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.