THE EAGLES STORM ELCHINGEN
Ney headed the 6th Light Infantry personally, “in full uniform and ablaze with decorations, offering a splendid target to the enemy.” Ney led the 6th with the Eagle of the First Battalion carried close at his side. Fifteen thousand Austrians with forty guns held Elchingen, and the post is described as being “one of the strongest positions that could be imagined.” The village itself, a large place, consisted of “successive piles of stone houses, intersected at right angles by streets, rising in the form of an amphitheatre from the banks of the Danube to a large convent which crowns the summit of the ascent. All the exposed points on heights were lined with artillery; all the windows filled with musketeers.” The village was on the north bank, and the river had to be crossed to get to it.
First the gallant 6th Light Infantry stormed the bridge. It had been partly destroyed by the Austrians on the day before, and its tottering arches were now swept by cannon-balls, plunging down from batteries on the heights in rear, and a tornado of bullets from sharpshooters in the houses near the river-side. Fighting their way forward step by step, the 6me Légère went on. Their Eagle headed the advance. Its bearer was wounded, but he proudly brandished on high the standard; its silken flag torn to tatters by bullets, and with one wing of the Eagle broken by a shot. With the 6th fought the 69th of the Line. The two regiments forced their way along the steep crooked main street up hill, fired down on furiously meanwhile from the windows. Parties of men at times entered the houses at the sides and fought the enemy inside bayonet to bayonet, from floor to floor. The 6th and the 69th pressed forward, broke down the enemy’s resistance, and carried Elchingen. The Austrians finally, after a gallant attempt to hold out in the convent on the hilltop, abandoned it as fresh French troops came up from across the river.
On the battlefield, when the fight was over, Napoleon, with the Imperial staff round him, publicly congratulated Marshal Ney (he named him later “Duc D’Elchingen”) in the presence of the 6th Light Infantry and the 69th, specially paraded at the spot for the occasion.
THE EAGLES AT ULM
The Eagles of Ney, again, were foremost at the winning of the final fight at Ulm. They led the furious onrush that stormed the steep heights of Michelsberg and Les Tuileries, the key of the last Austrian position. Thence Napoleon looked down directly into the fortress; and within an hour of Ney’s brilliant final feat the French shells, from batteries, quickly galloped up to the heights, were bursting in Ulm, carrying terror and death into every quarter of the city.
On that came the surrender of General Mack. The curtain next rises on the intensely dramatic Fifth Act of the tragedy, the march out of the Austrians to lay down their arms.
In that display the Eagles had their allotted place. Before them, brought forward and prominently paraded, each Eagle in advance of its own corps in line, with the whole Grand Army ranged in battle order as spectators of the scene, the standards of the vanquished foe defiled out of the gates of Ulm, and were laid down on the ground in formal token of surrender.
Napoleon proved himself at Ulm a born stage-manager.
Hardly ever before, never in modern war, had such a spectacle been witnessed as that presented on that chill and cheerless October Sunday forenoon, October 20, 1805, in the heart of central Germany, beside the banks of the rushing Danube, roaring past, a yellow foaming torrent after weeks of autumn rain, amid pine-clad summits extending far and wide on either hand.