On the 5th and 6th of July he was at the famous battle of Wagram, where he led two divisions of infantry, some of which were battalions of the Garde Impériale. With these he advanced under a fire, when two hundred pieces of cannon were engaged on both sides, and when the roar of the conflict was the greatest ever heard even by the oldest veteran of these warlike armies. Three-fourths of his column perished under the storm of shot by which it was assailed as he advanced to break the Austrian centre, the task assigned to him by the Emperor.
The fury with which his troops came on was irresistible. He drove back the brigades of the archduke with immense loss, and a total rout of the Austrians ensued, thus terminating a two days' conflict which will ever be remembered in the annals of carnage—for few prisoners were taken on either side, which proved the resolution of both—to conquer or die!
Thirty-six thousand, seven hundred and seventy-three officers and soldiers of both armies lay killed or wounded on the field and round the walls of Vienna; while, as related in the memoir of Count O'Reilly, corpses in every variety of uniform, gashed and bloody, floated in hundreds down the dark waters of the Danube, or were daily thrown upon its shores to feed the wolves or to fester and decay. Such was the field of Wagram, and it was the culminating point in the fortunes of Stephen Macdonald.
Napoleon, though little disposed to view him with favour, when the field was won, sprang from his horse, and embraced him with ardour, exclaiming,—
"Now, Macdonald, we are together for life and death!"
He complimented him before his staff, extolled him in the bulletin, and on the field of battle made him at last a Marshal of the Empire.
Of all the French marshals he was the only one who thus received a bâton in the field, and soon after he was created Duke of Tarentum, from a town of that name in Naples.
"Among all the marshals of France," says the editor of Bourienne's Memoirs, "there is not one so pure from every stain on the soldier's character—so daringly honest with Napoleon in his prosperity—so lastingly true to him in his adversity, as this, his only Scottish officer."
Napoleon thus bore honourable testimony to the value of his service at Wagram, the glory of which another marshal sought to appropriate to himself.