The second great battle-day of the Eagles in the Russian War was at Borodino, on September 7. There a quarter of a million and more combatants faced each other: on one side, 132,000 Russians with 640 guns; on the other, 133,000 French with 590 guns. The battle of Borodino was perhaps the most sanguinary and the most obstinately contested in history. The opening shots were fired at sunrise. When at sunset both sides drew sullenly apart, exhausted after twelve hours of carnage, neither army was victorious. Each held the ground on which it had begun the battle; 25,000 men lay dead on the field, and 68,000 more lay wounded, an appalling massacre that staggered even Napoleon.

Amidst the ferocious savagery of the hand-to-hand fighting that characterised Borodino all over the field, many of the Eagles were in desperate peril. Several were cut off in the terrible havoc that the ferocious Russian counter-charges wrought in the French ranks, and were only saved by the stern fortitude of the soldiers, fighting at times back to back round the Eagles, keeping off the enemy with bayonet thrusts till help should come. In one part of the field the 9th of the Line was isolated and for a time broken up and scattered. The Eagle-bearer was cut off by himself and surrounded. He saved the Eagle, as he fell wounded. “Amidst the confusion, wounded by two bayonet thrusts, I fell, but I was able to make an effort to prevent the Eagle falling into the hands of the enemy. Some of them rushed at me and closed round, but, getting to my feet, I managed to fling the Eagle, staff and all, over their heads towards some of our men, whom I had caught sight of, fortunately near by, trying to charge through and rescue the Eagle. This was all I could do before I fell again and was made prisoner.” The brave fellow returned to France two years later, at the Peace of 1814, and made his way to the regimental dépôt, where he found barely twenty of his comrades at Borodino left. The rest had succumbed during the retreat from Moscow. The survivors had brought back the Eagle to France; only, however, to have to give it up to the new Minister of War for destruction.

TWO EAGLES JUST SAVED

The 18th of the Line, broken in a Russian counter-attack, after storming one of the Russian redoubts erected to defend part of the position, rallied with their Eagle in their midst and held their ground in spite of repeated attacks until help could get through to them. At the roll-call next morning, 40 officers out of 50, and 800 men out of 2,000 were reported as missing; left dead or wounded on the field. Another regiment lost its colonel and half one battalion dead on the field; the Eagle-Guard were all shot down or bayoneted round the Eagle, which in the end was saved and brought out of the battle by a corporal, who was awarded a commission by Napoleon in the presence of the remains of the regiment next day. The Eagle of the 61st of the Line again was only kept out of Russian hands by the devotion of the men round it. Napoleon rode past the regiment next day while being paraded for the roll to be called. Only two battalions were there, and he asked the colonel where the third battalion was. “It is in the redoubt, Sire!” was the officer’s reply, pointing in the direction of the Great Redoubt, round which some of the hardest fighting of the day had taken place. The battalion had literally been annihilated: not an officer or a man of the 1,100 in the third battalion of the 61st had returned from the fight.

A regiment of Cuirassiers lost its Eagle at Borodino: the Eagle had disappeared in the midst of a fierce mêlée, in which the Eagle-bearer had gone down. The loss was not discovered till later. All, however, refused to believe that it had been captured: that was incredible. The dead Eagle-bearer’s body was found after the battle, but no Eagle was there. Overwhelmed with shame, the regiment had to admit that the impossible had happened, and during the weeks that they were at Moscow “they remained plunged in a profound dolour.” The Eagle reappeared in an extraordinary way. In the retreat, when passing the scene of the battle, a ghastly and horrible spectacle with its unburied corpses and the carcasses of horses strewn thickly and heaped up all over the field, a sudden thought struck one of the officers. Late that night, he and a brother officer, taking the risk of capture by Cossacks on the prowl in rear of the retreating army, rode back and found their way by moonlight to where the Cuirassiers had had their fight and the Eagle-bearer had fallen. They found the Eagle inside the carcass of the Eagle-bearer’s horse. It had been thrust in there by the dying Eagle-bearer through the gaping wound that had killed the horse, as the only means to conceal it in the midst of the enemy.

HOW THE EAGLES ENTERED MOSCOW

The Eagles made their last triumphant entry into a conquered capital at Moscow on September 14, the Eagle of the Old Guard leading the way at the head of the grenadiers of the Guard, all wearing for the day their full-dress parade uniform. As has been said, every officer and soldier of the Guard, by Napoleon’s standing order, carried a suit of full-dress uniform in his kit or knapsack on campaign in readiness for such occasions—“en tenue de parade comme si elle eut défiler au Carrousel.” They had marched like that with music and full military pomp twice through Vienna, and through the streets of Berlin and Madrid; but there was at Moscow a disconcerting and ominous difference, both in their surroundings and in the reception that they met. Elsewhere, alike in Vienna, Berlin, and Madrid, the parade march of the victorious Eagles passed through densely crowded streets of onlookers, silently gazing with dejected mien at the scene. At Moscow not a soul was in the streets, at the windows, anywhere; on every side were emptiness and desolation. The inhabitants had fled the city, and only deserted houses remained. The first incendiary fires at Moscow broke out at midnight, within twelve hours of Napoleon taking up his residence in the Kremlin.

The spell after that was broken. Henceforward victory deserted the Eagles; the hour of fate was at hand for Napoleon and the Grand Army. The Fortune of War, indeed, turned against the Eagles even before Napoleon had quitted Moscow.

Early on October 18, Napoleon, while at breakfast in the Kremlin, suddenly heard distant cannonading away to the south. He learned what had happened that afternoon while holding a review of the Italian Royal Guard. “We hastily regained our quarters, packed up our parade-uniforms, put on our service kit ... and to the sound of our drums and bands threaded our way through the streets of Moscow at five in the afternoon.” During the past five weeks, while all had been outwardly quiet, the Russian armies had been manœvring to close in along the only road of retreat open to Napoleon.

THE FIRST SENT TO THE CZAR