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

THE TROPHIES OF TWO CENTURIES

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

SPOILS TAKEN IN NAVAL FIGHTS

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

AFTER DUPONT’S SURRENDER

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

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

ALL THAT WAS DREDGED UP

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