After Moscow: How the Eagles faced their Fate
There are seventy-five standards of Napoleon’s Grand Army of 1812 now in Russia, trophies of the Moscow disaster. Rather more than half of the number are Eagles. The remainder of the trophies are battalion and cavalry flags; some French, some the ensigns of allied contingents and the troops of vassal states of the Napoleonic Empire, compelled to take a part in the campaign. All the European armies of the period are represented among the trophies: green and white Saxon flags; blue and white Bavarian flags; violet and white Polish ensigns; Spanish, Dutch, and Portuguese colours; Swiss flags; Westphalian and Baden flags of the Confederation of the Rhine; the red and black of Würtemburg; the yellow and black of Austria; the white and black of Prussia; the green, white, and red tricolor of Italy.
They are preserved at St. Petersburg, in the Kazan Cathedral and in the Cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul. Those in the Kazan Cathedral are grouped over and round the tomb of the septuagenarian hero, Kutusoff, who lies buried on the spot where he knelt in prayer before setting out to take command as generalissimo of the national army. Near by, suspended against the pillars, are the marshal’s bâton of Davout, and the keys of Hamburg, Leipsic, Dresden, Rheims, Breda, and Utrecht, similarly spoils of the Napoleonic war.[32]
MOST OF THE EAGLES GOT THROUGH
The actual Eagle trophies number all told between forty and fifty: less than a third of the total array of Eagles that crossed the Niemen at the head of their regiments on the outbreak of the war. The majority of the Eagles of the Grand Army were saved from falling into the hands of the Russians through the devoted heroism of those responsible for their safe-keeping amid the horrors of the retreat. Of those at St. Petersburg, not more than half at most were taken in actual combat, and they were only yielded up by their bearers with life, being picked up from among the dead bodies, and carried off by the Russians on going over the field after the fight was over. Five Eagles only were surrendered by capitulation. The others were brought in by the Cossacks, who came upon them while prowling in rear of the retreating army. They were found, some in hollow trees, where their despairing bearers had tried to conceal them; some in holes dug with bayonets in the frozen ground underneath the snow. Others were dragged to light, broken from their staves, from beneath the coats or from the knapsacks of officers and men, who had fallen by the way at night and been frozen to death, during the final stage of the retreat between Wilna and the Niemen. It is in remembrance of how, to the last, during the Moscow retreat, in many a dark and hopeless hour, there yet remained detachments of devoted men, the last remnants of regiments, at all times ready to stand at bay and sacrifice themselves for the honour of their Eagles, amidst hordes of disorganised fugitives all round—in remembrance of that, the army of modern France commemorates on the colours of certain regiments, as representing corps that bore the same numbers in Napoleon’s Grand Army in Russia, the names, among others, of “Marojaroslav,” “Polotz,” “Wiasma,” “Krasnoi,” “La Berezène,” defeats and disasters though these were.
WHAT FRANCE REMEMBERS TO-DAY
The Eagles were under fire for the first time in Russia on July 17, in the attack on Smolensk on the Dnieper, the ancient Lithuanian capital, where took place the first important battle of the war. There the Eagles of Ney’s and Davout’s corps did their part in inciting the men to add fresh laurels to the fame of their regiments; ever prominent in the attack, leading charge after charge as the columns made repeated efforts to storm the fortified suburbs and lofty ramparts of the citadel. The soldiers did all that intrepidity and desperate valour might attempt, but in vain. No valour could prevail against the stubborn endurance of the Russians, who also occupied a strongly walled position that was practically impregnable. The fierce contest went on all through a whole day, until nightfall, and then, under cover of darkness, the defenders silently drew off and retreated beyond the city, leaving Smolensk in flames. No fewer than 15,000 French and 10,000 Russians fell in the merciless encounter.
Next morning there followed a spectacle hardly ever perhaps paralleled: the march of the Grand Army through the streets between the still blazing houses, “the martial columns advancing in the finest order to the sound of military music.” “We traversed between furnaces,” as an officer puts it, “tramping over the hot and smouldering ashes, in all the pomp of military splendour, bands playing and each Eagle leading its men.”
WON ON THE BATTLEFIELD
At Smolensk one regiment won its Eagle, which Napoleon presented at five o’clock in the morning on July 19, before the paraded battalions of Davout’s corps. It was the 127th of the Line; a regiment, it is curious to note, enrolled a few months before, from former Hanoverian subjects of our own King George the Third, and commanded by French officers as a regular corps of the French Line. By Napoleon’s latest ordinance, issued just before the Emperor quitted Paris in May, the regiments newly raised for the Russian War, of which there were several, were in each case to win their Eagles on the battlefield. The Eagle for each regiment was to be provided in advance, but would be held back, locked up in the regimental chest, until it “should be won by distinguished conduct.” The 127th won their Eagle at Smolensk, their brilliant service being specially brought before Napoleon by Marshal Davout, who, of his own initiative, claimed the Eagle for them from Napoleon. The regiment bore it with distinction through the hottest of the fighting at Borodino, carried it all through the disastrous retreat from Moscow, and preserved it to the end to go through the later campaign in Germany, and face the enemy after that in the last stand before Paris in 1814. The Eagle was eventually destroyed by order of the restored Bourbon Government.