They went forward to their doom: to meet disaster, swift, terrible, overwhelming, and to leave two of their Eagles in the hands of the enemy as mementos of their fate. Yet they were not given up; neither of those Eagles was surrendered. They remained on the field amid the dead; left behind because there was not a man living of their regiments to defend them. They lay where they fell, surrounded by the soldiers who had died in their defence; lying on the snow for the Cossacks to pick up and carry away. They were the Eagles of the 14th and the 24th of the Line.
The Russians turned their guns on Augereau’s corps directly it commenced its advance; it was sheer massacre for the French, as the fierce tornado of cannon-balls crashed into the thick of the densely massed columns. Whole companies were swept away, mowed down, on every side. “Within a quarter of an hour, half of the corps were struck down.” The rest, though, with stolid endurance, held firmly on their way. The soldiers went doggedly on; only halting for a moment now and again to close up their shattered ranks. At that moment, as they were nearing the Russian position, a furious snow-storm burst over the battlefield, the snow blowing right in the faces of the French. “It was impossible,” one of the survivors told, “to see anything at all in front; we could at times barely see a foot before us.” All, in spite of that, however, laboured bravely to get forward; without wavering, and regardless of the merciless fire of the Russian guns, which never ceased for one moment.
OVERWHELMED IN A SNOWSTORM
Then, as the snow-blinded soldiers struggled on, when the storm of whirling snow was at its worst, all in an instant the catastrophe happened. Without warning, coming from nowhere, as it seemed, an enormous mass of Russian horse, dragoons and Cossacks, charged suddenly, amid an infernal din of furious shouting, into them. “So thick was the snow-storm, and so unexpected the onset, that the assailants were only a few feet off, and the long lances of the Cossacks almost touching the French infantry when they were first discerned.” The Russians swept down on all sides of the two divisions; charging them in front and flanks and rear at once, the dragoons sabring them right and left, the Cossacks stabbing at them with their long eighteen-foot lances.
“The combat was not of more than a few minutes’ duration; the corps, charged at once by foot and horse with the utmost vigour, broke and fled in the wildest disorder back into Eylau, closely pursued by the Russian cavalry and Cossacks, who made such havoc, that the whole, above 15,000 strong, were, with the exception of 1,500 men, taken or destroyed; and Augereau himself, with his two generals of divisions, Desjardins and Heudelet, was desperately wounded.”
Cut off in one part of the field and hemmed in, the 24th of the Line, “one of the finest regiments in the Grand Army, and itself almost equal to a brigade,” as a French officer speaks of it, was destroyed to a man. It refused to turn its back to the enemy, and stood its ground to face its fate. The 24th were slaughtered as they stood in their ranks. Colonel Sémelé and a devoted band of soldiers fought round the Eagle to the last, and fell dead beside it. A Cossack picked the Eagle up and rode off with it.
The 14th had led the attack. It had lost heavily from the Russian cannonade, but was still pressing on when the cavalry came charging down. The regiments next following it, however, had suffered still more heavily from the artillery fire. They were swept away en masse by the Cossack rush. Thus the 14th were cut off and left by themselves, barely half a battalion of men in numbers, in the midst of the raging torrent of Cossacks and dragoons. The survivors hastily threw themselves into a square on and round a low elevation or hillock of snow. There, with their Eagle in their midst, they stood at bay, refusing to retire without direct orders from their marshal.
ISOLATED AND SURROUNDED
Marbot, in his memoirs, describes the fate of the 14th, to which he was sent with a message from Napoleon. He was one of Augereau’s aides de camp. It was just after the wounded marshal had been carried back to the churchyard of the village of Eylau, the centre of the French position, whence Napoleon, on horseback, among his personal suite, had witnessed the disaster. All could see the 14th standing there, isolated and surrounded; “we could see that the intrepid regiment, surrounded by the enemy, was brandishing the Eagle in the air, to show that it still held its ground and wanted help.” Napoleon, “touched by the grand devotion of these brave men, resolved to try to save them. He gave orders that an officer should be sent to tell them to try to make their way back towards the army. Cavalry would charge out to help them. It looked,” says Marbot, “almost impossible to get through the thronging Cossacks; but Napoleon’s command had to be obeyed.”
“A brave captain of engineers named Froissart, who, though not an aide de camp, was on Augereau’s staff, happened to be nearest him, and was told to carry the order to the 14th. Froissart galloped off: we lost sight of him in the midst of the Cossacks, and never saw him again or heard what became of him. The marshal, seeing that the 14th did not move, then sent an officer named David. He had the same fate as Froissart; we never heard of him again. Probably both were killed and stripped, and could not be recognised among the many corpses which covered the ground. For the third time the marshal called, ‘The officer for duty!’ It was my turn.”