently published Diary, at p. 173, and may be taken as settling the fate of the story of “this towering and massive perch,” “that wonderful scaffold,” “that huge scaffolding,” “part of Napoleon’s equipment at Waterloo,” as a modern historical writer calls it.
This is what Lady Shelley wrote at the time:
“Throughout the battle of Waterloo Napoleon remained on a mound, within cannon shot, but beyond the range of musketry fire. He certainly was not in the observatory after the battle began; nor could he have from that spot directed the movements of his troops. That observatory was built for topographical reasons by a former Governor of the Netherlands something like a century ago.”
[44] The “fanion” of the second battalion of the 45th shared the fate of the regimental Eagle. It fell to Private Wheeler of the 28th, the “Slashers,” the present 1st Battalion of the Gloucestershire Regiment. The 28th, on the left of Picton’s line, had, like the Highlanders, charged forward among the French, following close after the Greys. Wheeler, after a fierce fight with the bearer of the “fanion,” in which he was severely wounded, bayoneted the French sergeant and carried off the trophy. It disappeared in an unexplained manner some days later, during Wellington’s march on Paris, while being forwarded to the Duke’s head-quarters.
[45] The news of Waterloo reached Paris just twenty-four hours earlier than it reached London—during the night of Tuesday, June 20. How it was broken to the French capital forms a story little less dramatic than the other story of how the news of Waterloo arrived in London. In Paris they had had news of the successful opening of the campaign. On the 18th, just as Napoleon was holding his last review, before Waterloo opened, the “triumphal battery” of the Invalides was firing a feu de joie in honour of victory over Blücher at Ligny. On Monday and Tuesday, the 19th and 20th, Napoleon’s Ligny Bulletin, with details, was published in the Moniteur. When the cafés closed that evening, there was as yet no word of Waterloo. But at that same moment the news was arriving—in a private message to Carnot, the Minister of the Interior. What had happened leaked out first at his house.
“On that evening,” describes M. Edgar Quinet, “several persons were assembled at the house of M. Carnot, and they vainly asked him for news. To evade these importunate questions, Carnot went to a card-table and sat down with three of his friends. He from whom I have this story sat opposite the Minister. By chance he raised his eyes and looked at Carnot; he saw his countenance, serious, furrowed, with tears pouring down it. The cards were thrown up; the players rose. ‘The battle is lost!’ exclaimed Carnot, who could contain himself no longer.” The news spread through Paris like wild-fire. It was not believed at first; the catastrophe was too stunning, too terrible. To that succeeded a gloomy stupor (une morne stupeur).
“They had not long to wait. All was known next morning. The astounding news of the rout of the army in Belgium, and the still more astounding news of the arrival of Napoleon in Paris, were spread through the great city almost simultaneously, and stirred to the depths its restless and volatile population. Twice before had Napoleon suddenly returned to Paris—from Moscow, from Leipsic—and each time alone, without an army. Thus had he again presented himself.”
[46] The Campaign of the Hundred Days, it has been estimated, from first to last cost Napoleon in round numbers, in killed, wounded, and prisoners taken in the field:
| Ligny (Killed and wounded) | 10,000 |
| Quatre-Bras (Killed and wounded) | 4,300 |
| Waterloo (Killed and wounded) | 29,500 |
| Waterloo (Prisoners unwounded) | 7,500 |
| Wavre (Killed and wounded) | 1,800 |
| Lesser actions (Killed and wounded) | 2,100 |
| Total | 55,200 |
Out of the 126,000 men with whom Napoleon took the field, he lost some 43 per cent. of his army in the week between June 15 and 22.
[47] Five Eagles were on show in London in the autumn of 1815, in the so-called “Waterloo Museum,” having been acquired somehow on the occupation of Paris. Two were described as the Eagles of the 5th of the Line and of the Seamen of the Guard, and two as National Guard Eagles—all four having been presented at the Champ de Mai. The fifth purported to be the Eagle of the “Elba Guard.” None of the five had ever been in action.