SO FAR TEN EAGLES LOST

At Krasnoi, on November 19, between Smolensk and the Beresina, Napoleon underwent another severe defeat from the pursuing Russians, 10,000 prisoners and 70 guns falling into the victors’ hands. Two Eagles were carried off from the battlefield and despatched to St. Petersburg by special courier, together with Kutusoff’s report to the Czar. Twenty-seven Eagles, however, got past the Russians, fighting their way through, thanks to the endurance of brave men who rallied round them. Krasnoi it was that gave the death-blow to Napoleon’s last hope of rallying the Grand Army. After it less than 30,000 men remained under arms with the main column, including the 8,000 survivors of the Imperial Guard. Up to then, according to the Russian official returns, 80,000 prisoners, 500 guns, and “40 standards and flags of all kinds” had fallen into the hands of the pursuers. Not more than ten, however, of the forty standards taken were Eagles: the two taken at Murat’s surprise at Vinkovo; the two taken at Wiasma; the two taken at Krasnoi; also two taken before Napoleon reached Smolensk, from a brigade sent from Smolensk to help him on the road, which blundered into the middle of the Russian army and had to surrender; and two captured elsewhere, from the French flanking armies of Marshal Macdonald and Marshal St. Cyr. An eleventh Eagle was taken in the second battle at Krasnoi, from Ney’s rearguard; the only Eagle that Ney actually lost in fight throughout the 600 miles’ march between Moscow and the frontier.

At Krasnoi, Ney’s rearguard, following at a day’s march behind the rest of the army, found its way barred. The Russians, after defeating Napoleon’s main column, a day’s march in advance, had waited on the scene of the former fighting for Ney. They held a position that it was practically impossible for Ney’s comparatively small force to get past. After vainly attempting to break through, Ney had to draw back, and make a forlorn-hope effort to avoid destruction by a long détour, in the course of which he had to abandon guns, baggage, and horses, and cross the Dnieper on ice hardly thick enough to bear the weight of a man.

On the eve of Krasnoi, indeed, the rearguard found itself in so desperate a position, that Ney ordered all its Eagles to be destroyed. His regiments had suffered so severely in their continuous fighting, that it was impossible adequately to safeguard the Eagles. Every musket and bayonet was wanted in the fighting line. It was impossible to supply sufficient Eagle-escorts. So far, in spite of the dreadful straits to which some of the regiments had been reduced, all had marched openly with their Eagles, and fought round them, guarding them sedulously by night and day. “When excess of fatigue constrained us to take a few moments of repose,” describes Colonel De Fesenzac of the 4th of the Line, “we (what was left of the regiment able to carry arms—not 100 men) assembled together in any place where we could find shelter, a few of the men standing by to mount guard for the protection of the regimental Eagle.”

“Then,” describes the colonel, “came the order that all the Eagles should be broken up and buried. As I could not make up my mind to this, I directed that the staff should be burned, and that the Eagle of the 4th Regiment should be stowed in the knapsack of one of the Eagle-bearers, by whose side I kept my post on the march.” The Eagle of the 4th, it may be added by the way, was the identical Eagle that Napoleon had presented to the regiment in place of that lost at Austerlitz, in exchange for, as has been told, two captured Austrian flags.

“THEY OUGHT TO PERISH WITH US”

Other officers did the same as Colonel De Fesenzac. One officer, however, the colonel of the 18th of the Line, flatly refused to have his regimental Eagle either broken up or hidden away. “The Eagle,” he says in his journal, which still exists, “had throughout, until then, been carried at the head of the regiment, and I declined to obey the order on behalf of the 18th. It seemed to us a monstrous ignominy. Our Eagles were not given us to be made away with or hidden: they ought to perish with us.” The Eagle of the 18th did actually perish with the regiment. In the rearguard repulse at Krasnoi the entire regiment was destroyed, except for some twenty survivors, including the colonel, severely wounded. “Our Eagle,” says the gallant colonel, proudly recording its fate, “remained among our dead on the field of battle.”

That Eagle of the 18th was the only one of Marshal Ney’s Eagles to fall into the hands of the Russians in battle. Some ten of the Eagles now at St. Petersburg were found on the bodies of officers and men who had been either frozen to death or had fallen dead on the march during Ney’s retreat after Krasnoi; they were not taken in fight.

Ney rejoined Napoleon with only 1,500 men left out of 12,000, of which the rearguard had consisted when it left Smolensk. It was while making his last effort to get past the Russians after his attempt to break through at Krasnoi had failed, that Ney, overtaken on the banks of the half-frozen Dnieper on the evening before he risked his perilous crossing, and summoned by the Russians to surrender, made that proudly defiant reply which has ever since been a treasured memory to the French Army: “A Marshal of France never surrenders!” Six hours later he had evaded capture and, with the remnant of his corps, was across the river. All the world has heard how Napoleon, hopeless of seeing him again, welcomed Ney with the words: “I have three hundred millions of francs in the vaults of the Tuileries; I would have given them all for Marshal Ney!”

ALL KEPT TOGETHER FOR SAFETY