The outrage scandalised the older soldiers, and very nearly brought about a mutiny among some of them.
“Indignant,” to continue in General Thiébault’s words, “at such an outrage to national emblems which the Army had been honouring and defending for thirteen years past, many of the men in the regiments began to grumble and make angry protestations. Presently oaths and violent imprecations burst out on all sides; and then some of the grenadiers became mutinous and defiant. They declared that they would go back, regardless of the consequences, and forcibly recover possession of the old colours.”
THE SITUATION JUST SAVED
The situation speedily became so threatening that General Thiébault hastened off to warn Murat of what was happening. As he went he came across one of the adjutants of the Commandant of the Military School. On the spur of the moment he gave him orders to get together what men he could of the party who had been keeping the parade ground. Of these Thiébault took personal charge and sent them round at once to collect the thrown-down colours and carry them inside the Ecole Militaire.
Apparently that satisfied the soldiers—anxious, most of them, to get out of the wet as soon as possible.
General Thiébault tried after that to find Murat, intending to report to him; but Murat had by then left the Field of Mars. In the end the General decided, as perhaps the wisest course, to refrain from saying anything; not to take official notice of what had happened. After all he was not on duty at the parade; he was only in Paris as an invited guest at the Coronation festivities. Nobody, as a fact, said a word of the affair. By the authorities all reference to it seems purposely to have been hushed up. Not a hint of anything of the sort appeared in the Moniteur, which published a fairly full report of the day’s proceedings; not a word in any of the other Parisian papers.
For the soldiers a dinner of double rations at the Emperor’s expense wound up the Day of the Eagles; for the great personages there was “a banquet at the Tuileries, at which the Pope and the Emperor sat side by side at the same table, arrayed in their Pontifical and Imperial insignia and waited upon by the Grand Officers of the Crown.” Afterwards, without delaying in the capital, the deputations set off on their return to rejoin their regiments. Their arrival at their various destinations was celebrated everywhere, by Imperial order, by a full-dress parade and State reception of the Eagle by each corps; the occasion being further treated as a fête-day and opportunity for a general carousal in camp or garrison. At Boulogne the regiments of the “Army of England” took over their Eagles at a grand review on December 23, Marshal Soult presiding over the ceremony.
THE CLOSE OF THE DAY
The old standards of the Consulate, some bearing on them the battle-scars of Marengo and Hohenlinden, remained where General Thiébault’s assistants had left them stacked, leaning up against the wall in one of the corridors of the Military School, until they were carted off in artillery tumbrils to the central dépôt at Vincennes. There, on New Year’s Day of 1805, they were officially made away with; burned to ashes in the presence of an ordnance department official told off to certify to their complete destruction. That was the authorised method in France of disposing of the standards of a discredited régime; but all the same it was a hard fate for national emblems that had waved victoriously over so many a hard-fought field.
Such were the principal scenes and incidents of the Day of the Field of Mars when Napoleon presented the Eagles of the Empire to the Soldiers of the Grand Army.