The colours were first surrendered, a French General, Andréossi, formerly Napoleon’s Ambassador in London, receiving them, with half a dozen staff officers and orderlies, who deposited the flags one by one in two commissariat wagons drawn up close by.
It was a moment of the deepest and keenest anguish for proud and gallant soldiers. All round them on the hillsides most of the French, overcome by excitement over the unprecedented and amazing spectacle, were by that time almost beside themselves, rending the air with exulting shouts and cheers. Under the cruel stress of the ordeal, as the supreme moment came on, the self-possession of some of the Austrians, tried beyond endurance, gave way.
The men of the Cavalry and Artillery bore themselves throughout with well-disciplined steadiness. As they came to the appointed place where groups of French cavalry troopers and gunners, told off to take over their horses and guns, were standing near the roadside awaiting them, they dismounted at the word of command from their own commanders and stood back. With hardly a murmur from the ranks the Austrian troopers unbuckled their swords and carbines and pistols, and dropped them in heaps at the places pointed out to them. With quiet dignity the officers relinquished their gold-embroidered banners into the enemy’s hands. In grim silence they saw the victors—who there at any rate behaved with courtesy and soldierly consideration for the feeling of the vanquished—step forward to take possession of their horses and their cannon. Many of the Austrians had tears running down their cheeks; some stood trembling with suppressed passion;—but all preserved order and behaved with complete decorum as became disciplined soldiers.
With others unfortunately, with some of the infantry corps, it was otherwise. At the very last, before arriving at the place where they were to give up their weapons, a number of the men in some of the marching regiments broke down under the fearful strain of the moment and lost their heads. In many regiments, no doubt, the soldiers obeyed mechanically, acting like men half stunned after a violent shock; they did as they were told, and passively grounded their arms to order. But in others the final scene was attended by acts of wild frenzy, pitiful to behold. In, as it were, a paroxysm of exasperation at the disgrace that had befallen them, the rank and file of these broke out recklessly, and got at once beyond all efforts of their officers to control. With one accord they began smashing the locks and butts of their muskets on the ground with savage curses, flinging away their arms all round, and stripping off their accoutrements and stamping on them, trampling them down in the mud. These, though, as has been said, were only some of the men; and in certain regiments. The majority of the Austrians bore themselves with fortitude and calmness.
At the end of the afternoon the Imperial Guard, headed by their Eagle and band, marched into Ulm and through the city, as we are told, “amid the shouts of the whole populace.”
So terminated the tragedy of Ulm, in the presence of the Eagles on their first triumphant battlefield.
THE ULM TROPHIES FOR PARIS
The spoils of the Eagles at all points, as announced by Napoleon in the Ulm Bulletin of the Grand Army, were 60,000 prisoners, 200 pieces of cannon, and, in all, 90 flags. The 40 standards surrendered at Ulm itself Napoleon sent to Paris forthwith—after a grand parade of the trophies at Augsburg, in which ninety sergeants of the Imperial Guard bore in procession the Austrian flags. The Ulm trophies were made an Imperial gift for the Senate. “It is a homage,” wrote Napoleon, “which I and my Army pay to the Sages of the Empire.” They were the flags, it may be added, which were displayed at the head of Napoleon’s coffin on the occasion of his State funeral in 1840: they form four-fifths of the trophies now grouped round Napoleon’s tomb. Alone of the trophies of the Ulm campaign, and also of the Austerlitz campaign which followed it, they escaped destruction in the holocaust of Napoleon’s trophies that took place at the Invalides in March 1814, on the night of the surrender of Paris to the Allies. How that came to pass will be told later.
There was a very interesting sequel to the Ulm campaign for one of Ney’s regiments. A brief but brilliant campaign in the Tyrol on their own account followed for Ney’s men immediately after Ulm.
Entering the Tyrol with two of his divisions, Ney attacked and by brilliant tactics overthrew the Tyrolese forces and Austrian regulars who barred his way in a position among the mountains deemed impregnable. The battalion Eagles of the 69th gave the signal for the frontal attack which stormed the enemy’s position. Guided by chamois-hunters the soldiers with the Eagles scaled the face of a precipitous line of crags which overhung in rear the Austrian centre, by inserting their bayonets into fissures in the rocks and clinging to shrubs and creepers, their havresacs tied round their heads as protection from the stones that the Tyrolese above showered down on them. At the top, driving in the defenders, they held up the gleaming Eagles in the sunlight on the brink of the precipice to the marshal below, firing down on the Austrians at the same time to demoralise their resistance and clear the way for Ney’s main effort: “Les Aigles du 69me plantées sur la cime des rochers servirent de signal à l’attacque de front que le Maréchal Ney avait preparé.”