Napoleon’s Eagles made a second appearance before the London populace in the following year. That was on September 30, 1812, and the Horse Guards Parade was again the scene of the display—this time with more elaborate ceremonial, and with the added presence of yet greater personages. Queen Charlotte herself this time witnessed the reception ceremony, with four of the Princesses; and the Prince Regent in person, “mounted on a white charger,” attended, to be publicly done obeisance to by the humbled standards of the enemy. Four of his Royal brothers, the Dukes of Clarence, York, Cambridge, and Sussex, accompanied the Prince Regent. Only the poor old King, blind and insane, was absent of the Royal family, remaining in his seclusion at Windsor Castle.
The Queen and Princesses watched the scene from the windows of the Levée Room at the Horse Guards, looking down over the Parade; the Prince Regent was on the ground and took the salute. The Eagles this time were five in number; and four French flags, one of exceptional interest, the garrison-standard of Badajoz, were with them in the procession.
The military display was on the grandest scale possible; the ensemble making up, as we are told, “a spectacle grand and impressive beyond anything ever beheld.” The First and Second Life Guards were present, “drawn up in a line reaching from the Foreign Office nearly to Carlton House,” with their bands in State dress and their standards. All three regiments of Foot Guards took part, with the State Colour of the First Guards, and three bands. Horse and Foot Artillery from Woolwich were also there; forming by themselves one side of the great hollow square which occupied the wide space of the ground, the scene of the reception of “the Eagle with the Golden Wreath.” Ninety grenadiers, drawn from the three regiments of Foot Guards, thirty from each, formed the trophy-escort, which, as before, accompanied the Eagles and captured standards round the square at a slow march—the five Eagles in advance by themselves, borne by as many Guards’ sergeants between files of grenadiers with fixed bayonets.
Again the trophies of Napoleon were spared nothing in the humiliation that they had to undergo. Twice were they lowered to the dust before the Queen; twice to the Prince Regent; eight times before the standards of the Life Guards; three times before the standards of the Guards and the King’s Colour of the First Guards, “the immense concourse of spectators rending the air with their huzzas” every time the trophies went down. Then, as before, the trophies were paraded across Whitehall to the Chapel Royal, and solemnly “churched” and hung up there, before the Royal family and “all the Cabinet Ministers and the leading members of the nobility in London.”
They were this time all Wellington’s trophies. Two of the Eagles were spoils from the battle of Salamanca—“dreadfully mutilated and disfigured in the conflict,” according to a newspaper reporter’s account, “one of them having lost its head, part of the neck, one leg, half the thunderbolt, and the distinctive number; the other without one leg and the thunderbolt.” Two had been taken in Madrid “in more perfect state and without their flags.” The last of the five had been “found on the way to Ciudad Rodrigo, in the bed of a river, dried up in summer, having been thrown away some months before during Masséna’s retreat.” The four Eagles which still bore distinctive numbers were, we are told, “those of the 22nd, 13th, and 51st and the 39th.” Of the standards, the garrison flag of Badajoz looked “like a sieve, a great part of it quite red with human blood”; the four other colours “were so mutilated that not a letter or device was legible.”
How we came by the trophies so displayed in London on that Wednesday forenoon is our story.
The two Salamanca Eagles were—and are, for they have a place to-day among our Chelsea Hospital trophies—mementoes of one of the most dramatic episodes of a battle in which there were many.
Salamanca, it may be said incidentally—the battle, like Waterloo, was fought on a Sunday, on July 22, 1812—was, in Wellington’s own eyes, his chef d’œuvre, his masterpiece, although it may be rather overlooked now perhaps by most of us and the world at large, eclipsed in the dazzling splendour of the last crowning victory of Waterloo. It was at Salamanca that Wellington, in the words of a French officer, speaking, of course, in general terms, “defeated 40,000 men in forty minutes.” The victory was held in such estimation by Wellington himself that he selected it in preference to all his other victories to be displayed over again in a sham fight on the Plain of Saint-Denis in the presence of the three Allied Sovereigns during the occupation of Paris in 1815 after Waterloo. Of it he wrote at the time: “I never saw an army receive such a beating.”
Upwards of 6,000 prisoners were taken, including one general and 136 other officers. Six thousand of the enemy, at the lowest computation, were left dead or wounded on the field of battle. Three French generals were killed and three wounded. Marshal Marmont himself, the enemy’s commander-in-chief, was among the wounded; grievously maimed by a bursting shell as he galloped to rally one of his broken columns. “Spurring furiously to the point of danger, he was struck by the fragment of a shell, which shattered his left arm and tore open his side.” Marmont bore the arm in a sling for the rest of his life. He was carried off the field under fire, on a stretcher made of a soldier’s great-coat with a couple of muskets thrust through the armholes to give it shape, under the escort of a squad of grenadiers. Eleven cannon—melted down at Woolwich Arsenal in 1820 as a cheap way of making new field-guns for the British Army—with the two Eagles and six stand of colours, were the trophies of the day.
The two Salamanca trophy Eagles at Chelsea Hospital are the spoils of the fiercest cavalry charge that British horsemen ever delivered on a battlefield; the death-ride—for 1,200 of Napoleon’s infantry—of the Heavy Brigade, which annihilated an entire French division in less than a quarter of an hour. It came about as one of the results of that opening false move on the part of the French commander which cost France in the end the loss of the battle.
Marmont, after a series of ably conducted manœuvres in the neighbourhood of Salamanca, had forced Wellington, on July 22, into a position so unfavourable that the British commander decided to retire towards the Portuguese frontier under cover of darkness during the following night. But at the last moment the French marshal overreached himself. Taking in the difficulties that confronted his opponent he attempted to anticipate him and cut him off from his base by barring the one line of retreat that was open to Wellington. In doing that, Marmont gave his game away. He rashly divided his force in the presence of the enemy, separating his left wing to a distance from the main body and marching off a whole division of infantry, cavalry, and artillery to occupy the road to Ciudad Rodrigo.
The fault was flagrant, and Wellington seized eagerly at the chance all unexpectedly offered him. He was at breakfast when Marmont’s troops began their false move and the aide de camp whom he had posted on the look-out hurriedly came to him with the news. “I think they are extending to the left——” the young officer began. He did not finish the sentence.
“The devil they are!” interposed Wellington hastily, with his mouth full. “Give me the glass!”
He took it, and for nearly a minute scanned the movements of the enemy with fixed attention.
“By God!” he ejaculated abruptly as he lowered the glass. “That’ll do!”
He turned to another aide de camp.
“Ride off and tell Clinton and Leith to return to their former ground.” These were the generals commanding the Fifth and Sixth Divisions, on the right and right-centre of the British position. Then Wellington ordered up his horse. Closing his spy-glass with a snap, he turned with these words to his Spanish attaché, Colonel Alava: “Mon cher Alava, Marmont est perdu!” A moment later Wellington was on horseback and his staff also, all galloping off.
Wellington grasped the meaning of Marmont’s move. He saw his chance of falling on in force and overpowering the detached French wing before help could reach it.
He made his way as fast as his charger could carry him to the British Third Division—Picton’s men, temporarily commanded by Wellington’s brother-in-law, General Sir Edward Pakenham.
“As he rode up to Pakenham,” says an officer whose regiment was close by, “every eye was turned on him. He looked paler than usual, but was quite unruffled in his manner, and as calm as if the battle to be fought was nothing more than an ordinary assemblage of troops for a field-day.”
“Ned,” said Wellington, as he drew rein beside Pakenham, tapping him on the shoulder and pointing in the direction of the separated French column as its leading troops were beginning to move towards their distant position, “Ned, d’ye see those fellows on the hill? Throw your division in column, and at ’em and drive ’em to the Devil!”
“I will, my lord, by God!” was Pakenham’s laconic reply, and he turned away to give the necessary orders.
The two Eagles were taken in the course of Pakenham’s attack, when the Third Division, with the Fifth advancing on one flank, was moving forward to meet the fierce counter-attack with which the enemy, after the first collision, attempted to make amends for their commander’s blunder.
“We were assailed,” describes a British officer in the Third Division, “by a multitude who, reinforced, again rallied and turned upon us with fury. The peals of musketry along the centre continued without intermission, the smoke was so thick that nothing to our left was distinguishable; some men of the Fifth Division got intermingled with ours; the dry grass was set on fire by the numerous cartridge-papers that strewed the battlefield; the air was scorching; and the smoke rolling onwards in huge volumes, nearly suffocated us.”
In the midst of the din and turmoil the Heavy Cavalry came suddenly on the scene. “A loud cheering was heard in our rear; the Brigade half turned round, supposing themselves about to be attacked by the French cavalry. A few seconds passed, the trampling of horses was heard, the smoke cleared away, and the Heavy Brigade of Le Marchant was seen coming forward in line at a canter. ‘Open right and left!’ was an order quickly obeyed; the line opened, and the cavalry passed through the intervals, and, forming rapidly in our front, prepared for their work.”
Catastrophe for the French assailants followed at once; swift, overwhelming, irremediable. The enemy in front had practically ceased to exist within the next twelve minutes. The entire French division and its supporting troops were struck down and shattered; broken to fragments and annihilated.
There was a “whirling cloud of dust, moving swiftly forward and carrying within its womb the trampling sound of a charging multitude. As it passed the left of the Third Division, Le Marchant’s heavy horsemen, flanked by Anson’s Light Cavalry, broke out at full speed, and the next instant 1,200 French infantry, formed in several lines, were trampled down with terrible clangour and tumult. Bewildered and blinded they cast away their arms and ran through the openings of the British squadron, stooping and demanding quarter, while the dragoons, big men on big horses, rode on hard, smiting with their long, glittering swords in uncontrollable power, and the Third Division, following at speed, shouted as the French masses fell in succession before this dreadful charge.”
So Napier describes the onset.
Startled and aghast at what they saw coming at them, the French attempted hastily to form squares. But Le Marchant’s impetuous squadrons were too quick for them. They came swooping down, the troopers galloping their hardest, with loosened reins, all racing forward, charging down with the irresistible sweep of an avalanche, and crashed into the midst of the ill-fated infantrymen before the squares could be formed.
Down on the enemy the cavalry thundered, 1,200 flashing British sabres. Three of the finest regiments of the British Army formed the brigade—the 3rd Dragoons, the “King’s Own”; the 4th, “Queen’s Own”; the 5th Dragoon Guards—strong and burly men on big-boned horses, and with sharp-edged swords. “Nec aspera terrent” was—and is—the fearless motto of the gallant “King’s Own,” who showed the way; and they flinched at nothing that day. “Vestigia nulla retrorsum” was—and is—the motto of the 5th, who closed the column; and dead and wounded and prisoners were the vestiges they left in rear on that stricken field.
General Edward Le Marchant, a daring and capable soldier—“a most noble officer,” was what Wellington called him—led them.
A French regiment a little in advance, the ill-fated 62nd of the Line, was the first to face the British, and to go down. They did not attempt to form square. They had, indeed, no time to do so. Yet they were in a formation sufficiently formidable. The 62nd was a regiment of three battalions, and stood formed up in a column of half-battalions, presenting six successive lines closely massed one behind the other. Their front ranks opened fire just before the leading horsemen reached them, but it did not check the British onset even for a moment. The cavalry bore vigorously forward at a gallop and burst into and through their column, riding it down on the spot. Nearly the whole regiment was killed, wounded, or taken; leaving the broken remnants to be carried off as prisoners by the infantry of the Third Division as these raced up in rear, clearing the ground before them.
The 62nd were disposed of by the cavalry in less than two minutes. According to French official returns, the unlucky regiment, out of a total strength that morning of 2,800 of all ranks in its three battalions, lost 20 officers and 1,100 men in killed alone; the survivors who escaped capture not being sufficient to form half a battalion.
Cheering triumphantly, the charging squadrons dashed on. They came full tilt on a second French regiment, the 22nd, catching it in the act of forming square. The front face of the square was already drawn up and met the troopers with a hasty volley which brought down some of the men and horses. But that made little difference. The next moment the cavalry were on them. The mass of the square in rear made but a weak effort at resistance. They swayed back, broke their ranks, and fell apart in utter confusion. Slashed down right and left, as had been the case with the 62nd, in little more than a minute only groups of fugitives were left, to be made prisoners by the British infantry, following in rear of the horsemen.
The cavalry raced on then to attack a third French regiment. In turn it attempted to make a stand, but only to be dealt with in like manner. It, too, was caught before its square could be formed, and was ridden down.
Yet another French battalion confronted the British troopers after that. It had had time to take advantage of a small copse, an open wood of evergreen oaks, where it formed its ranks in colonne serrée, to await attack, and make a stand. “The men reserved their fire with much coolness, until the cavalry came within twenty yards. Then they poured it in on the concentrated mass of men and horses with deadly effect. Nearly a third of the dragoons came to the ground, but the remainder had sufficient command of their horses to dash forward. They succeeded in breaking the French ranks and dispersing them in utter confusion over the field.”
All the time the infantry in rear were racing on with exultant cheers, finishing off the horsemen’s work as fast as they came up. It was an easy task. Further fight had been scared out of the French under the stress of the fearful experience they had gone through. “Such as got away from the sabres of the horsemen,” says one of the British officers, “sought safety amongst the ranks of our infantry; and, scrambling under their horses, ran to us for protection, like men who, having escaped the first shock of a wreck, will cling to any broken spar, no matter how little to be depended on. Hundreds of beings, frightfully disfigured, in whom the human face and form were almost obliterated—black with dust, worn down with fatigue, and covered with sabre-cuts and blood—threw themselves among us for safety. Not a man was bayoneted—not one even molested or plundered. The invincible old Third on this day surpassed themselves; for they not only defeated their terrible enemies in a fair stand-up fight, but saved them when total annihilation seemed the only thing.”
The two Salamanca Eagles were taken now. They fell to two infantry officers as their actual captors: one to an officer of a regiment of the Third Division, and the other to an officer of the Fifth Division, which had come into the fight, and were following the cavalry, partly mingled with Pakenham’s men.
The first Eagle—that of the hapless French 62nd, whose fate has been told—fell to Lieutenant Pierce of the 44th, a regiment in the Fifth Division. He came on the Eagle-bearer while in the act of unscrewing the Eagle from its pole in order to hide it under his long overcoat and get away with it. Pierce sprang on the Frenchman, and tussled with him for the Eagle. The second Porte-Aigle joined in the fight, whereupon three men of the 44th ran to their officer’s assistance. A third Frenchman, a private, added himself to the combatants, and was in the act of bayoneting the British lieutenant, when one of the men of the 44th, Private Finlay, shot him through the head and saved the officer’s life. Both the Porte-Aigles were killed a moment later—one by Lieutenant Pierce, who snatched the Eagle from its dead bearer’s hands. In his excitement over the prize Pierce rewarded the privates who had helped him by emptying his pockets on the spot, and dividing what money he had on him amongst them—twenty dollars. A sergeant’s halberd was then procured, on which the Eagle was stuck and carried triumphantly through the remainder of the battle. Lieutenant Pierce presented it next morning to General Leith, the Commander of the Fifth Division, who directed him to carry it to Wellington. In honour of the exploit the 44th, now the Essex Regiment, bear the badge of a Napoleonic Eagle on the regimental colour, and the officers wear a similar badge on their mess-jackets.
The second Eagle taken was that of the 22nd of the Line. It was captured by a British officer of the 30th, Ensign Pratt, attached for duty to Major Cruikshank’s 7th Portuguese, a Light Infantry (or Caçadores) battalion, serving with the Third Division. He took it to General Pakenham, whose mounted orderly displayed the Eagle of the 22nd publicly after the battle, “carrying it about wherever the general went for the next two days.”
Two more Eagles, it was widely reported in the Army, came into the possession of other regiments of the Third and Fifth Divisions. One of them is said to have “wanted its head and number”; but what became of them is unknown. Possibly the existence of these particular trophies was merely camp gossip. According to one story, an officer picked up one of the Eagles during the battle and “carried it about in his cap for some days.” No Eagles, however, reached head-quarters after Salamanca except those of the 62nd and 22nd, which in due course were sent to England.27
One Eagle narrowly evaded capture at the hands of the Hanoverian Dragoons of the King’s German Legion in the pursuit after Salamanca. It escaped—to find its way to Chelsea Hospital on a later day, as the famous trophy of our own 1st Dragoons, the “Royals,” at Waterloo. What took place when the Eagle of the 105th of the Line so nearly fell into the enemy’s hands after Salamanca is a story that in its incidents stands by itself.
General Anson’s cavalry brigade, made up of British Light Dragoons and the Hanoverians, was sent in chase to follow and break up the wreck of the defeated army. It came upon the French rearguard in the act of taking post at a place called Garcia Hernandez. In front were several squadrons of cavalry; in rear the 105th of the Line. The three battalions of the regiment were moving in column, with guns in the intervals. Not seeing the French infantry and guns at first, owing to an intervening ridge, Anson rode for the cavalry and drove them in. “Their squadrons fled from Anson’s troopers, abandoning three battalions of infantry, who in separate columns were making up a hollow slope, hoping to gain the crest of some heights before the pursuing cavalry could fall on, and the two foremost did reach higher ground, and there formed in squares.” The squares at once opened fire on the horsemen, and for a moment checked them.
The Hanoverian Dragoons were the nearest of the pursuers to the rearmost of the French squares, and there was no way to ride past without exposing their flank at close range. Captain Von Decken, who was leading the dragoons, on the spur of the moment took the daring decision to attack the square with the single squadron he had with him, then and there. Without an instant’s hesitation the gallant captain charged, regardless of the fierce fusillade that met him at once, from which his men went down all round. They dropped fast under fire. By twos, by threes, by tens, all round they fell; yet the rest of them, surmounting the difficulties of the ground, hurled themselves in a mass on the column and went clean through it.
The gallant Von Decken was among the first to go down, shot dead a hundred yards from the square. But a leader no less heroic was at hand. Instantly Captain Von Uslar Gleichen, in charge of the left troop, dashed to the front. He rode out to the head of the squadron, inciting his men by voice and gesture and example. Another French volley smote hard on the squadron, but the intrepid troopers galloped through it, and, bringing up their right flank, swept on towards the enemy’s bayonets, making to attack the square on two sides. The two foremost ranks of the French were on the knee with bayonets to the front, presenting a deadly double row of steel. In rear the steady muskets of four standing ranks were levelled at the horsemen. The dragoons pressed on close up, and some were trying, in vain, to beat aside the bayonets before them, and make a gap through, when an accident at the critical moment gave the opportunity. A shot from the kneeling ranks, apparently fired unintentionally, as it is said, killed a horse, and caused it with its rider to fall forward, right across and on top of the bayonets. Thus a lane was unexpectedly laid open to the cavalry. They seized the chance instantly and crowded in through. The square was broken. It was cleft apart: its ranks were scattered and dispersed. All was over in a few moments. Within three minutes the entire battalion had been either cut down under the slaughtering swords of the dragoons or had been made prisoners.
Immediately on that another Hanoverian captain, Von Reitzenstein, came sweeping by with the second squadron, riding for the second French square. These met the charge with a bold front and rapid volley, but their moral had been shaken by the startling and horrible scene they had just beheld. The front face of the second square gave way as the horsemen got close, and four-fifths of that battalion were either sabred on the spot or made prisoners.
There was yet, near by, the third battalion in its square. Its numbers had been added to by such fugitive survivors from the first and second squares as had been able to reach the place and get inside. The third squadron of the Dragoons dealt with the third square in the same way, riding boldly at it, and breaking in with deadly results, as before.
How the Eagle of the 105th was saved—it was with the first battalion in the square first broken—is not on record. It did, however, somehow, evade capture—hidden hastily perhaps beneath the coat of somebody in the handful of men who got away in the mêlée. Only the broken Eagle-pole was left, to be picked up among the dead after the fight:
Described a British officer who went over the ground after the fight:
“The contest ended in a dreadful massacre of the French infantry. The 105th bravely stood their ground, but the ponderous weight of the heavy cavalry broke down all resistance; and arms lopped off, heads cloven to the spine, or gashes across the breast and shoulders showed the fearful encounter that had taken place.”
The third of the trophy Eagles paraded in London before the Prince Regent was that of Napoleon’s 39th of the Line. It had been picked up in the dried-up bed of the river Ceira, one of the tributaries of the Douro. Apparently the Eagle had been dropped, owing to the fall of its bearer during the night action of Foz d’Aronce on June 15, 1811, when Ney’s corps of Masséna’s army, then retreating from Torres Vedras, was roughly handled and driven across the river by Wellington’s Third and Light Divisions.
The fourth and fifth of the Eagles were found at Madrid on Wellington’s occupation of the city after Salamanca—stored away in the French arsenal and army dépôt there, to which uses the ancient Royal Palace of the Buen Retiro, just outside the walls of Madrid, had been converted.28 Seventeen hundred men held the Retiro, and the approaches to the arsenal had been fortified by order of Napoleon, but the garrison surrendered without firing a shot. They gave up to the victors 180 brass cannon, 900 barrels of powder, 20,000 stand of arms, muskets and bayonets, together with the Eagles of the 13th and 51st of the Line, which had been laid up at the Retiro for safe custody while the two regiments were operating in a wild part of the country against the Spanish guerrillas.29
The last Eagles taken by Wellington in the Peninsular War came into our hands in the battles of the Pyrenees.30 Neither of them is now in existence. One was taken by our 28th in the combat of the Pass of Maya. The 28th, supporting the 92nd Highlanders in the fighting, overwhelmed with a series of fierce volleys an unfortunate French regiment, which was afterwards discovered to be the French 28th—a curious coincidence. The Eagle of the 28th, the senior corps of its brigade, was found on the battlefield, and was brought to England and hung in the Chapel Royal, Whitehall. It disappeared from there in circumstances already related. The second French Eagle was that of the 52nd of the Line, presented by Wellington, as has been told, to the Spanish Cortes. That also has since been entirely lost sight of.
This also may be added. Early in 1813 a special order was issued by Napoleon to the army in Spain requiring the Eagles of most of the regiments to be sent back to France. Napoleon at that time was in Paris, engaged in getting together a new Grand Army to replace that destroyed in Russia. The regiments in Spain, he said, would be so weakened by the intended withdrawal of their third, fourth, and fifth battalions (which he was recalling in order to send them to Germany for the coming campaign there), that the Eagles—in charge of the first battalions which were remaining in Spain—would be exposed to undue risk. “In future,” he wrote, “there will in Spain be only one Eagle to each brigade, that of the senior regiment of the brigade.” The Eagles withdrawn from Spain, added the order, would “in the end rejoin the battalions with the Grand Army in Germany, as soon as these had been reconstituted afresh as regiments, with a sufficient force of men to ensure the safety of the Eagles.” All the cavalry Eagles were recalled: “No regiment of Cavalry in Spain is to retain its Eagle. Those who have not done so are immediately to send theirs to the dépôt.”
It was due to this order mainly that at Vittoria, after the overwhelming rout of the French army, only one Eagle-pole—with its Eagle gone—fell into British hands, although there had been on the field upwards of 70,000 French soldiers (of whom 55,000 were infantry), and the French lost everything—in the words of one of their own generals (Gazan), “all their equipages, all their guns, all their treasure, all their stores, all their papers.”31