There are thirteen of Napoleon’s Eagles in England, among the trophies of the British Army at Chelsea Royal Hospital; or, to speak strictly, twelve Eagles and a “dummy” Eagle, the later reproduction of a very famous trophy, gone now, unfortunately, to the melting-pot of a thieves’ kitchen. It is with the dummy Eagle, as it may be called for short, without disrespect to its gallant custodians, and five of the twelve Eagles at Chelsea, that we are for the immediate moment concerned. That represents the first of Napoleon’s trophies won by British soldiers in hand-to-hand fight—the once celebrated “Eagle with the Golden Wreath.”

The story opens on Saturday morning, May 18, 1811, a day that was a great occasion for Londoners. For the first time, on that Saturday, trophies taken from Napoleon were publicly displayed in the British Capital, and no pains were spared to make the most of the event. An elaborate and dramatic ceremonial was ordained for the occasion by the authorities at the instance of the Prince Regent. It was like nothing else of the kind ever witnessed or heard of in England before.

On many another day in bygone times London had been the scene of stately martial pageants in which the victor’s spoils from many battlefields were borne in triumph, amid blare of trumpets and clash of drums, to be deposited with due ceremony in their allotted resting-places. So had it been when the Marlborough trophies from Blenheim and Ramillies, the captured flags from Dettingen, Louisburg, and Minden, were borne along the crowded streets, preceded by bands playing triumphant music and accompanied by armed escorts of Foot and Horse. Another Saturday, seventeen years before, May 17, 1794, had been the last occasion of trophy-flags being displayed in London, when the captured French Republican standards of the garrison of Martinique were publicly carried through the streets by Life Guards and Grenadiers, with the band of the First Guards leading the way and the Tower guns booming out an artillery feu de joie, from St. James’s Palace to St. Paul’s, to be received at the great west doors of the Cathedral by the Dean and Chapter, and laid up “as a lasting memorial of the success of his Majesty’s Arms.” Some of the flags then displayed hang in the Hall of Chelsea Hospital to-day.

So, too, had it been in London in yet earlier times, in the far off, unhappy days of Civil War in England, when the citizens of those periods, in turn, saw the spoils of Bosworth, and of Marston Moor and Naseby, of Worcester, Preston, and Dunbar, paraded through their midst, escorted by mail-clad men-at-arms, on the way to be hung up exultingly in St. Paul’s Cathedral or in Westminster Hall. With his own Royal banners from Marston Moor and Naseby drooping down overhead from the roof of Westminster Hall, Charles the First faced his judges and heard his fate. But never before in London had so elaborately designed a ceremony attended the display of trophies taken from any enemy, as that planned for the Royal Depositum, as it was officially styled, of the first of the captured Eagles of Napoleon to be received in England.

There was to be a special display of trophies the London newspapers announced some days beforehand. The newspapers had not spared themselves in working up public interest. At the outset they had told how, on the night of March 24, Captain Hope, First A.D.C. to General Graham, had arrived in London with the Barrosa despatches and a “French Eagle with a wreath of gold,” which, it was stated, “the general trusted his aide de camp might be permitted to lay at his Majesty’s feet.” Then Londoners were informed that the Barrosa Eagle was a trophy of unusual importance, and was being kept at the War Office, to be presented to the Prince Regent at the next levée. It was announced a week later that his Royal Highness had been so desirous of seeing it at once, that the War Minister, the Earl of Liverpool, instead of waiting five weeks for the levée, had already presented it to the Prince at Carlton House. On that came the official notification that “the Eagle with the Golden Wreath,” as the trophy was everywhere styled, together with a number of other French trophies, which had been previously received and had been some time stored away at the War Office pending instructions as to their disposal, would be deposited in the Chapel Royal, Whitehall, (now the Museum of the Royal United Service Institution). “The Royal Depositum ceremony will be very grand, and the martial music appropriate to the occasion, and as the orders have been issued by direction of his Royal Highness the Prince Regent, the Chapel will be thronged with nobility.” So one journal notified; another remarking that “in addition to the great religious and military ceremony, an anthem is to be performed after the manner of the Te Deum.”

Thus popular interest was aroused and kept alive in advance, and the selected Saturday morning proving fine and pleasant, with the prospect of a genial and sunny forenoon, Londoners turned out in large numbers to see the show.

To the Brigade of Guards it fell to carry out the ceremony of the military reception of the Eagles.

The “Parade in St. James’s Park,” which we know now as the Horse Guards Parade, was the appointed place for the display, and as the clock struck nine the preliminaries opened with the arrival of a large body of Guards’ recruits who were to keep the ground. From quite an early hour a crowd had been gathering there and along the side of the Park. Soon afterwards the first of the troops designated to attend the ceremony began to arrive. These were several companies of the First Guards and Coldstreamers “in undress, with side arms.” They formed line along either side of the parade-ground; on one side “extending from the corner of the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s garden to the Egyptian gun”; on the opposite side, “from the Admiralty towards the Park.” To right and left of the archway under the Horse Guards leading to Whitehall were drawn up the “recruiting parties stationed in the Home District.”

At a quarter to ten came on the scene the first of the actors in the day’s proceedings, the “King’s Guard” of the day, “in their best uniforms, and with sprigs of oak and laurel in their hats.” Marching up, headed by the combined bands of the First Guards and the Coldstreamers, with the regimental colour of the First Guards, they formed on the right, along the open side of the square, facing towards the Horse Guards. Following them, a few moments later, came the picked detachment appointed as the “trophy-escort,” furnished jointly by the grenadier companies of the First Guards and the Coldstreamers. All were in review-order full dress, “wearing long white gaiters, with oak and laurel leaves in their hats.” A captain of the First Guards was in command; and the detachment was made up of two subalterns, four sergeants, and ninety-six rank and file. They took post on the left of the King’s Guard. As the trophy-escort halted, up came another detachment of Guards, a hundred strong, with the Life Guards; marching across the square and through the Horse Guards archway to line the way thence to the doors of the Chapel Royal.

Towards ten o’clock privileged spectators were admitted within the square, “to stand at an appointed spot”: several veteran generals, “in their best uniforms and powdered,” as a newspaper reporter remarks; Lord Liverpool the War Minister; the Earl Marshal; the Speaker; the Spanish and Portuguese Ambassadors, both gorgeously attired; and “a number of beautiful and elegant ladies of distinction.”

The Horse Guards clock struck ten, and as the last clanging stroke died away “the authorities” came clattering on to the ground on horseback: Sir David Dundas, Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Governor of Chelsea Hospital, at the head of a number of other plumed and cocked-hatted generals in full uniform, together with the Head-quarters Staff at the Horse Guards. Prominent in the glittering array of gold-laced red coats, “mounted on a cream-coloured Arab,” was General Sir John Doyle, Colonel of the 87th Royal Irish Fusiliers; the regiment whose prowess at Barrosa had won the great trophy of the day—“the Eagle with the Golden Wreath.”

With Royal punctuality, as the clock chimed the half-hour, amid cheers from the crowd and the spectators filling the windows of the Horse Guards and Admiralty and other Government offices overlooking the ground, came riding up the three Princes who were to preside at the ceremony—the Dukes of York, Cambridge, and Gloucester.

The display began forthwith.

Preceded by the two Guards’ bands playing the “Grenadiers’ March,” the trophy-escort of grenadiers crossed the Parade at a slow step, and marched in four divisions, or “platoons,” to the old Tilt Yard orderly-room under the Horse Guards. There the trophies had been taken beforehand to be in readiness for the ceremony. The grenadiers halted before the doors, and the trophies, twelve in number, were brought out by Lifeguardsmen from the Tilt Yard Guard and committed to the charge of twelve picked sergeants—six of the First Guards, six of the Coldstreamers—selected to bear them to the Chapel Royal.

The trophy-bearers carrying the Eagles then took post according to the date of the capture of each trophy; the earliest taken of the Eagles leading. In advance of all, immediately after the band, marched the three officers with swords drawn; the captain and the two subalterns. Then, with their flanking grenadiers as escort, a file to each trophy, came, one after the other, three Battalion Eagles of Napoleon’s 82nd of the Line, surrendered at the capitulation of Martinique in 1809. Immediately in rear marched No. 1 platoon of grenadiers; in the interval between the first trophy-group and the second. That consisted of the Regimental Eagle of the French 26th of the Line, surrendered at Martinique at the same time as the Eagles of the 82nd, and then that of the 66th of the Line, surrendered at the capitulation of Guadaloupe in 1810, with, just behind them, the all-important trophy of the day, the first Napoleonic Eagle captured—or, at any rate, taken possession of—by British soldiers on the battlefield: “the Eagle with the Golden Wreath”—that Eagle of Napoleon’s 8th Regiment of the Line, won in hand-to-hand fight by the 87th Royal Irish Fusiliers at Barrosa.

Five of the Eagles had their silken tricolor flags still attached to the poles. The Barrosa Eagle had none: it showed simply a bare pole topped by the wreathed Eagle. The wreath, according to a newspaper reporter present, was “an honour conferred on the regiment for fine conduct at the battle of Talavera, where they were opposed to the 87th; and, by a singular coincidence of circumstances, these regiments met in conflict at Barrosa and recognised each other.” As we shall see, the statement was a freak of journalistic imagination, without a scrap of fact behind the story, although, strangely, the legend holds to this day and reappears periodically in print. Adds the reporter, as to the appearance of the Eagle, recording this time what he actually saw: “The Eagle is fixed on a square pedestal, and standing erect on one foot; the other raised as if grasping something; its wings expanded. It is about the size of a small pigeon, and appears to be made of bronze, or of some composition like pinchbeck, gold-gilt.” The “something” which the talons of the Eagle appeared to be grasping was the “thunderbolt,” which was missing, having been either knocked out of its place in the scuffle on the battlefield, or stolen later by somebody for a relic. The wreath was really of gold. A couple of its leaves picked up on the field after the battle and given to Major Hugh Gough, the gallant commander of the 87th at Barrosa, are now in possession of one of that officer’s descendants.

The second grenadier platoon divided the Eagles from the first three of the flag-trophies, borne in file, one by one, in the same way as the Eagles. The first in date of capture led; a French Republican standard taken in fight at Sir Ralph Abercombie’s victory at Alexandria, ten years before, and kept ever since at the War Office: “the Invincible’s standard.” “As it is falsely called,” adds the reporter; right for once. “So tattered is it,” he continues, “that the mottoes are not legible; a bugle in the centre was the only figure we could distinguish.” Two flags taken by Wellington’s men in the Peninsula accompanied the Alexandria flag: “a Fort Standard,” as it is described, and the battalion colour, or “fanion,” of the Second Battalion of Napoleon’s 5th of the Line.23

In rear of the colour of the 5th marched the third grenadier platoon, and the last three trophies sent to England by Wellington. Two were a pair of tattered German standards, the flags of the two battalions of a Prussian regiment in Napoleon’s service, composed of unfortunate soldiers levied compulsorily during the French occupation of their country, and tramped off to Spain to meet their fate under British bullets. Each flag bore the legend “L’Empereur des Français au Régiment Prussien” on one side, and “Valeur et Discipline” on the other, and was mounted on a staff with a steel pike-head instead of an Eagle. They were silken flags of the ordinary Napoleonic pattern. The third flag of the group was that of a “provisional regiment”; also with a steel pike-head to its staff.

From the Tilt Yard orderly-room the trophies and their escort-guard set off, as before, in slow time, the bands playing “God save the King!” The sergeants, carrying the Eagles and Flags between the files of grenadiers, marched in the intervals between the four divisions “in double open-order with arms advanced.” Right round the square they now passed, close along the lines of the troops drawn up, “the immense multitude rending the air with huzzas.” In front of the First Guards, in front of the recruiting parties, in front of the long line of Coldstreamers, along each of the three sides of the square, paced the procession with martial pomp to the stately music of the two bands as they led the way. Then it proceeded along the fourth side of the square until it came face to face with the King’s Guard, all standing with ordered arms, not at the present.

There was a brief pause in front of the Colour of the King’s Guard.

That was the supreme moment of the display. Now took place the formal act of obeisance to the victors; the formal act of abasement and humiliation for the vanquished. Amid redoubled cheering from all sides, the Eagles and the other flags were, one and all, formally dipped and prostrated. “The captured standards saluted and were lowered to the ground in token of submission.”

The procession turned away in front of the King’s Guard and led round in front of the three Royal Dukes, seated on their chargers, a little in advance of the Commander-in-Chief and Horse Guards Staff, at the centre of the parade-ground. Again, as they now passed before the Royal trio, the hapless Eagles of Napoleon and the other French flags in turn were one by one made to pay homage, bowed grovelling to the dust; the crowd of onlookers shouting themselves hoarse “with,” as we are told, “truly British huzzas.”

After that the trophy procession marched across to the Horse Guards archway, and through to Whitehall and the Chapel Royal; between Life Guards on one side and more Foot Guards on the other, drawn up to keep a lane open through the immense crowd of people who had gathered there, and thronged the wide roadway. “The procession,” says our reporter, “moved off the Parade amid the acclamations of many thousand spectators and entered the Chapel as the clock was striking eleven, which [sic] was crowded by all the beauty and fashion in Town.” Another reporter speaks of the Chapel Royal as being “exceedingly crowded in all parts with nobility and gentlemen and ladies of distinction.”

“The religious part of the ceremony,” we are told, “was solemn and impressive.” It comprised Morning Prayer and a sermon by the Sub-Dean. “Previous to the commencement of the Te Deum, a pause was made, when three grenadier sergeants entered at each door by the sides of the Altar with the Eagles on black poles about 8 feet high. They took their stations in front of the Altar. Each party was guarded by a file of grenadiers, commanded by two officers; the whole of them with laurel-leaves in their caps as emblems of Victory. At the same instant the five French flags and Bonaparte’s honourable standard entered the upper gallery at the back of the Altar, all carried by grenadier sergeants.

“The whole remained presented for some time for the gratification of the beholders, after which the Eagles were placed in brass sockets on each side of the Altar, suspended by brass chains. The five flags were suspended from the front of the second gallery, and Bonaparte’s honourable standard placed over the door of the second gallery, behind the others.”

The trophies, with others won at Salamanca and Waterloo, and subsequently laid up in the Chapel Royal, were removed later to Chelsea Royal Hospital, where all, except “the Eagle with the Golden Wreath,” are now kept treasured amid befitting surroundings.

“The Eagle with the Golden Wreath” disappeared from Chelsea Hospital in broad daylight. It was displayed in the Chapel, affixed in front of the organ-loft over the doorway, until it suddenly vanished from there a little after midday on Friday, April 16, 1852, in the absence of the pensioner-custodian of the Chapel during the Hospital dinner-hour. How it was stolen was apparent; but the thief was never traced. The thief, attracted undoubtedly by the widely told story that the wreath was of gold, made his way into the Chapel by the roof, which was undergoing repairs at the time, to which he got access by a workman’s ladder. He got inside by the trap-door on the leads above the organ-loft. There, with a saw, he cut through the Eagle-pole near where it was fastened to the organ-loft, and, secreting it under his coat, made his escape by the way he had come, unseen by anybody. The Eagle-pole was found outside, in front of the building, with the Eagle and wreath wrenched off. For some reason the Royal Hospital authorities of the day offered a reward of only a sovereign, and though the London police did their best, the malefactor was never discovered.24

At Barrosa Napoleon’s 8th of the Line was in the French column that made its attack on the right. It was one of the regiments that charged forward across the plain at the foot of Barrosa ridge, to break through General Graham’s second brigade and drive it back to the edge of the cliffs by the seashore, while the French left attack seized the ridge itself, and beat back the British first brigade in the act of hastening to regain that unwisely abandoned position. The Eagle went down in the fierce counter-attack with which Graham’s men on the plain, the 87th Royal Irish Fusiliers in the front line, met the French onset.

What befell the 8th of the Line is told by one of their own officers in his Journal de Guerre—Lieutenant-Colonel Vigo-Roussillon, in command of the First Battalion, with which was the Eagle.

Just before the critical moment, says Colonel Roussillon, the 8th, who were on the flank of the French second line, lost touch with the regiment next them, and had in consequence to meet the 87th by themselves. They fired their hardest as the British troops came on, “but could not stop them, ever advancing to a bayonet attack.”

They came on silently, steadily, irresistibly. “Their officers,” adds one of Victor’s staff, “kept up all the time the old custom of striking with their canes those of the men who fell out of the ranks. Our own non-commissioned officers,” he adds, “placed as a supernumerary rank, crossed their muskets behind the squads, thus forming buttresses which kept the ranks from giving way. Several of the French officers, also, picked up the muskets of the wounded, and flung themselves into the gaps made in the ranks of the men.”

“I saw the English line,” describes Colonel Roussillon again, “at sixty paces continuing to advance at a slow step without firing. It seemed impossible to stop them; we had not sufficient men.”

Apparently he then caught sight of General Graham, leading the British line.

“Under the influence of a sort of despair, I urged forward my charger, a strong Polish horse, against an English mounted officer who seemed to be the colonel of the nearest regiment coming on at us. I got up to him, and was about to run him through with my sword, when I was held back by a sense of compassion and abandoned the murderous thought. He was an officer with white hair and a fine figure, and had his hat in his hand, and was cheering on his men. His calmness and noble air of dignity irresistibly arrested my arm.”

Such is the lieutenant-colonel’s own account. But did he really get quite close to the general? Graham was the last man in the world to let him get back unfought!

“I then,” as Vigo-Roussillon continues, “quickly galloped back to my own men, and was riding along the line, telling them to meet the enemy with our bayonets, and drive them back, when a bullet from an English marksman broke my right leg.

“I managed to dismount and tried to pass through in rear of the line, but it was impossible to walk. The ground was covered with thick bushes, and I was crippled and in great pain. All I could do was to sit down where I was, calling on the men to fire again. A moment later I was enveloped in smoke; and at the same instant the English charged in among us.

“I called out my loudest, cheering on my men; and now two soldiers tried to lift me up and carry me. But both were shot down.

“For the time we held our own, and kept the enemy back; but some of the English got round us. Seeing themselves outflanked, the battalion began to give ground. Then came a second furious charge from the English, and that broke us.”

The fight, man to man, went on desperately for several minutes—some of the British soldiers, as yet another French officers relates, fighting with their fists. “Many of the Englishmen broke their weapons in striking with the butts or bayonets; but they never seemed to think of using the swords they wore at their sides. They went on fighting with their fists.”

It was in the final mêlée that “the Eagle with the Golden Wreath” was taken; after a sharp and fierce hand-to-hand fight round it.

Colonel Roussillon himself was at almost the same moment struck down, and lay insensible for a space among the dead near by. He was recovering his senses and trying to stand up, when, as he tells, a British sergeant saw him and ran at him with his halberd. He parried the thrust, and kept the sergeant off, and then a British officer came up. To him the Commandant of the First Battalion of the 8th surrendered his sword.

The fight for the Eagle—on one hand to take it, on the other to keep it—was furious; desperately and heroically contested by both sides.

First, a gallant Irish boy, from Kilkenny, Ensign Edward Keogh of the 87th, caught sight of it, borne on high above the fray. There had been no unscrewing of the Eagle of the 8th, no trying to break it from its pole. “See that Eagle, sergeant!” called Keogh to Sergeant Masterton, among the foremost, close by his officer; and then he dashed straight into the thick of the party round the Eagle, sword in hand. The brave lad cut his way through, with Masterton and four or five privates close behind him. He got close up to the “Porte-Aigle,” crossed swords with him, and got a grip of the Eagle-pole. But he could not wrench it from the no less brave Frenchman’s hands before he went down with half a dozen musket bullets and bayonet stabs in his body.

Porte-Aigle Guillemin, as the gallant French Eagle-bearer of the 8th was named, fell dead at the same moment, shot through the head by one of the British privates.

Instantly other Frenchmen rushed up to save the Eagle, and formed round it hastily. One of the British privates who seized hold of the staff was slashed to death, and the French recovered it. The fight round the Eagle went on for some minutes. In that time no fewer than seven French officers and sub-officers fell dead in defence of the Eagle. An eighth officer, Lieutenant Gazan, clung to the pole to the last, regardless of wounds that nearly hacked him to pieces. Finally the Eagle was torn from his grasp by Sergeant Masterton, at the end the sole unwounded survivor of the attacking British party. Gazan “survived miraculously,” and lived to be decorated by Napoleon for his devoted courage. Masterton seized the Eagle and kept it. So “the Eagle with the Golden Wreath” became a British trophy.

From the crossing of the bayonets in the final charge to the taking of the Eagle, the mêlée lasted about fifteen minutes.

The remnant of the 8th were saved by a rally to the spot by the French 54th, after another regiment, the 47th, had attempted its rescue in vain. The 47th lost their Eagle in the mêlée, but recovered it. “The man who had charge of it was obliged to throw it away, from excessive fatigue and a wound,” explains a British officer. The 8th lost at Barrosa their Colonel (Autié) and the Lieutenant-Colonel of the Second Battalion, killed; Vigo-Roussillon, of the First Battalion, wounded; and 17 other officers and 934 of the rank and file killed or wounded. The Moniteur, the official Paris newspaper under the Napoleonic régime, in reporting the battle of April 5, referred to the loss of the Eagle in these terms: “A battalion of the 8th, having been charged in wood-covered ground, and the Eagle-bearer being killed, his Eagle has not been found since.”

The battalion that fared so hardly had to pay the regulation penalty. Napoleon gave the 8th no other Eagle. He held rigidly to his rule, and set his face relentlessly against a second presentation. They must present him first with a standard taken on the battlefield from the enemy. But with Wellington’s men opposed to them to the end, the 8th got few chances in that direction. They had to fight without an Eagle to the close of the Peninsular War.

Two days after Barrosa, when General Graham re-entered Cadiz with the Spanish army, “the Eagle with the Golden Wreath” was publicly paraded through the crowded streets, “between the regimental colours,” as the 87th marched to barracks, the church bells ringing triumphantly, and amid exultant shouts and cheers of the populace, and cries of “Long live Spain! Death to our oppressors!” At the barracks “we presented the Eagle to our gallant commander,” says one of the officers.

The Eagle was then sent to England in the custody of the officer carrying General Graham’s despatch. Its capture is commemorated to this day by the Royal Irish Fusiliers, who wear “an Eagle with a Wreath of Laurel” as a regimental badge, while a similar Eagle is embroidered in gold on the regimental colour. Also, a representation of the wreathed Barrosa Eagle was granted later on as a special augmentation to the family arms of the officer who commanded the 87th in the battle, Major Hugh Gough, on his being raised to the Peerage while Commander-in-Chief in India after the first Sikh War. “The Aiglers” was always the regiment’s sobriquet after Barrosa among their comrades in Wellington’s army; a sobriquet that has endured since then in the form of “the Aigle-Takers,” although our modern recruits are said to prefer calling themselves “the Bird-Catchers.”25

It was in this way that the Barrosa trophy Eagle came by its golden wreath. The decoration, as has been said, had nothing to do with Talavera.

The wreath was one of those voted by the City of Paris to the regiments that had gone through the Jena and Polish frontier campaigns, the first of which was presented to the Imperial Guard. First of all, in the outburst of patriotic enthusiasm in France at the news of Jena, wreaths had been voted as decorations for the Eagles, by way of popular tribute to the regiments which had helped in dealing that staggering blow to the famous Prussian Army. After the crowning victory of Friedland which ended the war, in a fresh outburst of enthusiasm, golden wreaths were voted wholesale for the Eagles of all the corps that had taken part in the fighting that followed Jena, during the nine months of war, down to the final day of Friedland. It was a costly guerdon, and their proposed generosity staggered the Paris municipality when the estimate was presented. No fewer than 378 wreaths—according to the official return—had to be provided. But the vote had been carried by acclamation on its first proposal, and trumpeted all over France. Also, the Emperor had taken up with the idea warmly. The Paris authorities dared not back out, and had to go on with it in spite of the cost. They carried it out with so good a grace that, as the sequel, a suggestion came from the Tuileries that the Austerlitz battalions of the Grand Army which had not had the fortune to be in the Jena-Friedland campaign should receive wreaths as well, an Imperial hint that the authorities, shrinking from the extra expense, were so slow to fall in with, that in the end it had to be forced on them, by means of a bluntly worded letter through the Ministry of War. “Tell the Prefect of the Seine,” wrote Napoleon to the War Minister, “that I expect wreaths of gold, similar to those given for Jena and Friedland, to be provided on behalf of the City of Paris for all the regiments at Austerlitz!”

The 8th was presented with its wreath in Paris, while on the way to take part in the Peninsular War. It was one of the regiments of the First Corps of the Grand Army, which Napoleon hastily recalled from Germany in the spring of 1808, and hurried across Europe to reinforce the troops in Spain on the first news of serious trouble being on foot in that quarter. The whole First Army Corps was recalled; starting from Berlin, where it had been quartered, and journeying by Magdeburg and Coblentz. Along the route the unfortunate German burgomasters and village authorities had to provide, not only provisions day by day, but transport vehicles for 30,000 soldiers; mostly farm-carts and wagons, each taking from four to sixteen men. The troops travelled by night and day, with only two stoppages of fifty minutes each in the twenty-four hours, for meals, and the authorities of the villages and towns named as halting-places were compelled to have hot food kept ready so that the men might fall to instantly on arrival. It was a journey the soldiers never forgot. The weather was rough and wet, the roads in places were almost impassable, and the carts continually broke down, in addition to which the peasant-drivers requisitioned for the conveyances deserted at every opportunity, usually going off at night with the horses after cutting the traces, leaving their wagon-loads of sleeping soldiers stranded by the roadside.

The 8th received its wreath at the Barrier of Pantin, on the outskirts of Paris. It arrived with the Second Division of the corps, and the troops were met by the Prefect of the Seine and the Municipal Council in State, while Marshal Victor, the commander of the Army Corps, attended the ceremony in full-dress uniform. He replied to the Prefect’s complimentary address by declaring that “these golden crowns henceforward decorating the Eagles of the First Corps will to them ever be additional incentives to victory.” One by one the regiments passed before the Prefect, who hung round each Eagle’s neck “a wreath of gold, shaped as two branches of laurel.” A triumphal march into Paris and an open-air banquet to all ranks in the Tivoli Gardens, with free tickets to the theatres after it, wound up the day.

All along the line of march through France to the Spanish frontier, banquets and elaborate festivities welcomed the regiments—and at the same time, it would appear, gave some of their entertainers more than they bargained for. The triumphal progress, from all accounts, proved such hard work for the ladies in the country towns, where public balls were in the programme every night, that at some places for the later comers—the 8th and other regiments in the Second Division of Marshal Victor’s corps—the balls had to be abandoned, “because the ladies were too tired to dance any more.” It was explained, with apologies, that they had practically been danced off their feet by the regiments of the First Division, which had preceded the Second, incessantly passing through during the previous three weeks, and that “most of the ladies, through sheer fatigue, had taken to their beds!”

At Talavera, the 8th, as part of a brigade of three regiments, had a passage of arms on the battlefield, first with the British 83rd; and then with the Guards; lastly with the 48th, before whose magnificent charge in the final phase of the fight they had to give ground. They did not meet the 87th Royal Irish Fusiliers at all in the battle.26