The sight of the sudden rout maddened their leader, Colonel Maury. Stooping from his charger, he snatched hold of the Eagle from its bearer, and held it up before the men. “What! you scoundrels! You dishonoured me two days ago; you are again disgracing me to-day! Forward! Follow me!” (“Comment, canaille! Vous m’avez deshonoré avant-hier, et vous recidiviez aujourdhui! En avant! Suivez moi!”) Brandishing the Eagle the colonel turned his horse to ride back across the bridge. The drums beat the charge: the regiment followed. But all was to no purpose. As fate willed it, the gallant colonel fell, shot dead before he could get across, and at the sight of his fall panic again seized the regiment. They ran wildly back again, leaving the dead colonel’s body and the Eagle lying halfway across the bridge. The Eagle was rescued and brought back by the men of another regiment. Had it not been for the sudden rush forward of the leading company of the 22nd of the Line, the regiment supporting the 70th in the attack, the Eagle would have been taken. Several Prussian soldiers had indeed already run forward to pick it up, and their leader was in the act of doing so when the foremost of the rescuers arrived, beat back the Prussians, and recovered the fallen Eagle.
The failure of this one regiment at Wavre is the only recorded instance of bad behaviour before the enemy in the Waterloo campaign. And for it too, in view of the composition of the regiment in question, some allowance may surely be made.
The Eagles announce Victory to London
The last of the four episodes is supplemental: the story of how Wellington’s Eagle-trophies themselves first announced Waterloo to London.
The two Eagles were sent to England immediately after the battle, together with Wellington’s Waterloo despatch, by Major the Hon. Henry Percy, of the 11th Light Dragoons, who was almost the only member of Wellington’s staff who went through the battle unwounded. He arrived in London, displaying the Eagles from his post-chaise as he travelled through the streets, on the stroke of eleven o’clock on the night of Wednesday, June 21.
Up to then not a word had come from Wellington: not a word of reliable news as to what had happened had reached England. Rumours of an early check to the French had arrived, from unofficial sources, during the previous day, but nothing more had been heard, and all London was on tenterhooks of suspense.
THE FIRST RUMOURS IN LONDON
The battle was fought on Sunday the 18th. But no news of it, or in regard to it, of any kind reached England during either Monday or Tuesday. There was no intelligence from the seat of war at all. On the Wednesday morning the Times announced vaguely that Napoleon had struck the first blow unsuccessfully. A Mr. Sutton, of Colchester, it said, the owner of packet-boats running between Harwich and Ostend, had forwarded a message to the effect that there had been fighting on the 15th and 16th and skirmishing on the 17th, and that a fresh battle was beginning on the morning of the 18th. His informant at Brussels had sent that news. There was no more news until Wednesday afternoon, when the Sun came out with a special edition stating that the Government had received no despatches, but that “a gentleman who left Ghent on Monday, and two others from Brussels, brought word that Sunday’s battle had been successful.” All London was in the streets until between ten and eleven that night, in a state of eager expectation; but repeated inquiries at the Horse Guards, at the War Office, and at the Mansion House only met with the answer—“No news yet.”
It was just as the crowds were dispersing, tired of waiting, and taking it as certain that nothing could be known until the morning, as the clocks were on the stroke of eleven, that Major Percy arrived in London.
“He left the Duchess of Richmond’s ball,” says his niece, Lady Bagot, in whose words the story may best be told, “on the night before the battle, and had no time to change his dress, or even his shoes, before going into action. When he received orders to go to England with the despatches, he posted to Antwerp, and there took the first sailing boat he could find to convey him to Dover, where he landed in the afternoon. He found that a report of the victory had preceded him there. The Rothschilds had chartered a fast sloop to lie off Antwerp, and bring the first news of the battle to the English shore—news which was to be used for Stock Exchange purposes.