The fight, man to man, went on desperately for several minutes—some of the British soldiers, as yet another French officers relates, fighting with their fists. “Many of the Englishmen broke their weapons in striking with the butts or bayonets; but they never seemed to think of using the swords they wore at their sides. They went on fighting with their fists.”
It was in the final mêlée that “the Eagle with the Golden Wreath” was taken; after a sharp and fierce hand-to-hand fight round it.
Colonel Roussillon himself was at almost the same moment struck down, and lay insensible for a space among the dead near by. He was recovering his senses and trying to stand up, when, as he tells, a British sergeant saw him and ran at him with his halberd. He parried the thrust, and kept the sergeant off, and then a British officer came up. To him the Commandant of the First Battalion of the 8th surrendered his sword.
The fight for the Eagle—on one hand to take it, on the other to keep it—was furious; desperately and heroically contested by both sides.
First, a gallant Irish boy, from Kilkenny, Ensign Edward Keogh of the 87th, caught sight of it, borne on high above the fray. There had been no unscrewing of the Eagle of the 8th, no trying to break it from its pole. “See that Eagle, sergeant!” called Keogh to Sergeant Masterton, among the foremost, close by his officer; and then he dashed straight into the thick of the party round the Eagle, sword in hand. The brave lad cut his way through, with Masterton and four or five privates close behind him. He got close up to the “Porte-Aigle,” crossed swords with him, and got a grip of the Eagle-pole. But he could not wrench it from the no less brave Frenchman’s hands before he went down with half a dozen musket bullets and bayonet stabs in his body.
Porte-Aigle Guillemin, as the gallant French Eagle-bearer of the 8th was named, fell dead at the same moment, shot through the head by one of the British privates.
HOW THE TUSSLE ENDED
Instantly other Frenchmen rushed up to save the Eagle, and formed round it hastily. One of the British privates who seized hold of the staff was slashed to death, and the French recovered it. The fight round the Eagle went on for some minutes. In that time no fewer than seven French officers and sub-officers fell dead in defence of the Eagle. An eighth officer, Lieutenant Gazan, clung to the pole to the last, regardless of wounds that nearly hacked him to pieces. Finally the Eagle was torn from his grasp by Sergeant Masterton, at the end the sole unwounded survivor of the attacking British party. Gazan “survived miraculously,” and lived to be decorated by Napoleon for his devoted courage. Masterton seized the Eagle and kept it. So “the Eagle with the Golden Wreath” became a British trophy.
From the crossing of the bayonets in the final charge to the taking of the Eagle, the mêlée lasted about fifteen minutes.
The remnant of the 8th were saved by a rally to the spot by the French 54th, after another regiment, the 47th, had attempted its rescue in vain. The 47th lost their Eagle in the mêlée, but recovered it. “The man who had charge of it was obliged to throw it away, from excessive fatigue and a wound,” explains a British officer. The 8th lost at Barrosa their Colonel (Autié) and the Lieutenant-Colonel of the Second Battalion, killed; Vigo-Roussillon, of the First Battalion, wounded; and 17 other officers and 934 of the rank and file killed or wounded. The Moniteur, the official Paris newspaper under the Napoleonic régime, in reporting the battle of April 5, referred to the loss of the Eagle in these terms: “A battalion of the 8th, having been charged in wood-covered ground, and the Eagle-bearer being killed, his Eagle has not been found since.”