The war drama of the Eagles

by Edward Fraser

Jena and the Triumph of Berlin

The curtain rises this time on an act in the War Drama of the Eagles unique in the startling incidents of its historic dénoûment.

Prussia, in September 1806, threw down the gage to Napoleon and drew the sword for a trial of strength, with the full assurance of victory. There was no doubt in Germany as to the issue; not the least anxiety was felt. No troops in the world, declared one and all, could stand up to the Prussian Army. It was easy, they said at Potsdam and Berlin, to account for what had happened last year on the Danube. Any sort of army could have won in that war. Timidity and want of skill in the Austrian generals, deficient training in the men, had been, beyond dispute, the reason of the disasters. It would be otherwise now. Napoleon would have to meet this time the Army of Prussia; the best drilled and smartest soldiers in the world, organised and trained under the system that the Great Frederick had originated and himself brought to perfection. “His Majesty the King,” said one of the Prussian generals, addressing a parade at Potsdam, “has many generals better than Napoleon!” In the Prussian Army, from veteran field-marshal to drummer-boy, there were no two opinions as to what must be the outcome of a clash of arms with France. The wings of Napoleon’s Eagles would be clipped once for all.

But to hurl defiant words was not enough. Yet further to display contempt for their French foes, the young officers of the Prussian Guard marched one night in procession through the streets of Berlin to demonstrate in front of the French Embassy. Shouting out insults and jeers, they brandished their swords before the windows of the mansion and made a show of sharpening the blades on the Ambassador’s doorsteps. The Prussian King’s ultimatum went forth, couched in language there was no mistaking, and the Royal Guard Corps set out from the capital for the frontier with flags displayed and their bands playing triumphal airs, chanting songs of the victories of the Great Frederick, and shouting themselves hoarse with cries of “Nach Paris!” All over Prussia it was the same. The marching regiments tramped through the towns and villages, their colours decked with flowers, their bands playing, and with the swaggering gait of victors returning from conquest.

A REPLY WITHIN A WEEK

The Prussian ultimatum, delivered on September 1, haughtily demanded a reply from France within a week. It was accepted with alacrity. Napoleon had foreseen all and laid his plans. “Marshal,” he said to Berthier, with a grim smile, as he read the ultimatum, “they have given us a rendezvous for the 8th; never did Frenchman refuse such an appeal.”

The Eagles never swooped to more deadly purpose, with results more amazing and more dramatic, than in that campaign.

Within three days of the firing of the first shot, a Prussian division of 9,000 men had been routed with heavy loss at Schleitz in Thuringia; and Murat’s cavalry had captured elsewhere great part of the Prussian reserve baggage-trains and pontoon equipment. On the fourth day of the war, at Saalfeld in Thuringia, 1,200 Prussian prisoners were taken and 30 guns. In the battles of Jena and Auerstadt, both fought on the same day, October 14, 20,000 Prussian prisoners, 200 guns, and 25 standards were spoils to the Eagles. At Erfurth, on the next day, a Prussian field-marshal with 14,000 men, 120 guns and the whole of the grand park of the reserve artillery of the army were taken. At Halle 4,000 Prussian prisoners were taken, with 30 guns; at Lübeck 8,000 prisoners and 40 guns. Magdeburg, one of the strongest fortresses in Europe, with immense magazines and 600 guns on the ramparts garrisoned by 16,000 troops, surrendered after a few hours’ partial bombardment. Stettin, a first-class fortress mounting 150 guns, with a garrison of 6,000 men, surrendered without firing a shot. The strong fortress of Cüstrin on the Oder, with 4,000 men in garrison and 90 cannon on the ramparts, surrendered, also without firing a shot, to a solitary French infantry regiment with four guns. The fortress of Spandau, garrisoned by 6,000 men, hauled down its flag and opened its gates to a squadron of French hussars, no other French troops being within many miles, bluffed into surrender. Within twelve days of Jena, Napoleon had made his entry as a conqueror into Berlin, and the Prussian Army had ceased to exist. “We have arrived in Potsdam and Berlin,” announced Napoleon in a Bulletin to the Grand Army, “sooner than the renown of our victories! We have made 60,000 prisoners, taken 65 standards, including those of the Royal Guard, 600 pieces of cannon, 3 fortresses, 20 generals, half of our army having to regret that they have not had an opportunity of firing a shot. All the Prussian provinces from the Elbe to the Oder are in our hands.” Before the end of the year, in little more than three months from the firing of the first shot, a total of 100,000 prisoners, 4,000 cannon, 6 first-class fortresses, and many smaller ones, were in the hands of the victors.

RUIN, SWIFT AND IRREPARABLE

Never had the world witnessed such an overthrow in war, so complete and appalling a catastrophe. Two battles sufficed to prostrate Prussia and annihilate the model army of Frederick the Great: the twin battles of Jena and Auerstadt, both fought, as has been said, on the same day, October 14, and within ten miles of one another. Jena was fought under Napoleon’s own eye; Auerstadt by Marshal Davout, practically single-handed, with his one army corps confronting the King and Blücher with the main Prussian army. The Prussian generals indeed gave themselves into Napoleon’s hands at the outset. They separated their main army into two bodies out of touch with each other, in the immediate presence of the enemy. Ruin, swift and irreparable, was the penalty. At Jena, Prince Hohenlohe’s army was flung roughly back and dashed to pieces, its scattered remnants flying in wild disorder. At Auerstadt, Davout defeated numbers nearly double his own, through the confused tactics of the Prussian generals. Immediately after that came on the débâcle. The Prussian Auerstadt army was falling back, disheartened and demoralised, but still in fair military formation to a large extent, when, all of a sudden, not having had up to then the least inkling of what had happened at Jena, the retreating troops came upon the shattered fragments of Hohenlohe’s battalions, streaming in wild confusion across their path; masses of fugitives running for their lives in frantic panic before the sabres of Murat’s pursuing cavalry. That ended everything for the Prussian army in five minutes. The sight of their fugitive comrades struck confusion and sheer fright into the retreating columns from Auerstadt. All order was instantly lost: the soldiers threw away their arms and spread over the country in headlong rout. And there was no means of stopping it. In their blind self-confidence the Prussian generals had made no arrangements in the event of a reverse. No line of retreat had been arranged for, no rallying-point had been thought of. “The disaster of a single day made an end of the Prussian army as a force capable of meeting the enemy in the field.”

For the Eagles it was a day of adventures on both battlefields. Swiftly alternating rushes forward, the Eagles showing the way at the head of their regiments at one moment; hasty halts to form in rallying squares, the Eagles in the midst, the next moment, to check the incessant Prussian cavalry counter-charges—that was what the fighting on the French side was like, all through the day, at both Jena and Auerstadt. At one time the Eagles were leading forward charging lines of exultantly cheering men, firing fast and racing forward at the pas de charge; immediately afterwards they were standing fast, each the centre of a mass of breathless and excited soldiers, surging round and closing up to form square, with bristling bayonets levelled on every side, to hold the ground they had won against the charging squadrons of Prussian horsemen that came at them, thundering down impetuously at the gallop.

“LEAD OUT YOUR EAGLE!”

“I want to see the Eagles well to the front to-day!” said Napoleon to several regiments in turn, as he rode at early dawn along the lines of Marshal Soult’s two foremost divisions who were to open the attack at Jena. To them the task had been appointed to push forward in advance, and hold the exits from the narrow defiles through which the French troops had to pass, before reaching the Prussians on the high ground beyond, in order to give time to the main army, following close in rear, to deploy and form in battle order. “Lead out your Eagle, Sixty-fourth!” Napoleon said to one of the regiments told off to go forward in the forefront of all. “I wish to-day to see the Eagle of the Sixty-fourth lead the battle on the field of honour!” How that Eagle led its regiment, how those who fought under it did their duty, the prized honour of special mention in the Jena Bulletin of the Grand Army, and a shower of crosses of the Legion of Honour, distributed among all ranks, bore testimony. Five times did the Eagle of the 34th, the regiment fighting next to the 64th, lead a charge, each charge crossing bayonets with the enemy, twice in hand-to-hand fight with the picked corps of the Prussian Grenadiers.

It was on the battlefield of Jena that Marshal Ney won his historic sobriquet of “The Bravest of the Brave.” He personally led forward his attack, with, at either side of him, the Eagles of the 18th of the Line, the 32nd, and the 96th. Carried away by his impetuous valour, soon after the opening of the battle, Ney made his attack with only at hand the three regiments of his First Division. The other two divisions of Ney’s corps had not yet reached the field. A regiment of cuirassiers headed the column, and at their first charge captured 13 Prussian guns; but the Prussian cavalry, charging back at once to recover the guns, overpowered the cuirassiers.

“The Prussian cavalry broke the French horse, and enveloped the infantry in such numbers as would inevitably have proved fatal to less resolute troops; but the brave marshal instantly formed his men into squares, threw himself into one of them, and there maintained the combat by a rolling fire on all sides, till Napoleon, who saw his danger, sent several regiments of horse, under Bertrand, who disengaged him from his perilous situation.”

Ney’s other troops then joined the marshal, coming up with their Eagles gleaming through the battle-smoke: the Eagles of the 39th and the 69th, of the 76th, the 27th, and the 59th. Ney, extricated from his difficulties, went on again at once. “With intrepid step he ascended the hill, and, after a sharp conflict, stormed the important village of Vierzehn-Heiligen, in the centre of the Prussian position. In vain Hohenlohe formed the flower of his troops to regain the post; in vain these brave men advanced in parade order, and with unshrinking firmness, through a storm of musketry and grape; the troops of Lannes came up to Ney’s support, and the French established themselves in such strength in the village as to render all subsequent attempts for its recapture abortive.”

LET THEM COME ON!

This was the spirit in which, at Jena, Ney’s men fought under the Eagles. One instance will suffice. The 76th of the Line, after the village of Vierzehn-Heiligen had been taken, were in the act of advancing across the open to a fresh attack, when a charge of Prussian cavalry swept fiercely down on them. The regiment formed in square, each battalion rallying round its Eagle, held up aloft for all to gather round. The Prussians had come up suddenly. They were within 150 yards before the 76th were ready. Then the 76th were ordered to “present” and fire. Instead of doing that, the men, as if moved by one common impulse, took off their shakos, stuck them on their bayonets, and waved them in the air, with defiant cheers of “Vive l’Empereur!” “Donnez feu, mes enfants! Donnez feu!” (“Fire, men, fire!”) shouted out their colonel, Lannier, anxious lest the enemy should get too near. “We have time: at fifteen paces, Colonel; wait and see!” came back in answer from the ranks. They did wait, and, at just fifteen paces, fired a crashing volley which so staggered the Prussians that, leaving half their men on the ground, they turned and galloped back.

The regiments of Lannes’ corps, with the fiery marshal cantering at their head and waving them on, cocked hat in hand, entered the battle with drums beating and the Eagles proudly displayed in the centre of the leading lines.

“HERE IS THE COU-COU!”

One regiment lost 28 officers and 400 men. It had made good its first attack and was advancing to a second, when it was charged in the open by the Prussian cavalry, while in the act of forming square. It all but lost its Eagle. The Eagle-bearer was cut down, and the Eagle was broken from its staff in the trampling tumult of horsemen intermingled with infantry, savagely fighting with their bayonets. A soldier saved the Eagle, and in the hurry of the moment stuffed it into the pocket of his long overcoat. Then he went on fighting. Apparently the man had no time or opportunity to think of the Eagle again. The regiment was re-forming towards the close of the battle, when Napoleon himself, riding across the ground near them, with his quick glance, missed the Eagle. He cantered up to the spot, and, on being told by an officer that he did not know where it was, angrily accused the men of having lost their Eagle on the field. He began upbraiding them indignantly: “What is this? Where is your Eagle? You have brought disgrace on the Army by losing your Eagle!” Those were his opening words. He was rating the men angrily, when he was abruptly interrupted by a voice from the ranks. “No, your Majesty, no! they did not get it: they only got a piece of the bâton! Here is the Cou-cou! I put it in my pocket!” The soldier drew out the Eagle as he spoke and held it up. There was a loud outburst of laughter from the soldiers at the unexpected turn of events, amid which Napoleon, without a word more, turned and rode off elsewhere.

At Auerstadt, where 30,000 French faced and defeated 60,000 Prussians, the fighting was even fiercer than at Jena. Recklessly the Prussian horsemen, led in person by the dauntless Blücher, repeatedly charged down on the French, who formed in square everywhere to beat them back, They did so at all points, and the Prussians only wrecked themselves beyond recovery by their efforts. In vain did the Prussian cavalry, as at Jena, gallop up to the French bayonets again and again. “In vain these gallant cavaliers, with headlong fury, drove their steeds up to the very muzzles of the French muskets. In vain they rode round and enveloped their squares: ceaseless was the rolling fire which issued from those flaming walls: impenetrable the hedge of bayonets which, the front rank kneeling, presented to their advances.” Erect in the centre of each French battalion square glittered its Eagle, raised on high defiantly above the smoke as the volleys flashed out all round.

Marshal Davout was seen at every point wherever the regiments were hardest pressed. From square to square the marshal galloped, as opportunity offered in the intervals of the Prussian attacks, “his face begrimed with sweat and powder-smoke, his spectacles gone,[11] his bald head bleeding from a wound, his uniform torn, a piece of his cocked hat shot away,” to exhort the men to stand fast and hold their ground. To one regiment he called out, as he reined up beside its square: “Their Great Frederick said that God gave the victory to the big battalions. He lied! It’s the stubborn soldiers who win battles; that’s you and your general to-day!” Davout personally brought up support at one point to rescue a sorely pressed division of four regiments, General Gudin’s,[12] holding the village of Herrenhausen, on the right of the battlefield; a post of vital importance to the fate of the day. Taken by a brilliant dash forward early in the battle, the village was held to the last, in spite of the utmost endeavours of the Prussians to regain it.

MARSHAL DAVOUT.

AT BAY BEHIND A BARRICADE

The French kept the post at the cost of half their numbers. One regiment, the 85th, on the side of the village fronting the Prussians, lost two-thirds of its men and was forced back and compelled to abandon the outskirts. It kept the Prussians at bay, however, within the village, behind a barricade of overturned carts, farm implements, and cottage furniture heaped together. Close behind the firing line across the village street the Eagle-bearer took his stand, amidst a hail of bullets, mounted on a wheelbarrow and brandishing the Eagle and calling on the men to stand firm and fire low.

Marshal Davout brought up his First Division of five regiments to rescue Gudin, heading them sword in hand as he galloped forward. In doing so he received his wound and had a narrow escape of his life. “One bullet went through the marshal’s hat just above the cockade.”[13]

The 111th of the Line, of Davout’s Third Division, had three Eagle-bearers shot down in succession, a fresh officer coming forward to carry the Eagle as his predecessor fell. All the drummer-lads of the regiment were killed, whereupon Drum-Major Mauser, dropping his staff, picked up a drum and beat it as the regiment advanced in its final charge. He ran forward close beside the Eagle until he in turn fell shot dead. This was in storming the village of Spielberg, nearly at the close of the battle.

“The corps of Marshal Davout performed prodigies,” wrote Napoleon in the Fourth Bulletin of the campaign, commending with warmth “the rare intrepidity of the brave corps.” He ordered 500 crosses of the Legion of Honour to be distributed in Davout’s corps, directing that when the army reached Berlin, Davout and the Third Corps should take precedence, and their Eagles lead the triumphal entry through the streets of the Prussian capital. At a special review of Davout’s corps, calling the marshal and his generals round him, he declared his unbounded admiration of the feat of arms they had achieved. “Sire,” replied Davout, deeply moved at Napoleon’s words, “the soldiers of the Third Corps will always be to you what the Tenth Legion was to Caesar.”

At the attack on Halle, three days after Jena, the 32nd of the Line, near the Eagle of which regiment Ney had ridden at Jena, distinguished themselves brilliantly. The Prussian Reserve Army Corps was holding Halle and making a gallant effort in a rearguard fight to safeguard the passage there over the river Saale. Led by the commander of Ney’s First Division, General Dupont, in person, they stormed the bridge in the face of a tremendous fire of grape and case shot. Then, backed up by their comrades in Ney’s First Division, the 18th and 96th and 9th Light Infantry, they fought their way through the city and, breaking open the gates, stormed the heights beyond, foremost throughout in the attack. Four times the Eagle-bearer of the 32nd was shot down: each time a fresh officer sprang forward to lead the regiment on. The 97th of the Line, while fighting their way through the streets of Halle at another point, found the Prussian cannon mounted at a barricade too deadly to face in the open, and the regiment recoiled in confusion. Taking the Eagle from the Eagle-bearer, Colonel Barrois called forward the grenadier company. Leading them on himself on horseback, holding up the Eagle with his right hand, he went straight at the barricade, which was stormed without touching a trigger.

ACROSS A CONQUERED LAND

Thenceforward there was only left for the Eagles to choose the slain; to parade in triumph across a conquered land. “Veni, Vidi, Vici,” sums up the story of the after-events of the war for the Eagles of Napoleon. The army of the great Frederick committed suicide after Jena. Its resistance collapsed: the army that had gone forth in September to cross the Rhine and dictate peace at the gates of Paris had ceased to exist within six weeks. How completely indeed the moral of the Prussians had been shattered, this story, from a report from Marshal Lannes to Napoleon, serves to show. “Three hussars,” related Lannes, “having lost their way towards Grätz, found themselves in the midst of an enemy’s squadron. They boldly drew their carbines and, levelling them at the enemy, called out that the Prussians were surrounded, and must surrender at discretion. The Prussians obeyed. The commander of the squadron, without apparently a thought of resistance, ordered his men to dismount, and they surrendered their arms to those three hussars, who brought them all in prisoners of war.”

General Lassalle, with a handful of hussars, as has been said, captured the fortress of Stettin, with 150 guns on its walls and a garrison of 6,000 men, by sheer effrontery. He rode up to the main gate and demanded the surrender within five minutes; and the governor capitulated on the spot. “If your hussars take strong fortresses like that,” wrote Napoleon to Murat, on hearing the news, “I have nothing to do but break up my artillery and discharge my engineers.” Prince Hohenlohe with 14,000 men and 50 guns, his troops including the Royal Prussian Guard and six regiments of Guard cavalry, laid down their arms at Prentzlau. A few miles away, 8,000 more Prussians surrendered on the same day to a French brigade of dragoons. The unfortunates were remnants of the troops beaten at Jena, and had been relentlessly pursued for ten days.

The 7th Hussars forwarded to Napoleon as their spoils from a three days’ chase, 7 Prussian cavalry standards; those of the Anspach and Bayreuth Dragoons; the Queen of Prussia’s regiment; and 4 standards of the Light Cavalry of the Guard. Marshal Lannes sent Napoleon 40 Prussian standards taken between Jena and Berlin. Bernadotte and Soult presented 82 more trophies, the spoils of Blücher’s army, forced to surrender at Lübeck after a forlorn-hope fight in the course of which the city was stormed.

“THE FINEST FEAT OF ARMS”

Marshal Ney took the fortress of Magdeburg without having a single siege-gun, and with only 11,000 men at hand to deal with 24,000 in the garrison and 700 guns on the ramparts, some of these being the heaviest artillery of the time. It was perhaps the most surprising event of the war. The taking of Magdeburg, wrote Junot, “is the finest feat of arms that has illustrated this campaign.” Ney had been ordered to blockade Magdeburg until a sufficient army was available for the siege of the fortress, which Napoleon expected would be a long and difficult affair. But so tedious a task as a blockade was not at all to Ney’s taste. To hasten matters he sent for half a dozen mortars, taken at Erfurt, and began throwing shells into the suburbs on the side nearest him. The bombardment caused a scare among the townsfolk. Panic-stricken at seeing their houses set on fire and destroyed by the bursting shells, they hastened to General Kleist, the governor of Magdeburg, an elderly and nervous old gentleman of between seventy and eighty years of age, and implored him to ask terms of the French marshal. Dismayed himself at the prospect of a siege, with disorder rampant among the military—nearly half the garrison was made up of fragments of fugitive regiments from Jena who had fled to Magdeburg for shelter from the pursuing French—Kleist, losing his nerve in the face of the alarming situation, agreed to negotiate for terms. Ney’s reply was a demand for instant surrender, whereupon the wretched governor, although he had more than enough good troops at disposal, without counting the Jena fugitives, to have made a stubborn defence, tamely hoisted the white flag.

The march out of the garrison of Magdeburg was a repetition of the Austrian humiliation of Ulm on a lesser scale. The standards of the Black Eagle in their turn had at Magdeburg publicly to acknowledge defeat before the Eagles of Napoleon.

THE GARRISON LAYS DOWN ARMS

Ney drew up his 11,000 men in a great hollow square outside the Ulrich gate of the fortress. His troops were drawn up along three sides of the square; the fourth side, that nearest the city, being left open. In front of the regiments stood their Eagles, all paraded as at Ulm, the Eagle-guards beside them, and the regimental officers standing in line with their swords at the carry. The Prussians marched out and, to the music of the French bands, passed in procession along the three inner sides of the square, and in front of Marshal Ney and his staff. The miserable Kleist led them, and then took his stand beside Ney, to answer the marshal’s questions as to who and what the various regiments were, as each set of downcast Prussians trailed past. They tramped by, with their muskets on their shoulders unloaded and without bayonets, and with their colours furled. The hapless prisoners, after they had defiled past, were at once marched away under escort on the road to Mayence. Twenty generals, 800 other officers, 22,000 infantry, and 2,000 artillerymen, with 59 standards, underwent the humiliation of the defilade.[14] There were several painful scenes at the laying down of the arms. “Their soldiers openly insulted their officers,” describes one of the French lookers-on. “Most of them looked terribly ashamed of themselves; the faces of not a few were streaming with tears.”

At Magdeburg, as in the other surrenders elsewhere, it was not the personal courage of the officers and soldiers that was wanting—there were men by thousands in the various garrisons ready to give their lives for the honour of their country; it was the generals in command whose nerve lacked. The generals were men past their prime, and mostly physically incapable of enduring hardships. They had been appointed to their posts, in accordance with the system in vogue in Prussia, for the sake of the emoluments.

“The overthrow of Jena,” to use the words of a modern writer, “had been caused by faults of generalship, and cast no stain upon the courage of the officers; the surrender of the Prussian fortresses, which began on the day when the French entered Berlin, attached the utmost personal disgrace to their commanders. Even after the destruction of the army in the field, Prussia’s situation would not have been hopeless if the commanders of the fortresses had acted on the ordinary rules of military duty. Magdeburg and the strongholds upon the Oder were sufficiently armed and provisioned to detain the entire French army, and to give time to the King to collect upon the Vistula a force as numerous as that which he had lost. But whatever is weakest in human nature—old age, fear, and credulity—seemed to have been placed at the head of the Prussian defences.” Küstrin on the Oder, “in full order for a long siege, was surrendered by the older officers, amidst the curses of the subalterns and the common soldiers: the artillerymen had to be dragged from their guns by force.”

At Magdeburg, indeed, before the march out, the younger officers of the garrison mobbed General Kleist, hooting at him and cursing him to his face; some of them, further, being with difficulty stopped from acts of personal violence.

There yet remained one day more for the Eagles. The triumphal parade of the victorious Eagles through Berlin was the crowning humiliation that Napoleon imposed on vanquished Prussia.

MARSHAL DAVOUT IN BERLIN

Davout’s corps, as Napoleon had promised, marched through the Prussian capital first of all. The marshal was waited on as he entered by the Burgomeister and civic authorities, humbly bowing before him, and offering in token of submission the keys of Berlin. The offer, however, was declined. “You must present them later,” was the reply; “they belong to a greater than I!” After marching through Berlin, Davout camped a mile beyond the city, posting his artillery “in position as for war, pointed towards the place as in readiness to bombard it.” The soldiers were then allowed to go about Berlin in parties. They behaved very quietly, and made eager sightseers, we are told. The shops, which had been closed during the march through, reopened later, and the people went about the streets as usual, “mortified and subdued in demeanour, but apparently very curious to see what they could of the French officers.”

Augereau’s corps, and then those of Soult, Bernadotte, and Ney made their triumphal entry and march through Berlin in turn, on different days later on, bands playing and Eagles displayed at the head of the regiments—the people turning out on each occasion in crowds to line the streets and gaze at the show, “expressing great surprise at the small size of our men and the youth of most of the officers.” Marshal Ney’s corps brought with them their fifty-nine trophies from Magdeburg, and, after parading them through the streets of Berlin, ceremoniously presented them to Napoleon in public, in front of the statue of Frederick the Great.

Napoleon himself made his triumphal entry into Berlin on October 28, three days after Davout’s march through. He rode from Charlottenburg through the Brandenburg Gate and along Unter-den-Linden to the Royal Palace, at the head of the Old Guard and six thousand cuirassiers in gleaming mail. Squadrons of Gendarmerie d’Elite and Chasseurs of the Guard and the Horse Grenadiers, in their huge bear-skins, led the long procession, all in grande tenue, with their bands playing and the Eagles glittering in the brilliant sunshine of a perfect autumn day.

Napoleon came next, “riding by himself, twenty paces in front of the staff, with impassive face and a stern expression,” passing amid dense silent crowds, “the men all wearing black, as in mourning; the women mostly with handkerchiefs to their eyes.” The people lined both sides of the roadway, and filled the windows of all the houses overlooking the route. All Berlin, young and old, was in the streets that day, staring at the spectacle in mute silence, looking on dumbly, pale-faced and miserable of aspect. Not a mutter of abuse was heard, not the least sign was apparent of the deadly hatred to their conqueror that one and all felt. With rage and despair in their hearts, with compressed lips and clenched fists at their sides, the men watched the splendid array sweep proudly past them in all the insolent pomp of victorious war.

NAPOLEON RIDES THROUGH

For once, on that historic occasion, Napoleon discarded his customary wear of the green undress uniform of his pet corps, the Chasseurs of the Guard. He entered Berlin as the head of a conquering army, wearing the full-dress uniform of a French general, crimson plumed cocked hat with blue and white aigrette, blue coat heavily embroidered with gold, and with glittering bullion epaulettes, and the blue and gold sash of a general round his waist. Four marshals, Berthier, Lannes, Davout, and Augereau, riding abreast, followed Napoleon, immediately in front of the Imperial Staff, a cavalcade of a hundred and more brilliantly decorated officers, all in their most gorgeous parade uniforms, in celebration of the day. The keys of the city were presented to the conqueror, and accepted by him, as Napoleon passed through the Brandenburg Gate. Ten thousand infantry of the Old Guard, in a vast solid column of glistening bayonets, marched, twenty abreast, in rear of the staff. Their famous band playing triumphantly, with the Eagle of the Grenadiers of the Old Guard above its flag of crimson silk and gold, heading the veterans. They also were all in the full-dress uniform they wore on gala-day parades before the Tuileries. By Napoleon’s special order, the Old Guard on all campaigns carried in their knapsacks their full-dress uniform, specially for donning on occasions such as that at Berlin.

But the cup of humiliation for the miserable citizens of the Prussian capital was not yet full. They had yet another military spectacle with a significance of its own to witness; one the deep humiliation of which they felt more bitterly even than Napoleon’s triumphant ride in person through their streets. The citizens of Berlin had to look on their own officers of the Royal Prussian Guard being led in procession through their midst under the armed escort of Napoleon’s grenadiers. That was Napoleon’s way of settling accounts for that August night of wanton insult to France, for the sharpening of the sword-blades on the steps of the French Embassy.

THE PRISONERS FARMED OUT

Nor, too, did Napoleon spare the Prussian prisoners of the rank and file. Writing from Berlin to the Minister of the Interior in Paris, he gave directions that the Prussian captives should be made use of as hewers of wood and drawers of water for their conquerors. They were to be farmed out to municipalities and district councils in the Departments. “Their services should be turned to account at a trifling expense in the way of wages for the benefit of our manufacturers and cultivators and replace our conscripts called to serve in the ranks of the Grand Army.”

Napoleon stayed in Berlin for four weeks, while the marshals were leading the Eagles through Eastern Prussia towards the Polish frontier. Russia had taken up the cause of her defeated neighbour, and the armies of the Czar were on the move to rescue what was left of the Prussian army. Less than 15,000 men were all that remained in the field to show fight, of 200,000 soldiers who, not two months before, had been on the march against France in full anticipation of victory.

In the Royal Palace of Berlin Napoleon received with elaborate ceremony the deputation of the French Senate sent from Paris specially to congratulate the victor of Jena in the enemy’s capital. He took advantage of the unique occasion for the formal presentation and handing over to their charge, for conveyance to Paris, of the trophies of the war—340 Prussian battle-flags and standards.[15] Forty of the trophies presented to the Senate on that day at Berlin are now among the array of trophies grouped round Napoleon’s tomb in the Invalides.

Napoleon handed over to the charge of the deputation at the same time, for transfer to the Invalides, his own personal spoil—the sword of Frederick the Great. It was removed—all the world knows the story of the unpardonable outrage—by Napoleon’s own hand from its resting-place on the royal tomb at Potsdam. “I would rather have this,” he said to the officers beside him in the royal vault as he took possession of the sword, “than twenty millions. I shall send it to my old soldiers who fought against Frederick in the campaign in Hanover. I will present it to the Governor of the Invalides, who will guard it as a testimonial of the victories of the Grand Army and the vengeance that it has wreaked for the disaster of Rosbach. My veterans will be pleased to see the sword of the man who defeated them at Rosbach!”

FREDERICK THE GREAT’S SWORD

The trophies started for France forthwith under military escort, and Paris went mad with exultation at the sight of them. On the day of the State Procession which escorted the trophies from the Tuileries to the Invalides it proved almost impossible to keep back the enormous crowds that thronged the streets along the route, in spite of cordons of gendarmerie and regiments of dragoons. Deputations of veterans and National Guards, with the Eagles of the Departmental Legions, led the way. Then came Imperial carriages with exalted official personages. The trophies had their place next, displayed in clusters of flags all round a gigantic triumphal car. Marshal Moncey, the acting Governor of Paris, rode a few paces behind the car of Prussian standards, holding up the trophy of trophies before the eyes of the wildly cheering onlookers—Frederick the Great’s sword. A gaily attired train of generals and staff officers attended the marshal. The rear of the procession was brought up by the battalions of the Guard of Paris, their Eagles being borne amid rows of gleaming bayonets. Salvos of artillery from the Triumphal Battery greeted the arrival of the trophies at the Invalides, where the veterans awaited them, drawn up on parade before the Gate of Honour. As Napoleon had specially directed, the Hanoverian War veterans of the Invalides met and escorted Marshal Moncey to the chapel at the head of other specially nominated veterans, who bore, marching in procession, the Prussian trophy-standards. The trophies were deposited with an elaborate display of ceremonial in front of the High Altar, after which Fontanes, the Public Orator of the Empire, delivered an address full of glowingly eloquent passages on the glorious achievements of the Grand Army and the “resplendent magnificence of the leader who had led the Eagles to surpassing triumphs!”