“Officers, sub-officers, and soldiers, swear to me here that not one of you saw your Eagle fall. Assure me that if you had done so you would have flung yourselves into the midst of the enemy to recover it, or have died in the attempt. The soldier who loses his Eagle on the field of battle loses his honour and his all.”
“We swear it!” came the reply at once.
At that there seemed to come a change in the Emperor’s mood. He paused once more for a few moments, during which there was dead silence. Then he raised his voice: “I will grant that you have not been cowards; but you have been imprudent! Again I tell you that these Austrian standards—even, indeed, were they six—would not compensate me for my Eagle.”
He stopped short. He seemed to be musing for a moment, looking straight into the eyes of the men. After that, with a curt “Well, I will restore you yet another Eagle!” Napoleon turned his horse and rode on down the line of troops.
THEY FOUND THE OTHER EAGLE
It was quite true, as the colonel told Napoleon, that the regiment was unaware at the time that their Eagle had been lost. As a fact, search-parties—practically all the survivors of the First Battalion—were out on the day after Austerlitz hunting over the battlefield among the dead for their lost Eagle. By the irony of fate it was they who picked up and restored the Eagle of the 24th Light Infantry to their fellows in adversity; the Russians, it would seem, had not marked its fall in the confusion of the fighting. At any rate it was left where it fell and where it was found.
There was, as it curiously happened, no reference in the Austerlitz Bulletin published in France—the 30th “Bulletin of the Grand Army”—to the loss of its Eagle by the 4th of the Line, although the disaster to the battalion is reported. “Un bataillon du 4me de Ligne fut chargé par la Garde Impériale Russe à Cheval et culbuté.” That was all that was said on the subject. Yet, on other occasions later, when Eagles were lost, mention was made of the misfortune in one or other of the Bulletins, with, generally also, some remark by way of explaining away the unpleasant fact, and now and then a caustic comment by Napoleon. A picture connected with the incident was, however, painted—at whose request is unknown. It is now in the national collection of military pictures of the campaigns of Napoleon at Versailles. It shows the First Battalion of the 4th of the Line at the Schönbrunn review “presenting Napoleon with two Austrian standards taken by them from the enemy, and claiming in exchange a new Eagle for themselves.”[10]
This closing word may be said of the spoils of the Eagles at Austerlitz.
THE RECEPTION IN NOTRE DAME
The forty-five flags captured in the battle, with five others selected from those taken at Ulm, making fifty in all, were presented by Napoleon to the Cathedral of Notre Dame. With the trophies he sent this message: “Our intention is that every year on the 2nd of December a Solemn Office shall be sung in the Cathedral in memory of the brave men who fell on the great day.” The flags were borne in triumph, together with the trophies of the Ulm campaign,—120 captured standards and colours in all—through the streets of Paris on January 15, 1806, amid a tremendous demonstration of popular enthusiasm. “The behaviour of the people,” wrote Cambacérès, “resembled intoxication.” Four days later the Austerlitz flags were received at Notre Dame by the assembled Cathedral clergy, Cardinal du Belloy at their head, with elaborate religious ceremonial.