Described a British officer who went over the ground after the fight:
“The contest ended in a dreadful massacre of the French infantry. The 105th bravely stood their ground, but the ponderous weight of the heavy cavalry broke down all resistance; and arms lopped off, heads cloven to the spine, or gashes across the breast and shoulders showed the fearful encounter that had taken place.”
SPOILS TAKEN IN ANOTHER WAY
The third of the trophy Eagles paraded in London before the Prince Regent was that of Napoleon’s 39th of the Line. It had been picked up in the dried-up bed of the river Ceira, one of the tributaries of the Douro. Apparently the Eagle had been dropped, owing to the fall of its bearer during the night action of Foz d’Aronce on June 15, 1811, when Ney’s corps of Masséna’s army, then retreating from Torres Vedras, was roughly handled and driven across the river by Wellington’s Third and Light Divisions.
The fourth and fifth of the Eagles were found at Madrid on Wellington’s occupation of the city after Salamanca—stored away in the French arsenal and army dépôt there, to which uses the ancient Royal Palace of the Buen Retiro, just outside the walls of Madrid, had been converted.[28] Seventeen hundred men held the Retiro, and the approaches to the arsenal had been fortified by order of Napoleon, but the garrison surrendered without firing a shot. They gave up to the victors 180 brass cannon, 900 barrels of powder, 20,000 stand of arms, muskets and bayonets, together with the Eagles of the 13th and 51st of the Line, which had been laid up at the Retiro for safe custody while the two regiments were operating in a wild part of the country against the Spanish guerrillas.[29]
The last Eagles taken by Wellington in the Peninsular War came into our hands in the battles of the Pyrenees.[30] Neither of them is now in existence. One was taken by our 28th in the combat of the Pass of Maya. The 28th, supporting the 92nd Highlanders in the fighting, overwhelmed with a series of fierce volleys an unfortunate French regiment, which was afterwards discovered to be the French 28th—a curious coincidence. The Eagle of the 28th, the senior corps of its brigade, was found on the battlefield, and was brought to England and hung in the Chapel Royal, Whitehall. It disappeared from there in circumstances already related. The second French Eagle was that of the 52nd of the Line, presented by Wellington, as has been told, to the Spanish Cortes. That also has since been entirely lost sight of.
NAPOLEON’S ORDER OF RECALL
This also may be added. Early in 1813 a special order was issued by Napoleon to the army in Spain requiring the Eagles of most of the regiments to be sent back to France. Napoleon at that time was in Paris, engaged in getting together a new Grand Army to replace that destroyed in Russia. The regiments in Spain, he said, would be so weakened by the intended withdrawal of their third, fourth, and fifth battalions (which he was recalling in order to send them to Germany for the coming campaign there), that the Eagles—in charge of the first battalions which were remaining in Spain—would be exposed to undue risk. “In future,” he wrote, “there will in Spain be only one Eagle to each brigade, that of the senior regiment of the brigade.” The Eagles withdrawn from Spain, added the order, would “in the end rejoin the battalions with the Grand Army in Germany, as soon as these had been reconstituted afresh as regiments, with a sufficient force of men to ensure the safety of the Eagles.” All the cavalry Eagles were recalled: “No regiment of Cavalry in Spain is to retain its Eagle. Those who have not done so are immediately to send theirs to the dépôt.”
It was due to this order mainly that at Vittoria, after the overwhelming rout of the French army, only one Eagle-pole—with its Eagle gone—fell into British hands, although there had been on the field upwards of 70,000 French soldiers (of whom 55,000 were infantry), and the French lost everything—in the words of one of their own generals (Gazan), “all their equipages, all their guns, all their treasure, all their stores, all their papers.”[31]