Napoleon specially decorated the lieutenant who recovered the Eagle, and who also had led more than one of the charges to rescue it in the earlier fighting. He gave him the cross of the Legion of Honour with a money grant. He further recorded the recovery of the Eagle—though without mentioning how it was got back—in the 55th Bulletin of the Grand Army, dated Warsaw, January 29, 1807:
“The Eagle of the 9th Light Infantry was taken by the enemy, but, realising the deep disgrace with which their brave regiment would be covered for ever, and from which neither victory nor the glory acquired in a hundred combats could have removed the stigma, the soldiers, animated with an inconceivable ardour, precipitated themselves on the enemy and routed them and recovered their Eagle.”
So Napoleon wrote history.
ON THE FIRST DAY AT EYLAU
Two Eagles met their fate in the first day’s fighting at Eylau—in the preliminary combat on February 7, which formed the opening phase of the terrific encounter next day. At Eylau—a small township some twenty-two miles to the south of Königsburg—Napoleon in person commanded with 80,000 men in the field, and met with his first serious check in a European war. In following up the Russian rearguard on the afternoon of the 7th, as it fell slowly back to rejoin its main body, drawn up in position on the farther side of Eylau, on ground chosen beforehand by the Russian leader for making a stand, two of Napoleon’s battalions, while pressing hotly forward after the enemy over the open plain, some two miles from Eylau, were overpowered and cut to pieces. They had charged and were driving in the nearest Russians to them, when a Russian cavalry regiment, the St. Petersburg Dragoons, unexpectedly came on the scene. Sweeping round amidst the tumult of the fighting, the dragoons rode into them on the flank. The two battalions were slaughtered almost to a man within five minutes, before help could get to them, and their Eagles were snatched up and borne away. It was an act of expiation for the St. Petersburg Dragoons. On the previous day Murat’s pursuing hussars had charged and broken them, putting them to flight, and in a wild panic they had ridden over one of their own regiments, trampling their comrades down, with loss of life. To retrieve their character the St. Petersburg Dragoons now went savagely at the two French battalions, riding them down with reckless daring and relentless fury, giving no quarter. Their capture of two of Napoleon’s Eagles in one charge, the taking of two Eagles by a single regiment, stands on its own account as a unique achievement.
Sketch Plan of the Battlefield of EYLAU
Eylau—the historic battle of February 8, 1807—was fought in the depth of winter; in the midst of a flat expanse of a desolate snow-plain and ice-bound marshes; under dreary lowering skies of leaden grey; amid howling gusts of piercing wind, with driving snow-storms sweeping intermittently across the field of battle. A hundred and fifty thousand men on both sides faced each other at the break of day, after passing the night with their outposts within shot of one another, the soldiers all lying in an open bivouac on the snow, round their watch-fires, wrapped up in their cloaks, the only shelter from the bitter cold. They fronted each other in the grey dawn “within half-cannon shot, their immense masses distributed in dense columns over a space in breadth less than four miles. Between them lay the field of battle, a wide stretch of unenclosed ground, rising on the Russian side to a range of small hills. All over the plain, ponds and marshes intersected the ground, but far and wide all was now covered over with ice and deep snow.”
Napoleon began the battle with a fierce cannonade, opening a terrific fire all along the line with no fewer than 350 guns. The Russians replied at once, firing back even more furiously and with yet more guns. For almost an hour nearly 800 cannon belched forth shot and shell on either side; an artillery duel perhaps unparalleled in war. Then, in the midst of the cannonade, Napoleon launched his first attack. Fifteen thousand men of Augereau’s corps moved out from the centre of the French line to storm the Russian position. They went forward, massed in two immense columns, with, in support, a third column of one of Soult’s divisions.
GOING FORWARD TO THEIR DOOM