Marbot had seen his two predecessors go off with their swords drawn, as though they intended to defend themselves against attacks on the way. He had remarked that, and now proposed another method for himself.
“To attempt defence was madness; it meant stopping to fight amidst a multitude of enemies. I went otherwise to work. Leaving my sword in its scabbard, I considered myself rather as a rider who is trying to win a steeple-chase and goes as quickly as possible by the shortest line towards the appointed goal without troubling about what is to right or left of his path. My goal was the hillock on which stood the 14th, and I resolved to get there without taking heed of the Cossacks. I tried to put them out of my mind entirely. The plan answered to perfection.”
“Lisette [Marbot’s charger], flying rather than galloping, moving more lightly than a swallow, darted over the intervening space, leaping the heaps of dead men and horses, the ditches, the broken gun-carriages, the half-extinguished bivouac fires. Thousands of Cossacks swarmed over the plain. The first who caught sight of me behaved like sportsmen who, while beating, start a hare and tell of its whereabouts to each other with shouts of ‘Your side!’ None of the Cossacks tried to stop me. Perhaps it was because of the amazing speed of my mare; perhaps—probably—because there were so many of them swarming round that each thought I could not escape from his comrades farther on. At any rate I got through them all, and without scratch either to myself or to my mare, and managed to reach where the 14th stood.
“AT LAST I WAS IN THE SQUARE!”
“I found them in square on top of their hillock, but the slope all round was very slight, and the Russian cavalry had been able to attack them with several charges. All, though, had been beaten off, and the regiment stood surrounded by a circle of dead horses and dragoons. The corpses indeed formed a kind of rampart round our men, and made by now their position almost inaccessible to mounted men. So I found, for in spite of the help of our men, I had much difficulty in getting across this horrible entrenchment. At last, however, I was in the square.”
The major of the 14th was the senior officer left alive, and to him Marbot gave Napoleon’s order. But it was absolutely impossible to carry it out; there were too few men left to make the attempt possible. They would be overpowered, said the major to Marbot, before they had gone half a dozen steps. They were past hope now, unless the cavalry could cut their way to them at once. Marbot must save himself and get back at once. He must take their Eagle back with him and deliver it into Napoleon’s own hands. “I see no means left of saving the regiment,” were the major’s words. “Return to the Emperor, and bid him farewell from the 14th of the Line. We have faithfully obeyed his orders in defence of the Eagle. Bear him back his Eagle which he entrusted to us, which now we have no hope of defending longer. It would add too much to the bitterness of death for us to see it fall into the hands of the enemy.” The major handed the Eagle to Marbot and then saluted it, amid shouts of “Vive l’Empereur!” from the men round.
Marbot took the Eagle, and, as the only means of preserving it during his ride back, tried to break it off from its stout pole so as to conceal it under his cloak. He was in the act of leaning forward to get a purchase in order to break the oaken staff, when he was suddenly rendered powerless by the wind of a grape-shot. It was a marvellous escape from death. The shot actually went through his hat, within a quarter of an inch of his head. It deprived him, as he describes, of all power and sensation, although he still remained fixed in his saddle, his eyes witnessing the last scene, the fate of the 14th. The square was finally rushed by a swarm of Russian grenadiers, as Marbot says, who came charging up to the spot—“big men with mitre-shaped caps bound in brass.
FIGHTING TO THE LAST MAN
“These men hurled themselves furiously on the feeble remains of the 14th. Our poor fellows had little strength left for resistance, weakened as they were by hardships and privations. They had for days been only existing on potatoes and melted snow, and on that morning had not had time to prepare even that wretched meal. Yet they made bravely what fight they could with their bayonets, and when, as too soon happened, the square was broken, they tried to hold together in groups, fighting back to back and keeping up the unequal fight to the last man.”
Those nearest Marbot, so as not to be bayoneted from behind, stood all round him with their backs to the mare, hemmed in by a ring of Russians, some shooting down the hapless Frenchmen, others killing them with the bayonet.