[35] One of those who presented arms before Napoleon at the Rheims review died, just twenty years ago, as the last French survivor of Trafalgar—André Manuel Cartigny. At Trafalgar he had been a powder-boy on board the celebrated Redoutable, from the mizen-top of which the bullet was fired which killed Nelson. He paraded at Rheims among the remnant of survivors of Napoleon’s last battalion left of the Seamen of the Guard, and was present a month later at the historic farewell at Fontainebleau.
[36] General Dupont, an officer of the highest promise and with an exceptionally brilliant record, Ney’s right-hand man, and chief divisional leader on many battlefields, a special favourite also with Napoleon (“a man I loved and was rearing up to be a marshal,” were Napoleon’s words of him), while on the expedition which was to win him the bâton, at the head of 25,000 men, let himself be surrounded and cut off; trapped among the gorges of the Sierra Morena by a horde of peasants backed up by Spanish regulars; and then, in spite of a final chance that offered for him to force his way through, surrendered to the enemy. He had committed “une chose sans exculpe; une lacheté insultante,” declared Napoleon in savage fury on hearing of the surrender. Those who had had part in it, declared the Emperor, should “die on the scaffold”—“ils porteront sur l’échaffaud la peine de ce grand crime national!” He had Brigadier Legendre, Dupont’s Chief of the Staff, who had been released on parole, brought before him at Valladolid, and heaped on the wretched, broken man the bitterest reproaches and revilings; beside himself in his wrath. Not a word in reply, in explanation, would he listen to. Before the Imperial Guard on parade, and the assembled Imperial Staff, Napoleon finally gripped the general by the wrist and shook it passionately. An onlooker, another officer, describes the scene: “A nervous contraction of the muscles seemed to seize the Emperor. ‘What, General!’ he ejaculated, his voice quivering with fury. ‘Why did not your hand wither when it signed that infamous capitulation!’” Legendre was cashiered: Dupont (who had been ill and was wounded during the battle) was cashiered, degraded from the Legion of Honour, and kept under police surveillance as long as the Empire lasted.
What became of the other two Eagles, those of the “Garde de Paris” and of the Second Battalion of the 5th Light Infantry, and the fourteen Reserve Battalion flags that were taken at Bailen is unknown. They are not in Spain, although one trophy indirectly associated with the disaster is now at Madrid, the admiral’s flag of Admiral Rosily, who was at Cadiz with the French squadron which Dupont was marching to rescue. It is kept as a trophy in the Museo Naval of Madrid. Rosily had charge of the five French ships of the line which escaped into Cadiz after Trafalgar. When Spain rose against Napoleon, they were placed in danger from the garrison of Cadiz; being at the same time unable to put to sea because a British fleet blockaded the port. Dupont’s army was specially sent to bring away the 4,000 soldiers and sailors on board, who were then to abandon the ships. Just before Dupont reached Bailen, the Spaniards attacked Rosily, bombarding his ships with heavy cannon, and mortars and a gunboat flotilla, and he had to surrender, his admiral’s flag being carried off by the Spaniards, ultimately to find its way to its present resting-place.
[37] Years later these trophies were again brought to light, and by degrees, one at a time, or two or three together, found their way once more to the Hôtel, where they form part of the present collection. Among those now in the Invalides are six of Frederick the Great’s trophies annexed at Berlin by Napoleon in 1806; six Austrian and Bavarian flags, also of the Seven Years’ War period, removed by Napoleon from Vienna; an old German flag taken by Marshal Turenne, and in earlier times hung in Notre Dame; five Austrian colours of unknown origin; one Russian flag-trophy from Austerlitz; one Prussian standard from Jena; and a number of Spanish and Portuguese flags from the Peninsular War.
Three British regimental flags, originally captured by Napoleon’s Polish lancers at Albuera, found their way back in this manner to the Invalides. They were taken at Albuera in the first part of the battle, when, under cover of mist and rain squalls, the French cavalry, circling round one flank, swooped down on the leading British brigade before its regiments could form in square. Of the five other British flags at present in the Invalides, four were taken on March 8, 1814, just three weeks before the burning of the trophies, and had not yet reached Paris. They were taken from us in very tragic circumstances—at the disastrous attempt to storm the fortress of Bergen-op-Zoom; but the details of that painful story nor the identification of the flags do not concern us here. One of the four flags is kept beside Napoleon’s tomb. The fifth flag purports to have been a British sloop-of-war’s red ensign and to have been captured in the Baltic in December 1813, in an action of which the British Admiralty has no record, and the French account is only a tradition. It again, apparently, had not reached Paris by March 1814.
[38] To the Army, Louis XVIII. was only a King imposed on them by their enemies; by the triumphant enemies of France, the European Coalition. He was merely the “protégé of foreign bayonets,” placed over them by the English and Prussians; “l’émigré rentré en croupe derrière un cosaque!” To the soldiers he only personified defeat and disaster; and the memories that they gloried in had been of set purpose obliterated by him and his creatures. The very charter under which he had assumed authority was dated the 19th year of his reign, as though Napoleon had never been. He had proscribed their Eagle standards before which all Europe had trembled. By his ordinances he had abolished and insulted the memory of their victories. In addition he had disbanded and turned adrift their officers, and had left them to starve, without the pay that was their due, in wretchedness and rags.
Fuel was added to the fires of disaffection in the ranks by the tales that went round of every barrack-room of personal ill-usage of and affronts to officers who had won the respect of all on campaign, and before the enemy under fire. Ci-devant colonels and captains in long-forgotten corps of the old-time Royal Army were appointed at one stride Lieutenant-Generals and Major-Generals on the Active List, ousting and sending into unemployment men, whom Napoleon himself had picked out for command, whose names were household words to the Army. In almost every regiment officers who had grown grey in war-service before the enemy, who had won distinction on a hundred battlefields, were shelved; set aside for émigrés, who, a quarter of a century before, had been boy subalterns in the army of the ancien régime, and had not set foot in France since they fled the country at the outbreak of the Revolution. These were brought back and posted wholesale as colonels and chefs de bataillon all through the Army, superseding and driving into poverty veterans who had raised themselves to their ranks and positions through personal merit and war-service, and had qualified step by step in the different grades. At a levée one day, after a review before the Duc de Berri, a grey-headed old regimental officer stepped forward, according to custom, and made a request to have granted to him for his services the Cross of St. Louis. “What have you done to deserve it?” was the Prince’s reply, uttered in a cold and sneering tone. “I have served in the Army of France for twenty years, your Royal Highness!” “Twenty years of robbery!” was the cruel and insolent answer as the Duc de Berri turned his back on the veteran. The words were repeated everywhere among the soldiers and had the worst effect. Another tale that caused deep resentment throughout the Army was that of the treatment which Marshal Ney had received at Court when protesting against rudeness which had been shown by certain ladies of title to his wife one day at the Tuileries. They had openly insulted the Maréchale Ney by making sarcastic and contemptuous comments on her comparatively lowly birth. Marshal Ney personally complained to the King, but was coldly referred to the Court Chamberlain. He laid his complaint before that functionary and was personally rebuffed “in a harsh and insolent manner”—as the only reply to which the Marshal with his wife had withdrawn from Paris altogether. And more than one other officer of eminence, it was told, had in like manner been forced to cease attendance at Court. When the moment came for the reappearance of Napoleon in their midst, the Army was more than ready to receive their old leader with open arms and rally once more to the Eagles.
[39] It was the action of Marshal Ney that sealed the fate of the Bourbon régime.
Ney had accepted the Restoration as bringing peace to exhausted France; he had given in his allegiance to the Bourbons. Angry and sick at heart as he was over the ill-treatment meted out to his brother officers, and the humiliations that the new régime had inflicted on the Army, and sore over personal grievances of his own, he had, in spite of all, loyally held back from intriguing against the restored dynasty. Napoleon’s leaving Elba, when he first heard the news, he condemned outspokenly as a crime against France. Impulsive and headstrong by nature, he forgot his grievances, and hastened to Paris to offer his sword to the King. Napoleon, he said to the King at the interview at the Tuileries, which was immediately granted him, was a madman and deserved to be brought to Paris “like a bandit in an iron cage.” So hostile witnesses at Ney’s court-martial declared, though Ney himself emphatically denied using any words of the kind. His services were accepted gladly, for Ney was the most popular of all the marshals with the soldiers, and he was sent to lead the army against Napoleon. Besançon was proposed as his head-quarters, and he betook himself there.
Almost at once, however, anxieties and doubts beset Ney. On taking up his command he found but few regiments available. He was promised reinforcements, but none arrived, and while he waited, no news of the rapidly altering situation reached him from Paris. Meanwhile the news came steadily in from all sides that the soldiers could not be trusted to oppose Napoleon. Ney was still loyal to the Bourbons, and he moved his troops nearer the line of advance Napoleon was taking; to Lons le Saulnier, midway between Besançon and Lyons. To officers who hinted that the soldiers would not fight if Napoleon appeared, Ney answered angrily: “They shall fight. I will take a musket and begin the firing myself! I will run my sword through the first man who hesitates!”