With the Eagles in their charge the regimental parties moved on. Passing in front of the stands and pavilions beyond, all wheeled there, to pass again round the arena of the Field of Mars, until they had reached their former stations, and halted, all ranged in the order in which they had taken post at their first arrival.
There remained after that the grand finale. The March Past of the Eagle detachments before Napoleon now came on, designed as the consummation of the day’s doings.
In connection with that, however, there was an unfortunate incident. On the Field of Mars were displayed also the old Army colours of the Consulate, which, as has been said, had been brought to Paris at the order of the War Minister by the regimental deputations. Paraded together with the new Eagles they helped to render the scene the more striking; but their presence led to an unforeseen complication, and in the end a deplorable contretemps.
The standard-bearers who had received the Eagles were each, in addition, still carrying the old regimental flag. They had to carry both. No instructions had been given out—by oversight, most probably—as to the giving up of the old flags, or what was to be done with them.
It may have been that Napoleon desired that the standards of the Consulate and the Eagles of the Empire should be displayed together on that day. None knew better than he the deep attachment of the older men in the ranks for their former battle-flags. Some of the old soldiers, indeed, even there on the Field of Mars, as we are told, were unable to restrain their feelings at the idea of having to part that day from their old colours. “More than one tear was shed,” relates an officer, “amidst all the cheering and shouts of ‘Vive l’Empereur!’” Enthusiastically as most of the soldiers might welcome the new Eagles in the presence of the Emperor, all did not desire to part with colours which had led through the battle-smoke on many a victorious field of the past, even in exchange for the glittering “Cou-cous,” as barrack-room slang had already dubbed Napoleon’s Eagles, giving them in advance a soldier’s nickname that stuck to them as long as the Army of the Empire lasted.
Both sets of standards were carried in the march past, which proceeded without incident to a certain point.
It was an effective display of the lusty manhood of France, of the pick of the Grand Army in its prime; not yet made chair au canon to gratify the ambition of one man. A curious commingling, too, of fighting costumes did the review present for the general spectators; those of yesterday side by side with those of the coming time. Three-fourths of the soldiers went by wearing the stiff Republican garb of the expiring régime, as adopted hastily at the outset of the Revolution: the long-skirted coat, cut after the old Royal Army fashion, but blue in colour instead of white, and with white lapels and turn-backs; long-flapped white waistcoats, white breeches, and high black-cloth gaiters above the knee, such as their ancestors had worn in the days of Marshal Saxe; the old-style big cocked hat, worn cross-wise, or “en bataille,” as the soldiers called it, with a flaunting tricolor cockade in front. The new Napoleonic style was represented by the Imperial Guard and Oudinot’s Grenadier Division from Arras and the Light Infantry battalions, whose turn out in smartly cut coatees faced with red and green, with the tall broad-topped shakos pictures of the time make us familiar with as the normal presentment of the soldiers of the Empire, attracted special attention.6
During the March Past, Frimaire suddenly reasserted itself, and brought about the regrettable incident that was to wind up the day.
The parade was three parts through, when, all of a sudden, a tremendous downpour of cold rain set in, discomfiting and scattering all who were looking on. With the drenching effect of a shower-bath the rain commenced to pour down in torrents, causing an immediate stampede among the general public. The rearmost columns of the soldiers had to pass before empty benches, tramping along stolidly through the mud, “splashing ankle-deep through a sea of mud,” as an officer put it.
The spectators one and all disappeared. The immense crowd of sightseers left the benches on the embankment round the Champ de Mars, and fled home en masse. The seat-holders on the open stands in front of the Ecole Militaire scurried off in like manner. The occupants of the pavilions and galleries, half drowned by the water that streamed down on them through the awnings, quitted their places in haste to seek shelter within the building. The downpour saturated the canopy of the Imperial Pavilion and dripped through. It compelled Josephine to get up from her throne and hurry indoors. The Princesses promptly followed the Empress’s example, all except one—Napoleon’s youngest sister, Caroline Murat. Caroline sat the March Past out to the end, together, of course, with Napoleon himself and the Marshals, and those Court officials who had to stay where they were. Soaked through, she smilingly remarked that she was “accustoming herself to endure the inconveniences inseparable from a throne!”
Then, at the close of the review, came the contretemps.
After the last Eagle had gone past the throne, when Napoleon had left on his way back to the Tuileries, as the troops were moving off the ground to return to their quarters, unanticipated trouble suddenly arose in connection with the old flags. What happened may best, perhaps, be described in the words of an eye-witness, a General present on the Field of Mars, Baron Thiébault:
“Immediately after the Emperor had gone and the seats all round were empty, finding it tiresome to be loaded with the double set of standards, all the more so, no doubt, as it was raining, the standard-bearers apparently could think of nothing better than to rid themselves of the superseded flags. They began everywhere to throw them down, that is, to drop them where they stood in the mud. There they were trampled under foot by the soldiers as they passed along on their way back to quarters.”
The outrage scandalised the older soldiers, and very nearly brought about a mutiny among some of them.
“Indignant,” to continue in General Thiébault’s words, “at such an outrage to national emblems which the Army had been honouring and defending for thirteen years past, many of the men in the regiments began to grumble and make angry protestations. Presently oaths and violent imprecations burst out on all sides; and then some of the grenadiers became mutinous and defiant. They declared that they would go back, regardless of the consequences, and forcibly recover possession of the old colours.”
The situation speedily became so threatening that General Thiébault hastened off to warn Murat of what was happening. As he went he came across one of the adjutants of the Commandant of the Military School. On the spur of the moment he gave him orders to get together what men he could of the party who had been keeping the parade ground. Of these Thiébault took personal charge and sent them round at once to collect the thrown-down colours and carry them inside the Ecole Militaire.
Apparently that satisfied the soldiers—anxious, most of them, to get out of the wet as soon as possible.
General Thiébault tried after that to find Murat, intending to report to him; but Murat had by then left the Field of Mars. In the end the General decided, as perhaps the wisest course, to refrain from saying anything; not to take official notice of what had happened. After all he was not on duty at the parade; he was only in Paris as an invited guest at the Coronation festivities. Nobody, as a fact, said a word of the affair. By the authorities all reference to it seems purposely to have been hushed up. Not a hint of anything of the sort appeared in the Moniteur, which published a fairly full report of the day’s proceedings; not a word in any of the other Parisian papers.
For the soldiers a dinner of double rations at the Emperor’s expense wound up the Day of the Eagles; for the great personages there was “a banquet at the Tuileries, at which the Pope and the Emperor sat side by side at the same table, arrayed in their Pontifical and Imperial insignia and waited upon by the Grand Officers of the Crown.” Afterwards, without delaying in the capital, the deputations set off on their return to rejoin their regiments. Their arrival at their various destinations was celebrated everywhere, by Imperial order, by a full-dress parade and State reception of the Eagle by each corps; the occasion being further treated as a fête-day and opportunity for a general carousal in camp or garrison. At Boulogne the regiments of the “Army of England” took over their Eagles at a grand review on December 23, Marshal Soult presiding over the ceremony.
The old standards of the Consulate, some bearing on them the battle-scars of Marengo and Hohenlinden, remained where General Thiébault’s assistants had left them stacked, leaning up against the wall in one of the corridors of the Military School, until they were carted off in artillery tumbrils to the central dépôt at Vincennes. There, on New Year’s Day of 1805, they were officially made away with; burned to ashes in the presence of an ordnance department official told off to certify to their complete destruction. That was the authorised method in France of disposing of the standards of a discredited régime; but all the same it was a hard fate for national emblems that had waved victoriously over so many a hard-fought field.
Such were the principal scenes and incidents of the Day of the Field of Mars when Napoleon presented the Eagles of the Empire to the Soldiers of the Grand Army.