The Eagles made their début on the battlefield amid a blaze of glory. Within a twelvemonth of the Field of Mars they had swooped irresistibly across half the Continent, leading forward victoriously through the cannon-smoke in combat after combat, to achieve the crowning triumphs of Ulm and Austerlitz. Within the twelvemonth they witnessed the overwhelming defeat of more than 200,000 foes, the capture of 500 cannon, while 120 standards had been paraded before them as spoils of victory.
In the first fortnight of September 1805, Austria and Russia, as the protagonists in Pitt’s great European Coalition against Napoleon, declared war on France, and an army of 80,000 Austrians traversed Bavaria in hot haste, to take post at Ulm by the Danube, on the frontiers of Würtemberg. There they proposed to hold Napoleon in check, until their Russian allies, whose advance by forced marches through Poland had already begun, could join hands with them. After that they would press forward in resistless force to cross the Rhine and invade France.
But Napoleon was beforehand with them from the outset. Within twenty-four hours of the ultimatum reaching his hands he had made the opening move in the campaign: the lion, whose skin had been sold, had crouched for the fatal spring.
General Mack, the Austrian Commander-in-chief, entered Bavaria on September 8. On September 1 Napoleon’s “Army of the Ocean” had struck its tents in Boulogne camp and started on its way, with plans laid that ensured Mack’s overthrow. A hundred and eighty thousand soldiers were hastening along every high-road through Hanover, Holland, and Flanders, and in eastern France, towards the great plain of central Bavaria, to deal the Austrians the heaviest and most resounding blow ever yet dealt to a modern army.
Napoleon, screening his movement by means of Murat’s cavalry, sent ahead on a wide front to occupy the attention of the Austrian outposts, made a bold sweep right round Mack’s right flank. Before the Austrian general had any suspicion that there was a single Frenchman on that side of him, the entire French army had passed the Danube in his rear, and had blocked the great highway from Vienna. Napoleon at the first move had cut the Austrian line of communication with their base. He had barred the only route by which the Russians could approach to Mack’s assistance.
That done, swiftly and successfully, while Mack, startled and utterly staggered at the sudden appearance of the enemy in his rear, was hurriedly facing about in confusion, to try to hold his ground, Napoleon struck at him hard. He hurled attack after attack in force on the Austrian flanking divisions, on both wings of Mack’s army, and broke them up. Taking thousands of prisoners and many guns, he drove the wreck, a disorganised mass of scared and helpless battalions, in rout to the walls of Ulm itself. Penned in there, ringed round by 100,000 French bayonets, with the French artillery pouring shot and shell into the doomed fortress from commanding heights within short range, General Mack, left now with barely 30,000 men, after a despairing interview with Napoleon, was terrorised into immediate surrender at discretion.
Amid such scenes did the Eagles of the Field of Mars undergo their baptism of fire. Ever in the forefront under fire, brilliantly, time and again, did those who bore them do their duty.
It was round the Eagles of Marshal Ney’s corps, “the Fighting Sixth,” that the fiercest contests of the campaign centred; and on every occasion they gained honour.
In the sharp brush at the bridge across the Danube at Reisenburg, near the small town of Günsburg, on October 8, one of the opening encounters of the campaign, the Eagle of the 59th of the Line showed the way to victory. The Austrians, whom Ney surprised on the south side or right bank, retreating as the French approached, had partially broken down the bridge before Ney’s men could reach the place.
The Danube flows wide and deep at Reisenburg, and there was no other means of getting over.
Ney had explicit orders from Napoleon to cross over and occupy Günsburg, and to hold the river passage. As the 59th, who led the attack, got to the bridge, a long and narrow wooden structure, the Austrian sappers were hard at work destroying it; covered by a rearguard brigade of infantry and artillery. The planking had been ripped away, but most of the bridge framework and supporting beams still stood. The 59th came up and opened fire, compelling the sappers to withdraw. Then a hasty effort was made by the pioneers of the regiment under fire to repair part of the bridge. They made a way across with planks wide enough for a few men to scramble over together. “In places only one man could get across at a time.”
At once the 59th rushed forward cheering, but the concentrated Austrian fire from the other side was too hot to face. They were beaten back three times, the dead and wounded falling into the rushing stream below. But were they not the 59th? No other of the regiments following them in rear should have the honour of being the first to make the passage! The Eagle-bearer of the 59th, weaving the Eagle aloft, headed a fourth attack; with Colonel Gerard Lacuée, the colonel of the regiment, a distinguished officer and an Honorary A.D.C. to the Emperor, beside him. The two led out in front, regardless of the storm of bullets round them. Colonel Lacuée fell mortally wounded. An officer ran forward and carried the Colonel back to die on the river-bank, but the Eagle-bearer went on. “Soldiers,” the brave fellow stopped for an instant to turn round and shout back to his comrades, “your Eagle goes forward! I shall carry it across alone!” The men of the 59th, thrown into a frenzy at the sight of their Eagle’s peril, rallied instantly to follow. The four leading companies held on bravely and got across. Then they charged the Austrians at the point of the bayonet and drove them back into the village. That, though, was not all. Fresh Austrians had turned back to help their rearguard troops. Firing from the river-bank on either side of the village, for a time they stopped the other French regiments from crossing the bridge after the 59th. Austrian dragoons and infantry at the same time charged the gallant regiment, entirely isolated now on that side of the river. But they could not break the 59th. Forming square, the two battalions, with their Eagles held on high as rallying-centres, kept a host of foes at bay. Three fierce Austrian charges did they beat off—and then help arrived. A second regiment, the 50th, had by then managed to get across the bridge. The two regiments maintained themselves there all the afternoon until nightfall and then bivouacked on the ground they had won until morning, “passing an anxious time, under arms, unable to light a fire. Fortunately, in the dark the Austrians did not realise our small numbers. They were more anxious to cover their own retreat.” Before daylight the Austrians fell back and the passage of the Danube was won.
There was another morning’s work on October 11.
At Haslach, on the north bank of the Danube, not far from Ulm, a brigade of Dupont’s Division of Ney’s corps, advancing on that side on its own account, was suddenly set on by five times its number of Austrians. The brigade was made up of three regiments: the 9me Légère (or 9th Light Infantry), the 32nd, and the 69th. They stumbled, as it were, suddenly on the Austrians, whereupon General Dupont, who was riding with the brigade, on the opposite side of the river from the rest of his troops, “judging that if he fell back it would betray his weakness,” made a dash at the enemy. His daring deceived the Austrians, who believed that he was the advanced guard of a large force close behind. They held back at first and awaited attack. Throwing the 32nd into Haslach to hold the village, Dupont boldly charged with the two other regiments, and at the first onset made 1,500 prisoners, numbers equal to a quarter of his total force. The Austrians, however, rallied and returned to the fight. They brought up reinforcements and entrenched themselves in the village of Jüningen, near by, where again Dupont attacked them. Five times did the 9th Light Infantry take and retake Jüningen at the point of the bayonet, their two battalion Eagles heading the attack each time. No fewer than six officers, bearing the Eagles in turn, fell in the fight. “Ces corps ne devaient étonner de rien,” commented Napoleon in praising Dupont and his men.
At Elchingen, a village in the immediate neighbourhood of Ulm, the scene of the brilliant victory by which Marshal Ney won his title of Due d’Elchingen, the Eagles of two regiments won distinction, through the individual heroism of the officers who, holding them on high,—“En haut l’Aigle!” was the charging cry—led the onset that stormed the place.7
Ney headed the 6th Light Infantry personally, “in full uniform and ablaze with decorations, offering a splendid target to the enemy.” Ney led the 6th with the Eagle of the First Battalion carried close at his side. Fifteen thousand Austrians with forty guns held Elchingen, and the post is described as being “one of the strongest positions that could be imagined.” The village itself, a large place, consisted of “successive piles of stone houses, intersected at right angles by streets, rising in the form of an amphitheatre from the banks of the Danube to a large convent which crowns the summit of the ascent. All the exposed points on heights were lined with artillery; all the windows filled with musketeers.” The village was on the north bank, and the river had to be crossed to get to it.
First the gallant 6th Light Infantry stormed the bridge. It had been partly destroyed by the Austrians on the day before, and its tottering arches were now swept by cannon-balls, plunging down from batteries on the heights in rear, and a tornado of bullets from sharpshooters in the houses near the river-side. Fighting their way forward step by step, the 6me Légère went on. Their Eagle headed the advance. Its bearer was wounded, but he proudly brandished on high the standard; its silken flag torn to tatters by bullets, and with one wing of the Eagle broken by a shot. With the 6th fought the 69th of the Line. The two regiments forced their way along the steep crooked main street up hill, fired down on furiously meanwhile from the windows. Parties of men at times entered the houses at the sides and fought the enemy inside bayonet to bayonet, from floor to floor. The 6th and the 69th pressed forward, broke down the enemy’s resistance, and carried Elchingen. The Austrians finally, after a gallant attempt to hold out in the convent on the hilltop, abandoned it as fresh French troops came up from across the river.
On the battlefield, when the fight was over, Napoleon, with the Imperial staff round him, publicly congratulated Marshal Ney (he named him later “Duc D’Elchingen”) in the presence of the 6th Light Infantry and the 69th, specially paraded at the spot for the occasion.
The Eagles of Ney, again, were foremost at the winning of the final fight at Ulm. They led the furious onrush that stormed the steep heights of Michelsberg and Les Tuileries, the key of the last Austrian position. Thence Napoleon looked down directly into the fortress; and within an hour of Ney’s brilliant final feat the French shells, from batteries, quickly galloped up to the heights, were bursting in Ulm, carrying terror and death into every quarter of the city.
On that came the surrender of General Mack. The curtain next rises on the intensely dramatic Fifth Act of the tragedy, the march out of the Austrians to lay down their arms.
In that display the Eagles had their allotted place. Before them, brought forward and prominently paraded, each Eagle in advance of its own corps in line, with the whole Grand Army ranged in battle order as spectators of the scene, the standards of the vanquished foe defiled out of the gates of Ulm, and were laid down on the ground in formal token of surrender.
Napoleon proved himself at Ulm a born stage-manager.
Hardly ever before, never in modern war, had such a spectacle been witnessed as that presented on that chill and cheerless October Sunday forenoon, October 20, 1805, in the heart of central Germany, beside the banks of the rushing Danube, roaring past, a yellow foaming torrent after weeks of autumn rain, amid pine-clad summits extending far and wide on either hand.
Along the lower slopes of the high ground to the north and east of Ulm, drawn up in lines and columns over a wide semi-circle, stood the victorious army; massed round, as it were, in a vast amphitheatre. They formed up by army corps, and took post grim and silent, drawn up in battle array, with muskets loaded and bayonets fixed. The Cavalry with sabres drawn were on one side; the Infantry on the other, facing them and leaving a space between, along which the Austrians were to pass. Fifty loaded cannon, in line along one ridge, pointed down on the city. In front, towards the river, there rose a small knoll, an outlying spur of rock. On that Napoleon took his station beside a blazing watchfire which marked the spot from far. Accompanying him were most of the marshals and the assembled Etat-Major of the Grand Army, a numerous and brilliant gathering. Immediately in rear stood massed the 10,000 men of the Imperial Guard.
Two army corps, a little way from the rest, had a special post of honour. They were drawn up at the end of the wide semi-circle of the main army nearest the Augsburg gate of Ulm; immediately where the defilading column of captives would present themselves before passing Napoleon to lay down their arms and standards. The two corps were: that on the right, Ney’s, the Sixth Army Corps, the heroes of the day par excellence; on the left, the Second Corps, Marmont’s, who had been doing notable work elsewhere in the neighbourhood of Ulm. Ney, with his personal staff beside him, was on horseback in front of the centre of his corps; Marmont had his post in like manner in front of his men. As his personal reward for the leading part Ney and the Sixth Corps had had in bringing about the triumph, that marshal had the special honour of being designated to superintend the surrender.
A few minutes before ten o’clock the French drums began to beat, and the regimental bands to play. Immediately after that the long-drawn-out procession of sullen and woebegone-looking Austrian captives began silently to trail its way out of the Stuttgart gate of the fortress. “Suddenly we saw an endless column file out of the town and march up in front of the Emperor, on the plain at the foot of a mountain.”
General Mack himself headed it, wan-faced and pale as the white uniform coat he wore, his eyes filled with tears, his head bowed, a pitiful and abject figure to behold. After him followed eighteen Austrian generals—a surprising number—most of them as wretched and downcast-looking as their chief. “Behold, Sire, the unfortunate Mack!” was the ill fated leader’s address to Napoleon, as he formally presented his sword. Napoleon, in a mood—as well he might be—in that hour of unparalleled triumph, to show courtesy to the fallen foe, desired Mack to keep his sword and remain at his side. He said the same to the eighteen other generals as, one by one, they came up in turn to tender him their swords. He returned each his sword and bade them all place themselves near their chief. When all the swords had been presented and returned, Napoleon made the Austrian generals collectively a short harangue. “Gentlemen,” he began, “war has its chances! Often victorious, you must expect sometimes to be vanquished!” He did not really know, Napoleon went on, why they were fighting. Their master had begun against him an unjust war. “I want nothing on the Continent,” said Napoleon in conclusion, “only ships, colonies, and commerce!” It was on the day before Trafalgar that these memorable words were spoken. The Austrian generals stared at Napoleon blankly, but not one uttered a word. “They were all very dull; it was the Emperor alone who kept up the conversation.” Then they took their stand beside their conqueror and looked on at the bitterly humiliating scene of the defilade of their fellow soldiers.
In an almost incessant throng the columns of the Austrian army streamed by: white-clad cuirassiers; hussars in red and blue and grey; battery after battery of cocked-hatted, brown-garbed artillerymen, riding with or on their rumbling dull-yellow wheeled guns; battalion after battalion of white-coated linesmen; dark-green coated jägers; Hungarian grenadiers, and so on. Twenty-seven thousand officers and men and sixty field-guns in all defiled past the Eagles, proudly arrayed there above them, in front of the serried lines of glittering French bayonets along the hillsides. For five hours on end the host of captives plodded on before the rocky brow from which Napoleon surveyed the spectacle; tramping by, their muskets without bayonets and unloaded, their cartridge-boxes emptied. In several regiments the men maintained a fair semblance of discipline and military order; but the ranks of all were sadly bedraggled-looking, the white uniforms torn and soiled and besmirched with powder-smoke, with many of the men hatless, or limping from wounds, or with bound-up heads, and their arms in bloodstained slings. As had been ordered by Napoleon, they carried with them their standards; no fewer than forty silken battle-flags—for the most part cased, but here and there was to be seen one not furled, displaying, as though in futile defiance, its flaunting yellow folds with the double-headed Black Eagle.
As the Austrian linesmen came abreast of where Napoleon stood, the pace of the men slackened. Every eye was turned to look at “him”; at the small grey-coated figure on foot beside the watchfire, standing near the crestfallen group of their own generals, a few paces from the bright and brilliant-hued cavalcade of French marshals and the staff. All stared at Napoleon, gazing as if under a spell. Then, in the midst of it all, this happened. Suddenly, as they passed Napoleon, a shout rose from among the ranks of the defeated army: “Es lebe der Kaiser!” (“Long live the Emperor!”) The cry burst forth with startling effect. It was repeated, and then several men took it up. But what did it mean? “Es lebe der Kaiser!” was the national German greeting in salute to their own Austrian sovereign as Head of the Empire, to the Kaiser at Vienna, the Emperor of Germany. Did the soldiers who first raised the cry intend it for that, or to hail Napoleon, as his own men did, with a “Vive l’Empereur!”? The words bore the same meaning. Or did the men fling the words at Napoleon in a sort of bravado, as a show of defiance? Some of the Austrians assuredly did mean them so; to relieve the breaking strain, the terrible tension of the ordeal. At least some of the French officers near Napoleon took that view of it. “As they passed by,” describes one, “the prisoners, seized with wonder, with admiration, slowed down in their march to gaze at their conqueror, and some cried out ‘Long live the Emperor!’ but no doubt under very different emotions; some with evident mortification.”
From the presence of Napoleon the captive army passed to the scene of the act of final humiliation: to the place where, midway between the lines of bayonets of the troops of Ney and Marmont, they were to lay down their colours and ground their arms.
The colours were first surrendered, a French General, Andréossi, formerly Napoleon’s Ambassador in London, receiving them, with half a dozen staff officers and orderlies, who deposited the flags one by one in two commissariat wagons drawn up close by.
It was a moment of the deepest and keenest anguish for proud and gallant soldiers. All round them on the hillsides most of the French, overcome by excitement over the unprecedented and amazing spectacle, were by that time almost beside themselves, rending the air with exulting shouts and cheers. Under the cruel stress of the ordeal, as the supreme moment came on, the self-possession of some of the Austrians, tried beyond endurance, gave way.
The men of the Cavalry and Artillery bore themselves throughout with well-disciplined steadiness. As they came to the appointed place where groups of French cavalry troopers and gunners, told off to take over their horses and guns, were standing near the roadside awaiting them, they dismounted at the word of command from their own commanders and stood back. With hardly a murmur from the ranks the Austrian troopers unbuckled their swords and carbines and pistols, and dropped them in heaps at the places pointed out to them. With quiet dignity the officers relinquished their gold-embroidered banners into the enemy’s hands. In grim silence they saw the victors—who there at any rate behaved with courtesy and soldierly consideration for the feeling of the vanquished—step forward to take possession of their horses and their cannon. Many of the Austrians had tears running down their cheeks; some stood trembling with suppressed passion;—but all preserved order and behaved with complete decorum as became disciplined soldiers.
With others unfortunately, with some of the infantry corps, it was otherwise. At the very last, before arriving at the place where they were to give up their weapons, a number of the men in some of the marching regiments broke down under the fearful strain of the moment and lost their heads. In many regiments, no doubt, the soldiers obeyed mechanically, acting like men half stunned after a violent shock; they did as they were told, and passively grounded their arms to order. But in others the final scene was attended by acts of wild frenzy, pitiful to behold. In, as it were, a paroxysm of exasperation at the disgrace that had befallen them, the rank and file of these broke out recklessly, and got at once beyond all efforts of their officers to control. With one accord they began smashing the locks and butts of their muskets on the ground with savage curses, flinging away their arms all round, and stripping off their accoutrements and stamping on them, trampling them down in the mud. These, though, as has been said, were only some of the men; and in certain regiments. The majority of the Austrians bore themselves with fortitude and calmness.
At the end of the afternoon the Imperial Guard, headed by their Eagle and band, marched into Ulm and through the city, as we are told, “amid the shouts of the whole populace.”
So terminated the tragedy of Ulm, in the presence of the Eagles on their first triumphant battlefield.
The spoils of the Eagles at all points, as announced by Napoleon in the Ulm Bulletin of the Grand Army, were 60,000 prisoners, 200 pieces of cannon, and, in all, 90 flags. The 40 standards surrendered at Ulm itself Napoleon sent to Paris forthwith—after a grand parade of the trophies at Augsburg, in which ninety sergeants of the Imperial Guard bore in procession the Austrian flags. The Ulm trophies were made an Imperial gift for the Senate. “It is a homage,” wrote Napoleon, “which I and my Army pay to the Sages of the Empire.” They were the flags, it may be added, which were displayed at the head of Napoleon’s coffin on the occasion of his State funeral in 1840: they form four-fifths of the trophies now grouped round Napoleon’s tomb. Alone of the trophies of the Ulm campaign, and also of the Austerlitz campaign which followed it, they escaped destruction in the holocaust of Napoleon’s trophies that took place at the Invalides in March 1814, on the night of the surrender of Paris to the Allies. How that came to pass will be told later.
There was a very interesting sequel to the Ulm campaign for one of Ney’s regiments. A brief but brilliant campaign in the Tyrol on their own account followed for Ney’s men immediately after Ulm.
Entering the Tyrol with two of his divisions, Ney attacked and by brilliant tactics overthrew the Tyrolese forces and Austrian regulars who barred his way in a position among the mountains deemed impregnable. The battalion Eagles of the 69th gave the signal for the frontal attack which stormed the enemy’s position. Guided by chamois-hunters the soldiers with the Eagles scaled the face of a precipitous line of crags which overhung in rear the Austrian centre, by inserting their bayonets into fissures in the rocks and clinging to shrubs and creepers, their havresacs tied round their heads as protection from the stones that the Tyrolese above showered down on them. At the top, driving in the defenders, they held up the gleaming Eagles in the sunlight on the brink of the precipice to the marshal below, firing down on the Austrians at the same time to demoralise their resistance and clear the way for Ney’s main effort: “Les Aigles du 69me plantées sur la cime des rochers servirent de signal à l’attacque de front que le Maréchal Ney avait preparé.”
Innsbrück, the capital of the Tyrol, and the head-quarters of the Austrian army corps garrisoning the country, was the immediate prize of the victory. It was there that this incident took place.
One of Ney’s regiments, the 76th, had fought in the Tyrol six years before; in Masséna’s campaign of 1799, in one of the battles of which—at Senft in the Grisons, on August 22—two of its battalions lost their colours. An officer of the regiment, while visiting the arsenal at Innsbrück after Ney’s capture of the city, came across the two flags there, in tatters from bullet-holes, hung up as trophies. He made known his discovery, and the place was quickly filled with the soldiers of the regiment, eager to see the old flags. “They crowded round them and kissed the fragments of their old colours, with tears in their eyes.”
Ney had the flags removed at once. He restored them to the custody of the regiment with his own hand at a grand parade in the presence of the rest of his army, which the marshal attended with his staff, all in full uniform. The old colours were received with an elaborate display of military ceremonial. They were borne along the lines while the regimental band played a stately march, and the Eagles of both battalions were formally dipped in salute to them.
On receiving Ney’s report, Napoleon thought fit to give the recovery of the flags a Bulletin to itself. Relating how they had been lost in battle, and the “affliction profonde” of the regiment in consequence, he set forth how they had been found and handed back by Marshal Ney to the regiment “with an affecting solemnity that drew tears from the eyes of both the old soldiers and the young conscripts, proud of having had their share in regaining them!” “Le soldat Français,” concluded the Bulletin, “a pour ses drapeaux un sentiment qui tient de la tendresse; ils sont l’objet de son culte, comme un présent reçu des mains d’une mère.” A medal was specially struck to commemorate the event; and Napoleon, in addition, specially commissioned an artist, Meynier, to paint a picture for him of Marshal Ney presenting the recovered colours to the regiment. The painting is now in one of the galleries of Versailles.
A startling and dramatic episode of the first campaign of the Eagles comes next. It took place during the second stage of the war; in the midst of Napoleon’s impetuous advance on Vienna down the Danube valley after Ulm. Intent on dealing a shattering blow at the advanced army corps of the Russians, which had reached Lower Austria and was making an effort to cover the capital, Napoleon made a false move, and left one of the headmost French divisions in an exposed position, temporarily isolated. It got trapped by the Russians at Dürrenstein, or Dirnstein, on the north side of the Danube, to the west of and about seventy miles up the river from Vienna; and was all but annihilated. There was nearly twenty hours of continuous fighting, including a night battle of the fiercest and most desperate character in which three Eagles were temporarily lost; fortunately to be recovered later among the dead on the battlefield.8
It was on an extemporised corps, specially placed under the command of Marshal Mortier, that the blow fell.
NAPOLEON’S CONCENTRATION IN REAR OF ULM
While Napoleon and the Grand Army in force advanced along the south, or right, bank of the Danube, Mortier had been detached across the river to hold in check any attempt to interfere with the main operations from the Bohemian side. A body of Austrian cavalry, under the Archduke Ferdinand, had managed to cut their way through from Ulm at one point just before the closing of the net round General Mack. With the aid of the local militia levies these might prove troublesome on the line of communications. To deal with them, three divisions, drawn from as many corps, were amalgamated as Mortier’s special corps, which numbered in all between twenty and twenty-five thousand men: Gazan’s division, lent by Marshal Lannes; Dupont’s, lent by Ney; Dumonceau’s, lent by Marmont. To keep Mortier in touch with the main body of the army, and that he might be reinforced in emergency, a flotilla of Danube craft was at the same time improvised, and placed in charge of the Seamen of the Guard, a battalion of whom had accompanied Napoleon for the campaign. The flotilla was to keep pace with Mortier and link him with Napoleon. Mortier crossed at Linz and moved forward; his three divisions each a day’s march apart, for convenience of provisioning. He marched so fast, however, that he outstripped the connecting boats.
At the moment the fighting opened, the flotilla was miles in rear. It had been stopped and its progress blocked near Moelkt, unable in the swollen state of the Danube to pass the dangerous Strudel, or whirlpool, there, raging just then, after the heavy autumn rains, with the force of a swirling maelstrom. The flooded river had made it extremely difficult work all the way, even for the picked Seamen of the Guard, to navigate with safety the assortment of boats and timber rafts, clumsy structures of logs and spars lashed together, 160 feet long each, and planked over, with cabins on the planks, which composed the flotilla. On them, together with a quantity of spare stores and ammunition for the army, convalescents and footsore men of various regiments were being carried, who, it was intended, would thus be on the spot to reinforce Mortier first of all in case of danger.
Immediately after passing Dürrenstein, the leading division, General Gazan’s, numbering some 6,000 men, unexpectedly stumbled across part of the Russian rearguard. All unknown to Mortier, the Russian army corps which had been entrenched in front of Vienna had abandoned its position and had hastily withdrawn north of the river, crossing a short distance from Dürrenstein.
Mortier, after clearing a narrow and difficult pass on the eastern side of Dürrenstein, with steep and rocky hills on one hand and the Danube on the other, first learned of the presence of the enemy by catching sight of the smoke of the burning bridge of Krems, which the Russians had set fire to after passing over. Then he suddenly found his further advance barred by troops with guns, who rapidly formed up across his path. The Russians took up a formidable-looking position, but the marshal decided to attack without waiting for Dupont to come up with the Second Division, or for the flotilla; both miles in rear. The sight of the burning bridge and the apparent haste of the enemy to get across the river, it would seem, misled Mortier into thinking that the Russians had been in action with Napoleon, and were in flight, trying to escape. He went at them without pausing to reconnoitre. He assumed that they were only making a show of defence. The troops before him he would sweep aside easily. Then he would press on and complete the rout of the rest of the Russians, whom he took to be retreating in confusion, screened by the force he saw, across his front. Confident of easy success, Mortier entered into the fight then and there.
The sudden rencontre, as has been said, was a surprise for the marshal. Half an hour previously a battle had been almost the last thing in Mortier’s thoughts. His guns were on board a number of river boats which were being drifted downstream abreast of the troops, the artillery horses being led with the marching columns along the bank. The boats had been requisitioned a few miles back, so as to enable the troops to get on faster over the rough stretch of road through the Pass of Dürrenstein. The guns were hastily disembarked and raced forward into the firing line in order to stop a forward movement that the Russians, who promptly took advantage of the opportunity offered by Mortier being apparently without artillery, began by making.
The Russians came on and quickly increased in numbers, to Marshal Mortier’s further surprise. Were those beaten troops in full flight? They began to swarm down to meet the French; heading for the guns as these were being brought forward. The fight rapidly became general, and charge after charge was made by the Russians to carry Mortier’s guns. They captured them, but were then beaten back and the guns recaptured. Twice were the guns taken and retaken. The two French regiments nearest the guns, the 100th and 103rd, defended them with brilliant courage, their four battalion Eagles conspicuous in the forefront and repeatedly the centre of desperate fighting, as the Russians essayed again and again at the point of the bayonet to make prize of the gleaming emblems.
But more and more Russians kept joining in, and after four hours of very severe fighting the marshal began to get anxious. He had gained ground towards Krems, and had made some 1,500 prisoners; but every foot of the way had been stubbornly contested, and his losses had been serious.
Mortier after that left the troops, and with an aide de camp galloped back through the pass in order to hasten up Dupont. But the Second Division was still at a distance. Dupont’s men were still a long way beyond Dürrenstein and could not arrive for some time yet. Mortier could only tell them not to lose a moment, and then retrace his own steps. On his way back, to his amazement, he came upon a second Russian column in great strength in the act of debouching from a side pass and entering Dürrenstein. It had come round by a track among the hills on the north to take Gazan’s division in rear, and interpose between it and Dupont’s reinforcing troops. At considerable personal risk the marshal managed to evade discovery by the Russians. By following a devious by-path he at length got back to where Gazan’s division was; as before, in hot action and slowly forcing the Russians back.
Mortier stopped the advance at once. He faced his troops about, and, while keeping off his original enemy, retreated; closing his columns and rushing all back as fast as possible to repass the defile of Dürrenstein and confront the new enemy on the further side, in a position he might hold until Dupont could reinforce him. But it was already too late. The French reached the entrance of the pass on the near side to find it already occupied by the Russians, who were pouring through in dense masses. There were nearly 20,000 of them on that side of him and 15,000 on the other, his former foes now fast closing in from behind hard on his heels. Mortier’s reduced ranks numbered barely 4,000 all told.
Owing to the high, steep rocks on one hand, and the river on the other, it was impossible to push past the Russians on either flank. All that could be done was to attack in front and try to cut a way through. That; or to surrender! With reckless impetuosity the French attacked, firing furiously and flinging themselves on the Russian bayonets; while their rearguard, facing round, kept their first foes back. For two long hours they fought like that; their ranks swept by the enemy’s cannon on each side. At length they forced the entrance to the pass: but they could get no farther. They had by then lost all their guns but two: but they still had all their Eagles. With bullet-holes through some of them, and their silken flags shot away or torn to tatters, the Eagles did their part. Now they were rallying-centres; now they were leading charges. There was hardly a battalion in which the first standard-bearer had not gone down.
All were fighting almost without hope, holding out in sheer despair as long as they had cartridges left, when, as that dreadful November afternoon was drawing to its close, suddenly, from beyond the far end of the pass was heard the booming of a distant cannonade. The soldiers heard it and hope revived. It could only be Dupont! Help, then, was coming! The despairing rank and file took heart again—but the hour of rescue was not yet.
They had four long hours more to go through; every hour making their terrible situation worse. At nightfall “our cavalry gave way, our firing slackened, our bayonets, from incessant use, became bent and blunted. The confusion became terrible. Things, indeed, could hardly have got worse.” So an officer describes. The enemy, in places, had got right in among them, but “our soldiers, being the handier and more agile, had an advantage over the great clumsy Russians.” Here and there “the men were so close, that they seized each other by the throat.” In the midst of the fiercest of the fighting the tall figure of the marshal was conspicuous. He was seen amid the flashes from the muskets “at the head of a party of grenadiers, sword in hand, laying about him like any trooper.”
The Battalion-Eagles of the 100th, with their Porte-Aigles and a handful of soldiers, got cut off together, amid a surging mêlée of Russians. The major of the regiment, Henriot by name, the senior surviving officer—the colonel of the 100th, as also the colonel of the 103rd, had fallen earlier in the fight—saw what was happening and the extreme peril of the Eagles. Calling for volunteers, he got together some of his men, cut his way through to the Eagles, and rescued them. Major Henriot, after that, having saved the Eagles for the moment, determined as a last resource to attempt a forlorn-hope charge; to get beyond the enemy and reach Dupont with them. It might be possible to save them under the cover of darkness. One of the Porte-Aigles of the 6th Light Infantry with his Eagle, near by at the moment, joined the devoted band of men that the intrepid major now managed to rally round the Eagles of the 100th. With half a dozen stirring words Henriot called on them to follow him. “Comrades, we must break through! They are more than we, but you are Frenchmen: you don’t count numbers! Remember, your duty is to save the Eagles of France!” (“Souvenez vous qu’il s’agit de sauver les Aigles Françaises!”)
There was a hoarse shout in reply: “We are all Grenadiers! Pas de charge!”
They dashed at the Russians, Henriot leading, and, after fighting their way through the pass and nearly to Dürrenstein, fell to a man. Yet the three Eagles did not fall into Russian hands, thanks to the darkness. They were found next morning by French search-parties under a heap of dead, where the last survivors, fighting back to back, had fallen while making their final stand.
So desperate, indeed, did things look for the French at one time, a little before midnight, that some of his staff appealed to Mortier to make his escape and get across to the other side of the Danube in a boat, “so that a Marshal of France shall not fall into the hands of the enemy!”
But the gallant veteran flatly refused to listen to the proposal.
“No,” was his answer, “certainly not! I will not desert my brave comrades! I will save them or die with them! Keep the boats for the wounded,” he went on. “We have still two guns and some case-shot—rally and make a last effort!”
Almost immediately afterwards an opportunity did offer for the marshal to save them.
MARSHAL MORTIER.
Two of Dupont’s regiments at that moment reached the battle. By persistent exertions, outstripping the rest of the Second Division, and continuing in the dark, guided by the flashes of the guns, they had made their way by a goat-path along the steep rocky slopes at the side of the defile and taken the Russians barring Mortier’s retreat in rear. Instantly the new arrivals flung themselves hotly into the fight. They were the 9th Light Infantry and the 32nd of the Line, that old favourite of Napoleon’s in the days of the Army of Italy, whose flag on the Eagle-staff bore, as has been said, the golden inscription which Napoleon had placed there—“J’étais tranquille, le brave 32me était là.”
The golden legend was of good omen for Mortier.
Their interposition put the Russian main force between two fires, weakening the attack on Mortier and compelling a portion of them to face about. Its effect was speedily felt, and at once; although a desperate effort by the two regiments to break through and join hands with Mortier, in which the Eagles of the 9th and 32nd were “taken and retaken,” was beaten back under pressure of numbers.
The arrival of the two regiments so opportunely put heart into all: Dupont’s whole division, declared the marshal, could not be far off. He himself would make an effort to meet him on the farther side of the pass.
“Then,” as is described by Napoleon’s aide de camp, Count de Sègur, “rallying and closing up the remaining troops, he brought up the only two guns left him. One was to point towards Krems and against Kutusoff’s troops; the other Mortier placed at the head of the column, in the direction of Dürrenstein. As all the drums had been broken he had the charge sounded on iron cooking-cans.
“At that moment the Austrian general, Schmidt, who had led the Russian corps from Dürrenstein, headed a final charge which was to strike a crushing blow and complete the destruction of our column. But Fabvier (the colonel in charge of Mortier’s artillery) heard them advance. Concealed by the darkness, he let Schmidt approach quite near. Then he suddenly fired the gun on that side, at the shortest range, in among the headmost of the attacking troops. The discharge threw the enemy into confusion and killed their leader. Into this bloody opening Mortier and Gazan precipitated themselves, overthrowing everything before them. Dürrenstein itself was retaken in the impetuous dash.”
It was indeed a tour de force; a sudden reversal of the fortunes of the fight. The feat in its complete accomplishment surprised even Mortier’s expectations. “The Marshal, in fact, could hardly believe his own success.” So an officer puts it. But he had done more than burst through the toils. As daylight next morning showed, the Russians, driven headlong, had abandoned six of their guns, and left in the hands of the French no fewer than twelve standards. Two of them were taken by the two Dupont regiments which had so gallantly flung themselves on the Russian rear.
That was as concerned honour and glory. As a set off, barely 2,000 remained of Mortier’s corps of 6,000 men. Two-thirds of the total when the roll was called next day were found to have fallen on the field.