The Twelve Lost Eagles of Eylau
Napoleon passed from the victorious fields of Prussia to the rough experiences of the Eylau and Friedland campaigns, which followed as the sequel to Jena on the plains of the Polish frontier. The Eagles there had to undergo under fire vicissitudes of fortune that were a foretaste of the fate in store for some of them later on, at the hands of the same enemy, in the Moscow campaign. No fewer than fourteen of the Eagles borne in triumph through Berlin after Jena were on view within a twelvemonth as spoils of war in the Kazan Cathedral at St. Petersburg.
The Eagle of Marshal Ney’s favourite regiment in the battle-days of the Ulm campaign, the 9th Light Infantry, was the first to meet adventures in the Polish War. It was on the occasion of the surprise of Bernadotte’s army corps, at Möhringen near the Vistula, in the last week of January 1807. The Grand Army was lying in winter quarters to the north of Warsaw, awaiting the reopening of the campaign in the early spring, when the Russian army, breaking up unexpectedly from its cantonments beyond the Vistula in the depth of winter, made a dash at Bernadotte’s outlying troops, posted by themselves at some distance from the main army and scattered in detachments over a wide tract of country for reasons of food-supply. Bernadotte only got news of the enemy’s approach just in time; practically at the eleventh hour. He was rapidly concentrating his corps at Möhringen, but barely half his troops had been able to reach the point of danger when the Russians struck their blow. He was able with the troops nearest at hand to avert destruction, but the escape was a narrow one and his losses were very heavy, all his baggage falling into the hands of the enemy. Fortunately for the French the Russian advanced guard attacked prematurely and was beaten back, after which Bernadotte made good his retreat to a safer neighbourhood.
FOUR TIMES TAKEN AND RETAKEN
The 9th Light Infantry were in the forefront of the fighting, which was at the closest quarters, the soldiers on both sides meeting man to man. Four Eagle-bearers of the 9th fell, one after the other. Four times the Eagle was taken by the Russians and recaptured at the point of the bayonet. A fifth time the Eagle-bearer went down, and on his fall this time the Eagle disappeared, while the 9th were driven back, broken and in disorder. They were quickly rallied again, however, and led once more to the charge, “going forward to the combat with the fury of despair.” This time their impetuous onset forced the Russians to give ground. Advancing with shouts of victory, they stormed the village of Psarrefelden, immediately in front of them, and there seized part of a Russian ammunition train. While searching for fresh cartridges in one of the enemy’s ammunition wagons to replenish their empty cartouche-boxes an officer, to his surprise, came upon the lost Eagle. It had been broken from its staff in the last fight round it, and its Russian captor, probably having enough to do to look after himself without carrying it about, had apparently thrust it hastily into the ammunition wagon on top of the cartridges. At any rate there the Eagle of the 9th Light Infantry was found, and so it was regained. The broken staff and flag were missing and were never seen again, but the all-important Eagle had been recovered. It was hurriedly mounted on a hop-pole, found leaning against a peasant’s hut near by, which was improvised for a staff, and on that the Eagle was carried to the close of the fighting that day, after which the 9th retreated with the rest of Bernadotte’s corps.
Napoleon specially decorated the lieutenant who recovered the Eagle, and who also had led more than one of the charges to rescue it in the earlier fighting. He gave him the cross of the Legion of Honour with a money grant. He further recorded the recovery of the Eagle—though without mentioning how it was got back—in the 55th Bulletin of the Grand Army, dated Warsaw, January 29, 1807:
“The Eagle of the 9th Light Infantry was taken by the enemy, but, realising the deep disgrace with which their brave regiment would be covered for ever, and from which neither victory nor the glory acquired in a hundred combats could have removed the stigma, the soldiers, animated with an inconceivable ardour, precipitated themselves on the enemy and routed them and recovered their Eagle.”
So Napoleon wrote history.
ON THE FIRST DAY AT EYLAU
Two Eagles met their fate in the first day’s fighting at Eylau—in the preliminary combat on February 7, which formed the opening phase of the terrific encounter next day. At Eylau—a small township some twenty-two miles to the south of Königsburg—Napoleon in person commanded with 80,000 men in the field, and met with his first serious check in a European war. In following up the Russian rearguard on the afternoon of the 7th, as it fell slowly back to rejoin its main body, drawn up in position on the farther side of Eylau, on ground chosen beforehand by the Russian leader for making a stand, two of Napoleon’s battalions, while pressing hotly forward after the enemy over the open plain, some two miles from Eylau, were overpowered and cut to pieces. They had charged and were driving in the nearest Russians to them, when a Russian cavalry regiment, the St. Petersburg Dragoons, unexpectedly came on the scene. Sweeping round amidst the tumult of the fighting, the dragoons rode into them on the flank. The two battalions were slaughtered almost to a man within five minutes, before help could get to them, and their Eagles were snatched up and borne away. It was an act of expiation for the St. Petersburg Dragoons. On the previous day Murat’s pursuing hussars had charged and broken them, putting them to flight, and in a wild panic they had ridden over one of their own regiments, trampling their comrades down, with loss of life. To retrieve their character the St. Petersburg Dragoons now went savagely at the two French battalions, riding them down with reckless daring and relentless fury, giving no quarter. Their capture of two of Napoleon’s Eagles in one charge, the taking of two Eagles by a single regiment, stands on its own account as a unique achievement.
Sketch Plan of the Battlefield of EYLAU
Eylau—the historic battle of February 8, 1807—was fought in the depth of winter; in the midst of a flat expanse of a desolate snow-plain and ice-bound marshes; under dreary lowering skies of leaden grey; amid howling gusts of piercing wind, with driving snow-storms sweeping intermittently across the field of battle. A hundred and fifty thousand men on both sides faced each other at the break of day, after passing the night with their outposts within shot of one another, the soldiers all lying in an open bivouac on the snow, round their watch-fires, wrapped up in their cloaks, the only shelter from the bitter cold. They fronted each other in the grey dawn “within half-cannon shot, their immense masses distributed in dense columns over a space in breadth less than four miles. Between them lay the field of battle, a wide stretch of unenclosed ground, rising on the Russian side to a range of small hills. All over the plain, ponds and marshes intersected the ground, but far and wide all was now covered over with ice and deep snow.”
Napoleon began the battle with a fierce cannonade, opening a terrific fire all along the line with no fewer than 350 guns. The Russians replied at once, firing back even more furiously and with yet more guns. For almost an hour nearly 800 cannon belched forth shot and shell on either side; an artillery duel perhaps unparalleled in war. Then, in the midst of the cannonade, Napoleon launched his first attack. Fifteen thousand men of Augereau’s corps moved out from the centre of the French line to storm the Russian position. They went forward, massed in two immense columns, with, in support, a third column of one of Soult’s divisions.
GOING FORWARD TO THEIR DOOM
They went forward to their doom: to meet disaster, swift, terrible, overwhelming, and to leave two of their Eagles in the hands of the enemy as mementos of their fate. Yet they were not given up; neither of those Eagles was surrendered. They remained on the field amid the dead; left behind because there was not a man living of their regiments to defend them. They lay where they fell, surrounded by the soldiers who had died in their defence; lying on the snow for the Cossacks to pick up and carry away. They were the Eagles of the 14th and the 24th of the Line.
The Russians turned their guns on Augereau’s corps directly it commenced its advance; it was sheer massacre for the French, as the fierce tornado of cannon-balls crashed into the thick of the densely massed columns. Whole companies were swept away, mowed down, on every side. “Within a quarter of an hour, half of the corps were struck down.” The rest, though, with stolid endurance, held firmly on their way. The soldiers went doggedly on; only halting for a moment now and again to close up their shattered ranks. At that moment, as they were nearing the Russian position, a furious snow-storm burst over the battlefield, the snow blowing right in the faces of the French. “It was impossible,” one of the survivors told, “to see anything at all in front; we could at times barely see a foot before us.” All, in spite of that, however, laboured bravely to get forward; without wavering, and regardless of the merciless fire of the Russian guns, which never ceased for one moment.
OVERWHELMED IN A SNOWSTORM
Then, as the snow-blinded soldiers struggled on, when the storm of whirling snow was at its worst, all in an instant the catastrophe happened. Without warning, coming from nowhere, as it seemed, an enormous mass of Russian horse, dragoons and Cossacks, charged suddenly, amid an infernal din of furious shouting, into them. “So thick was the snow-storm, and so unexpected the onset, that the assailants were only a few feet off, and the long lances of the Cossacks almost touching the French infantry when they were first discerned.” The Russians swept down on all sides of the two divisions; charging them in front and flanks and rear at once, the dragoons sabring them right and left, the Cossacks stabbing at them with their long eighteen-foot lances.
“The combat was not of more than a few minutes’ duration; the corps, charged at once by foot and horse with the utmost vigour, broke and fled in the wildest disorder back into Eylau, closely pursued by the Russian cavalry and Cossacks, who made such havoc, that the whole, above 15,000 strong, were, with the exception of 1,500 men, taken or destroyed; and Augereau himself, with his two generals of divisions, Desjardins and Heudelet, was desperately wounded.”
Cut off in one part of the field and hemmed in, the 24th of the Line, “one of the finest regiments in the Grand Army, and itself almost equal to a brigade,” as a French officer speaks of it, was destroyed to a man. It refused to turn its back to the enemy, and stood its ground to face its fate. The 24th were slaughtered as they stood in their ranks. Colonel Sémelé and a devoted band of soldiers fought round the Eagle to the last, and fell dead beside it. A Cossack picked the Eagle up and rode off with it.
The 14th had led the attack. It had lost heavily from the Russian cannonade, but was still pressing on when the cavalry came charging down. The regiments next following it, however, had suffered still more heavily from the artillery fire. They were swept away en masse by the Cossack rush. Thus the 14th were cut off and left by themselves, barely half a battalion of men in numbers, in the midst of the raging torrent of Cossacks and dragoons. The survivors hastily threw themselves into a square on and round a low elevation or hillock of snow. There, with their Eagle in their midst, they stood at bay, refusing to retire without direct orders from their marshal.
ISOLATED AND SURROUNDED
Marbot, in his memoirs, describes the fate of the 14th, to which he was sent with a message from Napoleon. He was one of Augereau’s aides de camp. It was just after the wounded marshal had been carried back to the churchyard of the village of Eylau, the centre of the French position, whence Napoleon, on horseback, among his personal suite, had witnessed the disaster. All could see the 14th standing there, isolated and surrounded; “we could see that the intrepid regiment, surrounded by the enemy, was brandishing the Eagle in the air, to show that it still held its ground and wanted help.” Napoleon, “touched by the grand devotion of these brave men, resolved to try to save them. He gave orders that an officer should be sent to tell them to try to make their way back towards the army. Cavalry would charge out to help them. It looked,” says Marbot, “almost impossible to get through the thronging Cossacks; but Napoleon’s command had to be obeyed.”
“A brave captain of engineers named Froissart, who, though not an aide de camp, was on Augereau’s staff, happened to be nearest him, and was told to carry the order to the 14th. Froissart galloped off: we lost sight of him in the midst of the Cossacks, and never saw him again or heard what became of him. The marshal, seeing that the 14th did not move, then sent an officer named David. He had the same fate as Froissart; we never heard of him again. Probably both were killed and stripped, and could not be recognised among the many corpses which covered the ground. For the third time the marshal called, ‘The officer for duty!’ It was my turn.”
Marbot had seen his two predecessors go off with their swords drawn, as though they intended to defend themselves against attacks on the way. He had remarked that, and now proposed another method for himself.
“To attempt defence was madness; it meant stopping to fight amidst a multitude of enemies. I went otherwise to work. Leaving my sword in its scabbard, I considered myself rather as a rider who is trying to win a steeple-chase and goes as quickly as possible by the shortest line towards the appointed goal without troubling about what is to right or left of his path. My goal was the hillock on which stood the 14th, and I resolved to get there without taking heed of the Cossacks. I tried to put them out of my mind entirely. The plan answered to perfection.”
“Lisette [Marbot’s charger], flying rather than galloping, moving more lightly than a swallow, darted over the intervening space, leaping the heaps of dead men and horses, the ditches, the broken gun-carriages, the half-extinguished bivouac fires. Thousands of Cossacks swarmed over the plain. The first who caught sight of me behaved like sportsmen who, while beating, start a hare and tell of its whereabouts to each other with shouts of ‘Your side!’ None of the Cossacks tried to stop me. Perhaps it was because of the amazing speed of my mare; perhaps—probably—because there were so many of them swarming round that each thought I could not escape from his comrades farther on. At any rate I got through them all, and without scratch either to myself or to my mare, and managed to reach where the 14th stood.
“AT LAST I WAS IN THE SQUARE!”
“I found them in square on top of their hillock, but the slope all round was very slight, and the Russian cavalry had been able to attack them with several charges. All, though, had been beaten off, and the regiment stood surrounded by a circle of dead horses and dragoons. The corpses indeed formed a kind of rampart round our men, and made by now their position almost inaccessible to mounted men. So I found, for in spite of the help of our men, I had much difficulty in getting across this horrible entrenchment. At last, however, I was in the square.”
The major of the 14th was the senior officer left alive, and to him Marbot gave Napoleon’s order. But it was absolutely impossible to carry it out; there were too few men left to make the attempt possible. They would be overpowered, said the major to Marbot, before they had gone half a dozen steps. They were past hope now, unless the cavalry could cut their way to them at once. Marbot must save himself and get back at once. He must take their Eagle back with him and deliver it into Napoleon’s own hands. “I see no means left of saving the regiment,” were the major’s words. “Return to the Emperor, and bid him farewell from the 14th of the Line. We have faithfully obeyed his orders in defence of the Eagle. Bear him back his Eagle which he entrusted to us, which now we have no hope of defending longer. It would add too much to the bitterness of death for us to see it fall into the hands of the enemy.” The major handed the Eagle to Marbot and then saluted it, amid shouts of “Vive l’Empereur!” from the men round.
Marbot took the Eagle, and, as the only means of preserving it during his ride back, tried to break it off from its stout pole so as to conceal it under his cloak. He was in the act of leaning forward to get a purchase in order to break the oaken staff, when he was suddenly rendered powerless by the wind of a grape-shot. It was a marvellous escape from death. The shot actually went through his hat, within a quarter of an inch of his head. It deprived him, as he describes, of all power and sensation, although he still remained fixed in his saddle, his eyes witnessing the last scene, the fate of the 14th. The square was finally rushed by a swarm of Russian grenadiers, as Marbot says, who came charging up to the spot—“big men with mitre-shaped caps bound in brass.
FIGHTING TO THE LAST MAN
“These men hurled themselves furiously on the feeble remains of the 14th. Our poor fellows had little strength left for resistance, weakened as they were by hardships and privations. They had for days been only existing on potatoes and melted snow, and on that morning had not had time to prepare even that wretched meal. Yet they made bravely what fight they could with their bayonets, and when, as too soon happened, the square was broken, they tried to hold together in groups, fighting back to back and keeping up the unequal fight to the last man.”
Those nearest Marbot, so as not to be bayoneted from behind, stood all round him with their backs to the mare, hemmed in by a ring of Russians, some shooting down the hapless Frenchmen, others killing them with the bayonet.
Marbot, recovering his senses, got at the last moment an unexpected chance of escape. His mare, Lisette, he says, “of a notoriously savage temper,” was pricked by a bayonet apparently, for she suddenly sprang forward, lashing out and kicking and biting. She crashed through the nearest Russians and galloped off with Marbot on her back towards Eylau. He was mistaken by the Cossacks, he thought, for a Russian officer, and rode on until suddenly Lisette collapsed beneath him, and Marbot rolled off into the snow, where he lay insensible for some hours. He lay there until a marauder on the field after the battle tried to strip him of his gold-laced uniform. That roused him, and he cried for help, which came; but the Eagle of the 14th had disappeared.
Two Eagles of St. Hilaire’s division of Soult’s corps were taken at about the same time that the 14th met its fate. One was that of the 10th Light Infantry, ridden down while hastening forward to support Augereau. The 10th missed its way in the snow-storm and, blundering close under the Russian guns, was “decimated by grape.” Immediately after that, while reeling under the shock, and trying to re-form its ranks, the Russian dragoons dashed into it. They burst into its midst at full gallop, “unseen until they were actually among us.” No help was near, and in less than three minutes the luckless 10th Light Infantry had ceased to exist. The second of Soult’s Eagles that was lost at Eylau was that of a battalion of the 28th of the Line, which also perished, victims to the sabres of the Russian horsemen. It was a little later in the day, just after the 28th had made a successful bayonet charge on the Russian infantry. They were in the midst of their combat when the dragoons dashed into them, rode through them, and scattered them, bearing off the Eagle, snatched from the hands of the Eagle-bearer, who was cut down in the mêlée.
“THE FIRST GRENADIER OF FRANCE”
The Heart of the “First Grenadier of France” nearly went to St. Petersburg at the same time, The 46th and 28th together formed General Levasseur’s division in Soult’s corps, and both were overwhelmed at the same time by the Russian dragoons. The more fortunate 46th saved both their Eagle and the silver casket in which the heart of La Tour d’Auvergne was kept enshrined. The casket was worn, strapped on a velvet shield, on the chest of the senior grenadier sergeant of the First Battalion, whose station was next the Eagle-bearer. It was with the 46th, then known as the 46th Demi-Brigade, that the heroic “Premier Grenadier de France” was serving as a captain when he met his death in the year of Hohenlinden, while in the act of capturing an Austrian standard. The 46th of the Line of the modern French Army keeps up to-day the traditional practice, first ordered by Moreau, the victor of Hohenlinden, of calling his name first of all at regimental parades. It was revived some thirty years ago, after being in desuetude since 1809. “Immediately the Colonel has saluted the flag,” describes one of the officers of the regiment, “the Captain commanding the colour-company steps forward and, facing the men, calls in a loud voice ‘La Tour d’Auvergne,’ on which the senior sergeant of the company steps out two paces and replies, in a loud voice also, ‘Mort au Champ d’Honneur!’—‘Dead on the Field of Honour!’”
The heart of La Tour d’Auvergne in its silver casket was ceremoniously deposited by the regiment at the Invalides in 1904, eight years ago.
The 25th of the Line saved its Eagle, but lost on the field every single one of its officers. A plainly built obelisk with the brief inscription, “To the Memory of the Officers of the 25th,” was erected by Napoleon to commemorate their fate at Eylau.
Two Eagles of Davout’s corps were lost at Eylau. One was that of the 18th—the sole loss of an Eagle in the battle, as it so happens, that it suited Napoleon’s purpose to admit publicly. This is what he said of it in his Eylau Bulletin—the 58th Bulletin of the Grand Army:
“The Eagle of one of the battalions of the 18th Regiment is missing. It has probably fallen into the hands of the enemy, but no reproach can attach to this regiment in the predicament in which it was placed. It is a mere accident of war. The Emperor will give the 18th another Eagle when it has taken a standard from the enemy.”
Comments on this, by the way, a British officer, Colonel Sir Robert Wilson, who was attached to the Russian army as British military commissioner:
“Admirable! the accidental loss of one Eagle and only one! Colonel Beckendorff, then, did not carry twelve Eagles (and, moreover, several colours from which the Eagles had been unscrewed) to Petersburg, where they now are for the inspection of the world!”
Napoleon made no other open reference to the loss of Eagles at Eylau; but, as he showed a little later, he felt what had happened. On the other hand, outside France, many people disbelieved the Russian official despatches. “The number of Eagles said to be taken,” wrote the editor of a London newspaper, “is astounding, indeed incredible.”
TWO MORE EAGLES LOST
The 18th lost their Eagle in the fierce fighting on the extreme right of the battlefield, where, after storming the village of Serpallen, Morand’s division captured a Russian battery, bayoneting the gunners. As they took the guns a Russian cavalry brigade came hastening to the spot to the rescue. Taking the 18th on the flank, the Russians rode them down, breaking the regiment up and scattering it. The Eagle disappeared in the midst of the fight. The Eagle of the 51st of the Line was the other that was lost in Davout’s corps. That was taken by the Prussian division which fought at Eylau; the last remnant of the Jena army still combating in the field. The Prussians, some 12,000 in number, had made good their escape to the Polish frontier and reached the battlefield of Eylau at the close of the fight, in time to strike in and take vengeance for their countrymen. They were, however, deprived in the end of their trophy. The captured Eagle of the 51st was claimed from them by the Russian general after the battle, and sent with the eleven others to St. Petersburg, where it now is.
Two others of Davout’s Eagles which came through at Eylau had narrow escapes. They were those of the 17th and 30th of the Line. The 17th was one of the regiments ridden down by Towazysky’s dragoons, the troopers who carried off the Eagle of the 18th. In their charge the dragoons broke up the 17th as well, and the Eagle was left with only a few men near by to defend it. They were in the midst of the dragoons as the Russians galloped through, slashing with their sabres at all within reach. As the only means of saving the Eagle, Locqueneux, a fourrier, or quartermaster-sergeant, “thrust the Eagle under the snow and stood on it shouting for help. Colonel Mallet heard the cry and ran to the rescue. With a few men who rallied to the spot he succeeded in getting the Eagle away from among the débris of the 17th.” At roll-call next morning only one man in five answered to his name. Napoleon, on his ride over the field, happening to pass by while the muster was being held, the gallant fourrier was brought before him and presented with a lieutenant’s commission and an annuity of 2,000 francs. The Eagle of the 30th of the Line, another of Morand’s regiments, was saved from capture in like manner by the personal devotion of another fourrier, Morin by name. All round him men were falling, and he himself had been severely wounded, but the brave fellow had just strength enough to bury the Eagle under the snow. He fainted from loss of blood as he did it. Morin was found next morning just alive, outstretched over where the precious Eagle lay concealed. He was able to make signs and indicate that it was lying underneath the snow, and then he died.
FOUR CUIRASSIER EAGLES TAKEN
Four cavalry Eagles, those of cuirassier regiments, made up the tale of twelve lost by Napoleon in the two days at Eylau. Platoff’s Cossacks of the Don captured the four. They swooped down on Murat’s cavalry, while out of hand and partially dispersed after breaking through the Russian centre, at the close of Murat’s desperate charge at the head of seventy squadrons to save the survivors of the massacre of Augereau’s ill-fated battalions. Of one cuirassier regiment only 18 men managed to regain their own lines, leaving 530 of their comrades on the field to be stripped of their shining armour by the Cossacks.
The Eagle of the Old Guard led a charge at Eylau at the head of the Grenadiers. The Guard came into action to beat back a daring Russian counter-attack on the centre of Napoleon’s position, which immediately followed the annihilation of Augereau’s corps. Napoleon himself gave the order for the Guard to go forward. “The Emperor,” describes Caulaincourt, who was on Napoleon’s staff, and near him throughout, “standing erect in the stirrups, his glass at his eye, was the first to realise that the black shadow steadily drawing near through the veil of the snow-storm must be the columns of the Russian reserve.[16] He immediately sent against them two battalions of the Grenadiers of the Guard commanded by General Dorsenne.” It was just after Murat had been ordered to make his charge.
Dorsenne—“Le Beau Dorsenne,” he was universally called; he had the reputation of being the handsomest man in the whole of the Grand Army—started off on the instant, rapidly deploying his men into lines as he moved forward, and with the Eagle of the Grenadiers of the Guard in advance of the centre of the front line. The Old Guard moved out in stately order, marching with clockwork precision, muskets at the support—held erect at the side and steadied and supported with one arm held stiffly across. One of the officers who rode beside Dorsenne suggested to the general as they were nearing the Russians to open fire. “Non!” was the haughty answer. “Grenadiers l’arme à bras! La Vieille Garde ne se bât qu’à la baïonette!” (“No! Arms at the support! The Old Guard only fights at the point of the bayonet!”)
They reached the Russians, who, on their side, seemed for the moment as if spellbound at the sight of them. The nearest Russians stopped short. They stood stock-still, rooted in the ground as it were, gazing at the sudden apparition of the solid wall of 2,000 veteran giants in their huge towering bear-skins. The next instant the battalion guns of the Guard, which accompanied the advance on either flank, opened with a burst of fire at short range into the thick of the Russians. At once, down came the gleaming rows of bayonets, and, like one man, the Old Guard sprang forward and charged into the enemy. A moment before the bayonets crossed a squadron of the Chasseurs of the Guard, the men on duty as Napoleon’s own personal escort, sent forward by the Emperor himself to assist the Grenadiers, dashed into the rear of the Russian column, and “drove it forward on our Grenadiers, who received it with fixed bayonets.”
THE EAGLE OF THE OLD GUARD
Just before that it was that the Eagle of the Old Guard had its adventure. A shell dropped right in front of it and burst. The fragments smashed the Eagle pole in two places, just above and below the hands of the Eagle-bearer. The Eagle fell to the ground at the feet of the Russians. But they had not time to get hold of it. Instantly Lieutenant Morlay, the Eagle-bearer, sprang forward and recovered it. Picking the Eagle up, with the flag and fragment of pole that was left, Morlay snatched hold of a grenadier’s musket and jammed the piece of the staff into the muzzle beside the bayonet. He carried the Eagle in that manner throughout the rest of the battle.[17]
AT MIDNIGHT AFTER THE BATTLE
A hundred and fifty thousand combatants had faced one another at daybreak. An hour before midnight, when the last shots were fired, 50,000 men lay dead or wounded on the field. “Never,” if we may recall the grim picture of the scene next day that Alison has drawn, “was spectacle so dreadful as that field presented on the following morning. Above 50,000 men lay in the space of two leagues, weltering in blood. The wounds were, for the most part, of the severest kind, from the extraordinary quantity of cannon-balls which had been discharged during the action and the close proximity of the contending masses to the deadly batteries, which spread grape at half-musket shot through their ranks. Though stretched on the cold snow and exposed to the severity of an Arctic winter, the sufferers were burning with thirst, and piteous cries were heard on all sides for water, or assistance to extricate the wounded men from beneath the heaps of slain or load of horses by which they were crushed. Six thousand of these noble animals encumbered the field, or, maddened with pain, were shrieking aloud amidst the stifled groans of the wounded. Broken gun-carriages, dismounted cannon, fragments of blown-up caissons, scattered balls, lay in wild confusion amidst casques, cuirassiers, and burning hamlets, casting a livid light over a field of snow. Subdued by loss of blood, tamed by cold, exhausted by hunger, the foemen lay side by side, amidst the general wreck. The Cossack was to be seen beside the Italian; the gay vine-dresser from the banks of the Garonne lay athwart the stern peasant from the plains of the Ukraine.”
When Napoleon took his ride over the field, “the men exhibited none of their wonted enthusiasm; no cries of ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ were heard; the bloody surface echoed only with the cries of suffering or the groans of woe.”
THE “TEMPLE OF VICTORY”
Sixteen Russian standards were sent to Paris after Eylau; Napoleon’s set-off to the twelve Eagles taken to St. Petersburg. They were to be hung, he directed, temporarily at the Invalides, until such time as the conversion of the former Church of the Madeleine into Napoleon’s grandiose “Temple of Victory” should be effected—a project that was fated never to be accomplished. There, designed Napoleon, all the trophies of the Grand Army would find their final resting-place, in a splendid edifice, designed externally after the Parthenon at Athens. Within, the trophies would be displayed, amidst colonnades of Corinthian pillars of marble and granite and a mass of decorative sculptures, statues of marshals and generals who had met their death in battle, and bas-reliefs of famous colonels, before a lofty marble curule chair, which Napoleon would occupy as a throne on great occasions. “It is a Temple I desire,” he laid down, writing from his camp in Poland, “not a church; and everything must be made in a chaste, severe, and durable style, and be suitable for solemnities at all times and all hours.”
Two more Eagles had yet to go to St. Petersburg before the war was over—the Eagle of the 15th of the Line and another. They were the spoils that the beaten Russian army carried off from the battle of Friedland, fought some six months after Eylau, on July 14. Napoleon won one of his most famous victories at Friedland, and one that he afterwards recorded on the colours of all the regiments that fought in the battle; but the defeated army carried back with them two more of his Eagles.
The Eagle of the 15th of the Line, a regiment of Marshal Ney’s corps, was lost in a bayonet charge while fighting the Russian Imperial Guard. The second Eagle was left among the dead in the repulse of a column of Marshal Lannes’ corps in the earlier part of the battle. “A column of 3,000 men advanced straight against Friedland. They were permitted to approach close to the Russian cannon without a single shot being fired, when suddenly the whole opened with grape, and with such effect that in a few minutes a thousand men were struck down, the column routed, and the Eagle taken.”
One of the regiments of the column saved itself as it fell back by rallying round its Eagle. As at Eylau, so at Friedland the Russian dragoons dashed down among the broken battalions while trying to re-form under the murderous cannonade. The 50th of the Line had been near the head of the column, and more than half of its men had been shot down. The dragoons were cutting their way through to the Eagle, when Adjutant Labourie snatched it from its wounded bearer, and, holding it up, shouted to the men: “Rally round the Eagle. We must defend it to the death!” A small square hastily formed round him, and, stubbornly resisting, they kept the Russian dragoons off and fought their way back to safety with the Eagle.
GOLDEN WREATHS FOR THE EAGLES
The Peace of Tilsit closed the war within a month of Friedland.
The welcome-home of Paris to the Old Guard, and public decoration of the Eagles with crowns of gold, was the curtain-scene and grand finale of the Jena-Friedland drama. To all the regiments of the Grand Army under fire at Jena, Friedland, and Eylau, wreaths of gold, to be affixed round the necks of their Eagles, were voted by the Municipality of Paris. The wreaths were to be publicly presented to each regiment on its return to France.
The Guard were the first to receive theirs, and their arrival in the capital was made the occasion of a series of civic fêtes; announced officially as being “offered in tribute to the Glory of the Grand Army.” Wednesday, November 25, 1807, was the day on which the Guard were due to reach Paris. All had been made ready to accord them a magnificent reception.
The Prefect of the Seine, at the head of the City magistrates and the Municipal Councillors of Paris, all in their robes and chains and glittering insignia of office, escorted by a mounted cohort of National Guards, met the returning veterans at the Barrier on the Strasburg road. Marshal Bessières led the Guard, who marched up with bands playing and resplendent in their full-dress uniforms, horse and foot and artillery—12,000 men in all. A gigantic triumphal arch was set up beyond the Barrier, wide enough for twenty men to march through abreast. It was the approach to a wide arena on which the troops drew up, massed in front of a lofty platform, decked out with flags and wreaths of evergreens and bright-coloured hangings. There the Prefect took his place with his entourage as the soldiers drew near. Grand-stands to accommodate a crowd of sightseers surrounded the arena.
The Old Guard marched in and drew up in close order, on which the proceedings opened with the civic address. “Heroes of Jena, of Eylau, of Friedland,” began the Prefect, “conquerors of a splendid peace, immortal thanks are your due from France! We salute you, Eagles of war, the symbols of the might of our noble-hearted Emperor! You have made known throughout the world, with his great name, the glory of victorious France!” So, in grandiloquent style, the address commenced. At its close the regiments of the Guards defiled past the platform in turn—Carabineers and Cuirassiers, Chasseurs, Dragoons, and Hussars, and the battalions of veteran Grenadiers. Round the neck of each Eagle, as its corps came up, the Prefect hung a wreath of laurel-leaves in gold.
Then came the triumphal march through the streets of Paris to the Tuileries, amid cheering crowds, nearly beside themselves with excitement and enthusiasm, and with difficulty kept back from breaking through the rows of National Guards who lined the pavement, to hug the grim bearskin-hatted warriors. The Eagles deposited with ceremony in the Imperial Guardroom of the Palace of the Tuileries, the horsemen dismounted in the Square of the Carrousel, muskets were piled, and all marched off to the Champs Elysées. An immense banquet awaited them there, under vast marquees—shelter that the men appreciated, for it turned out a miserably wet afternoon.
BANQUETED BY THE CITY OF PARIS
The banquet in the Champs Elysées was the first in the round of festivities with which Paris welcomed home the “Victors over Europe.” The fêtes lasted over three days, and terminated in a grand reception given by the Senate to all ranks of “Our Invincible Guard” in the Gardens of the Luxembourg.[18]