The war drama of the Eagles

by Edward Fraser

“Austerlitz
1805.
Friedland
1807.
Talavera
1809.
Anvers
1832.
Zaatcha
1849.
Solferino
1859.”

[27] Southey, in his History of the Peninsular War, makes this ugly suggestion in regard to the Eagle trophies of Salamanca: “It is said that more than ten were captured, but that there were men base enough to conceal them and sell them to persons in Salamanca who deemed it good policy, as well as a profitable speculation, to purchase them for the French.” It may be, as to that, that Marmont’s army lost more than the two Eagles now at Chelsea. It is of course possible that camp followers and Spanish peasants of the locality, wandering over the battlefield to strip and plunder the dead on the day after the battle, when Wellington and the army were miles away, picked up Eagles on the scene of so tremendous a disaster for the French. They might easily traffic in them with French agents at Salamanca, well aware of their value if they could be secretly restored to their regiments. It is, however, inconceivable that British soldiers could have acted as alleged and been guilty of the dastardly crime that Southey hints at. Four Eagle-poles, with screw tops and the Eagles gone, were found on the field by British burying-parties; but those were all, and one of the four may have been the pole of the Eagle of the 62nd.

[28] As to Napoleon’s opinion in regard to the preservation of trophies so acquired, see his memo to Ney at Magdeburg, quoted in Chapter V., as [footnote to page 141].

[29] Napoleon had given permission to his marshals in Spain to grant colonels of regiments, in certain circumstances, discretionary powers as to the disposal of their Eagles. Colonels were authorised, when their regiments were proceeding on what might be considered “exceptionally hazardous service,” or when operating in difficult country, to keep the Eagles back, and leave them in camp or in a fortress. That is how Wellington in 1812 came to find the Eagles of the 13th and 51st of the Line at Madrid.

[30] On July 28, 1813, in a skirmish in the Pyrenees, the 40th (now the 2nd Somersetshire Regiment) surrounded and captured the French 32nd of the Line, rounding its First Battalion up in a valley and charging it with the bayonet, 24 officers and 700 men being taken. The Eagle had been thrown into a rapid mountain torrent in sight of our men, during the retreat of the 32nd, but it was impossible to prevent it, or to recover the Eagle afterwards.

[31] Others of the Eagles had narrow escapes during the Peninsular War. In the fighting south of the Douro, near Grijon, on the day before Wellington’s passage of the river at Oporto, the 31st Light Infantry all but lost their Eagle on being charged by the British 14th and 20th Light Dragoons. The 31st broke in confusion before the British onset, and only rallied some miles from the battlefield. “Our losses,” described one of the officers, “were very heavy, but our Eagle, which had been in extreme peril in the encounter, was happily saved.” Again, in the pursuit up the mountain side after the defeat of Girard’s Division at Arroyo dos Molinos, the Eagles of the 34th and 40th of the Line escaped capture—although both regiments were all but annihilated—to Marshal Soult’s expressed relief. In reporting the reverse to Napoleon, Soult added this by way of solatium: “L’honneur des armes est sauvé; les Aigles ne sont pas tombés au pouvoir de l’ennemi.” After Talavera, the Eagle of the 25th of the Line was picked up on the battlefield by a party of the King’s German Legion—it was sent to Hanover and is now in Berlin; also, during the battle, the British 29th took two Eagle-poles in a charge, but with the Eagles unscrewed from the tops and removed by the Eagle-bearers at the last moment and carried out of the fight under their coats.

[32] Elsewhere are other permanent trophies of the campaign, spoils of another kind. Nine hundred and twenty-nine of Napoleon’s cannon fell into Russian hands, mostly abandoned during the retreat, without attempt at defence. Of these, most are fittingly kept at Moscow; they number 875, and are exhibited in the arsenal, or mounted as trophies in the public squares in the Holy City. As with the flags, they are not all French. Those bearing the French Imperial cypher, the letter “N” surmounted by the Eagle and Napoleonic crown, number less than a half of the total. The French guns number 365; the bulk of the collection being made up of artillery from allied and vassal states: 189 Austrian cannon, 123 Prussian, 70 Italian, 40 Neapolitan, 34 Bavarian, 22 Dutch, 12 Saxon, 8 Spanish, 5 Polish, with 7 Westphalian, Würtemburg, and Hanoverian pieces. The Prussian and Austrian guns, most of them, it is fair to say, were not captured from the contingents serving with the Grand Army in Russia: they formed part of the artillery marching with Napoleon’s main column; they belonged to the French army, and were manned by French gunners, being spoils from the Austerlitz, Wagram, and Jena campaigns, turned to account to form field batteries for the French army. Innumerable other reminders of the fate of the Grand Army are preserved all over Russia: soldiers’ arms and accoutrements, personal belongings and decorations of French officers and men, fragments of uniforms, helmets, swords and lances, pistols and muskets; relics mostly picked up on battlefields or by the wayside along the route of the retreat. The muskets serve to illustrate incidentally, in the variety of the woods used for their stocks, the makeshifts to which, some time before 1812, the demands of Napoleon’s armaments had reduced France: the musket-stocks of oak, chestnut, elm, beech, maple, of even poplar and deal, tell a tale of exhausted supplies of the walnut and ash woods ordinarily used in the manufacture of firearms.

The total of 75 Eagles and other standards is no extravagantly large array of trophies, remembering the overwhelming nature of the catastrophe to the Grand Army in Russia. Of the 600,000 soldiers who mustered round their regimental colours at the crossing of the Niemen at the outset of the campaign, 125,000 were killed in fight, and 193,048, according to the Russian official returns, were taken prisoners. In round numbers 250,000 died on the line of march during the retreat, from cold, hardships, and starvation, or were killed as stragglers by the Cossacks and peasants. The mementoes also of their grim fate exist to-day in Russia. The graves of most of them may be seen all along the railway line from Wilna to Moscow, which follows closely the route of Napoleon and the Grand Army, over country the same in appearance now as then; a dreary, wind-swept, lonesome plain, broken only by vast stretches of dark, monotonous birch and pine forests, with here and there narrow ravines, and strips of hilly ground, amid which wind chill and sluggish rivers. At intervals huge mounds, looking like embankments or ancient barrows of enormous size, rise over the flat expanse of plain. They are the graves of the French dead. It took three months to destroy the remains of the dead soldiers and of some 150,000 horses which perished in the campaign. The ghastly task was carried out locally by the peasantry, under an urgent Government order, so as to prevent the outbreak of pestilence in the spring from the vast numbers of unburied corpses that strewed the track of the ill-fated host. The bodies, when the snow thawed, were dragged together and collected in heaps each “half a verst long and two fathoms high,” over 500 yards long and some 14 feet high. At first, efforts were made to burn them, but the supply of firewood failed, and the stench all over the country was unbearable. The corpses were then hauled into shallow trenches alongside, and quicklime and earth heaped over them, making the mounds now to be seen along the railway, on either side of the old post-road from Wilna to Moscow, the route of Napoleon’s retreat. In the province of Moscow, 50,000 dead soldiers and 29,000 dead horses were so disposed of before the middle of February; in the province of Smolensk, by the end of the month, 72,000 dead soldiers and 52,000 horses; in the province of Minsk, 40,000 human corpses and 28,000 horses; to which, later on, when the ice had melted, 12,000 more dead soldiers were added, the bodies found in the Beresina; in the province of Wilna, also by the end of February, 73,000 dead soldiers, with 10,000 dead horses. There were, in addition, very many never accounted for: dead stragglers who had perished in the forests, their remains being devoured by the wolves; and those who were massacred—beaten to death, or buried alive, or burned alive—by the peasants in places away from the line of march. Such was the appalling loss of life that attended the Moscow campaign, and which the trophies represent. In the circumstances, in proportion, the toll is hardly a large one.

[33] The wolves killed many of the stragglers as they wandered in search of food or shelter from the cold, away from the retreating columns. They followed in the track of the Grand Army to the last, across Germany to the Rhine. It is the fact, indeed, that the presence of wolves to-day in the forest lands of Central Europe is largely due to the tremendous incursion of ravenous brutes from Russia which swept in huge swarms in rear of Napoleon’s ill-fated host.

[34] Coignet, then a lieutenant of the Old Guard, thus speaks of the horrors of those latter days immediately following the Beresina: “The cold continued to grow more intense; the horses in the bivouacs died of hunger and cold. Every day some were left where we had passed the night. The roads were like glass. The horses fell down, and could not get up. Our worn-out soldiers no longer had strength to carry their arms. The barrels of their guns were so cold that they stuck to their hands. It was twenty-eight degrees below zero. But the Guard gave up their knapsacks and guns only with their lives. In order to save our lives, we had to eat the horses that fell upon the ice. The soldiers opened the skin with their knives, and took out the entrails, which they roasted on the coals, if they had time to make a fire; and, if not, they ate them raw. They devoured the horses before they died. I also ate this food as long as the horses lasted. As far as Wilna we travelled by short stages with the Emperor. His whole staff marched along the sides of the road. The men of the demoralised army marched along like prisoners, without arms and without knapsacks. There was no longer any discipline or any human feeling for one another. Each man looked out for himself. Every sentiment of humanity was extinguished. No one would have reached out his hand to his father; and that can easily be understood. For he who stooped down to help his fellow would not be able to rise again. We had to march right on, making faces to prevent our noses and ears from freezing. The men became insensible to every human feeling. No one even murmured against our misfortunes. The men fell, frozen stiff, all along the road. If, by chance, any of them came upon a bivouac of other unfortunate creatures who were thawing themselves, the newcomers pitilessly pushed them aside, and took possession of their fire. The poor creatures would then lie down to die upon the snow. One must have seen these horrors in order to believe them.... But it was at Wilna that we suffered most. The weather was so severe that the men could no longer endure it: even the ravens froze.”