After Moscow: How the Eagles faced their Fate

There are seventy-five standards of Napoleon’s Grand Army of 1812 now in Russia, trophies of the Moscow disaster. Rather more than half of the number are Eagles. The remainder of the trophies are battalion and cavalry flags; some French, some the ensigns of allied contingents and the troops of vassal states of the Napoleonic Empire, compelled to take a part in the campaign. All the European armies of the period are represented among the trophies: green and white Saxon flags; blue and white Bavarian flags; violet and white Polish ensigns; Spanish, Dutch, and Portuguese colours; Swiss flags; Westphalian and Baden flags of the Confederation of the Rhine; the red and black of Würtemburg; the yellow and black of Austria; the white and black of Prussia; the green, white, and red tricolor of Italy.

They are preserved at St. Petersburg, in the Kazan Cathedral and in the Cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul. Those in the Kazan Cathedral are grouped over and round the tomb of the septuagenarian hero, Kutusoff, who lies buried on the spot where he knelt in prayer before setting out to take command as generalissimo of the national army. Near by, suspended against the pillars, are the marshal’s bâton of Davout, and the keys of Hamburg, Leipsic, Dresden, Rheims, Breda, and Utrecht, similarly spoils of the Napoleonic war.32

The actual Eagle trophies number all told between forty and fifty: less than a third of the total array of Eagles that crossed the Niemen at the head of their regiments on the outbreak of the war. The majority of the Eagles of the Grand Army were saved from falling into the hands of the Russians through the devoted heroism of those responsible for their safe-keeping amid the horrors of the retreat. Of those at St. Petersburg, not more than half at most were taken in actual combat, and they were only yielded up by their bearers with life, being picked up from among the dead bodies, and carried off by the Russians on going over the field after the fight was over. Five Eagles only were surrendered by capitulation. The others were brought in by the Cossacks, who came upon them while prowling in rear of the retreating army. They were found, some in hollow trees, where their despairing bearers had tried to conceal them; some in holes dug with bayonets in the frozen ground underneath the snow. Others were dragged to light, broken from their staves, from beneath the coats or from the knapsacks of officers and men, who had fallen by the way at night and been frozen to death, during the final stage of the retreat between Wilna and the Niemen. It is in remembrance of how, to the last, during the Moscow retreat, in many a dark and hopeless hour, there yet remained detachments of devoted men, the last remnants of regiments, at all times ready to stand at bay and sacrifice themselves for the honour of their Eagles, amidst hordes of disorganised fugitives all round—in remembrance of that, the army of modern France commemorates on the colours of certain regiments, as representing corps that bore the same numbers in Napoleon’s Grand Army in Russia, the names, among others, of “Marojaroslav,” “Polotz,” “Wiasma,” “Krasnoi,” “La Berezène,” defeats and disasters though these were.

The Eagles were under fire for the first time in Russia on July 17, in the attack on Smolensk on the Dnieper, the ancient Lithuanian capital, where took place the first important battle of the war. There the Eagles of Ney’s and Davout’s corps did their part in inciting the men to add fresh laurels to the fame of their regiments; ever prominent in the attack, leading charge after charge as the columns made repeated efforts to storm the fortified suburbs and lofty ramparts of the citadel. The soldiers did all that intrepidity and desperate valour might attempt, but in vain. No valour could prevail against the stubborn endurance of the Russians, who also occupied a strongly walled position that was practically impregnable. The fierce contest went on all through a whole day, until nightfall, and then, under cover of darkness, the defenders silently drew off and retreated beyond the city, leaving Smolensk in flames. No fewer than 15,000 French and 10,000 Russians fell in the merciless encounter.

Next morning there followed a spectacle hardly ever perhaps paralleled: the march of the Grand Army through the streets between the still blazing houses, “the martial columns advancing in the finest order to the sound of military music.” “We traversed between furnaces,” as an officer puts it, “tramping over the hot and smouldering ashes, in all the pomp of military splendour, bands playing and each Eagle leading its men.”

At Smolensk one regiment won its Eagle, which Napoleon presented at five o’clock in the morning on July 19, before the paraded battalions of Davout’s corps. It was the 127th of the Line; a regiment, it is curious to note, enrolled a few months before, from former Hanoverian subjects of our own King George the Third, and commanded by French officers as a regular corps of the French Line. By Napoleon’s latest ordinance, issued just before the Emperor quitted Paris in May, the regiments newly raised for the Russian War, of which there were several, were in each case to win their Eagles on the battlefield. The Eagle for each regiment was to be provided in advance, but would be held back, locked up in the regimental chest, until it “should be won by distinguished conduct.” The 127th won their Eagle at Smolensk, their brilliant service being specially brought before Napoleon by Marshal Davout, who, of his own initiative, claimed the Eagle for them from Napoleon. The regiment bore it with distinction through the hottest of the fighting at Borodino, carried it all through the disastrous retreat from Moscow, and preserved it to the end to go through the later campaign in Germany, and face the enemy after that in the last stand before Paris in 1814. The Eagle was eventually destroyed by order of the restored Bourbon Government.

The second great battle-day of the Eagles in the Russian War was at Borodino, on September 7. There a quarter of a million and more combatants faced each other: on one side, 132,000 Russians with 640 guns; on the other, 133,000 French with 590 guns. The battle of Borodino was perhaps the most sanguinary and the most obstinately contested in history. The opening shots were fired at sunrise. When at sunset both sides drew sullenly apart, exhausted after twelve hours of carnage, neither army was victorious. Each held the ground on which it had begun the battle; 25,000 men lay dead on the field, and 68,000 more lay wounded, an appalling massacre that staggered even Napoleon.

Amidst the ferocious savagery of the hand-to-hand fighting that characterised Borodino all over the field, many of the Eagles were in desperate peril. Several were cut off in the terrible havoc that the ferocious Russian counter-charges wrought in the French ranks, and were only saved by the stern fortitude of the soldiers, fighting at times back to back round the Eagles, keeping off the enemy with bayonet thrusts till help should come. In one part of the field the 9th of the Line was isolated and for a time broken up and scattered. The Eagle-bearer was cut off by himself and surrounded. He saved the Eagle, as he fell wounded. “Amidst the confusion, wounded by two bayonet thrusts, I fell, but I was able to make an effort to prevent the Eagle falling into the hands of the enemy. Some of them rushed at me and closed round, but, getting to my feet, I managed to fling the Eagle, staff and all, over their heads towards some of our men, whom I had caught sight of, fortunately near by, trying to charge through and rescue the Eagle. This was all I could do before I fell again and was made prisoner.” The brave fellow returned to France two years later, at the Peace of 1814, and made his way to the regimental dépôt, where he found barely twenty of his comrades at Borodino left. The rest had succumbed during the retreat from Moscow. The survivors had brought back the Eagle to France; only, however, to have to give it up to the new Minister of War for destruction.

The 18th of the Line, broken in a Russian counter-attack, after storming one of the Russian redoubts erected to defend part of the position, rallied with their Eagle in their midst and held their ground in spite of repeated attacks until help could get through to them. At the roll-call next morning, 40 officers out of 50, and 800 men out of 2,000 were reported as missing; left dead or wounded on the field. Another regiment lost its colonel and half one battalion dead on the field; the Eagle-Guard were all shot down or bayoneted round the Eagle, which in the end was saved and brought out of the battle by a corporal, who was awarded a commission by Napoleon in the presence of the remains of the regiment next day. The Eagle of the 61st of the Line again was only kept out of Russian hands by the devotion of the men round it. Napoleon rode past the regiment next day while being paraded for the roll to be called. Only two battalions were there, and he asked the colonel where the third battalion was. “It is in the redoubt, Sire!” was the officer’s reply, pointing in the direction of the Great Redoubt, round which some of the hardest fighting of the day had taken place. The battalion had literally been annihilated: not an officer or a man of the 1,100 in the third battalion of the 61st had returned from the fight.

A regiment of Cuirassiers lost its Eagle at Borodino: the Eagle had disappeared in the midst of a fierce mêlée, in which the Eagle-bearer had gone down. The loss was not discovered till later. All, however, refused to believe that it had been captured: that was incredible. The dead Eagle-bearer’s body was found after the battle, but no Eagle was there. Overwhelmed with shame, the regiment had to admit that the impossible had happened, and during the weeks that they were at Moscow “they remained plunged in a profound dolour.” The Eagle reappeared in an extraordinary way. In the retreat, when passing the scene of the battle, a ghastly and horrible spectacle with its unburied corpses and the carcasses of horses strewn thickly and heaped up all over the field, a sudden thought struck one of the officers. Late that night, he and a brother officer, taking the risk of capture by Cossacks on the prowl in rear of the retreating army, rode back and found their way by moonlight to where the Cuirassiers had had their fight and the Eagle-bearer had fallen. They found the Eagle inside the carcass of the Eagle-bearer’s horse. It had been thrust in there by the dying Eagle-bearer through the gaping wound that had killed the horse, as the only means to conceal it in the midst of the enemy.

The Eagles made their last triumphant entry into a conquered capital at Moscow on September 14, the Eagle of the Old Guard leading the way at the head of the grenadiers of the Guard, all wearing for the day their full-dress parade uniform. As has been said, every officer and soldier of the Guard, by Napoleon’s standing order, carried a suit of full-dress uniform in his kit or knapsack on campaign in readiness for such occasions—“en tenue de parade comme si elle eut défiler au Carrousel.” They had marched like that with music and full military pomp twice through Vienna, and through the streets of Berlin and Madrid; but there was at Moscow a disconcerting and ominous difference, both in their surroundings and in the reception that they met. Elsewhere, alike in Vienna, Berlin, and Madrid, the parade march of the victorious Eagles passed through densely crowded streets of onlookers, silently gazing with dejected mien at the scene. At Moscow not a soul was in the streets, at the windows, anywhere; on every side were emptiness and desolation. The inhabitants had fled the city, and only deserted houses remained. The first incendiary fires at Moscow broke out at midnight, within twelve hours of Napoleon taking up his residence in the Kremlin.

The spell after that was broken. Henceforward victory deserted the Eagles; the hour of fate was at hand for Napoleon and the Grand Army. The Fortune of War, indeed, turned against the Eagles even before Napoleon had quitted Moscow.

Early on October 18, Napoleon, while at breakfast in the Kremlin, suddenly heard distant cannonading away to the south. He learned what had happened that afternoon while holding a review of the Italian Royal Guard. “We hastily regained our quarters, packed up our parade-uniforms, put on our service kit ... and to the sound of our drums and bands threaded our way through the streets of Moscow at five in the afternoon.” During the past five weeks, while all had been outwardly quiet, the Russian armies had been manœvring to close in along the only road of retreat open to Napoleon.

The nearest of the Russian armies, concentrated to the south-west of Moscow, struck the first blow on October 18 at daybreak, by surprising Murat’s cavalry camp near Vinkovo. The results to the French were disastrous. Two thousand of Murat’s men were killed and as many more were taken prisoners. Between thirty and forty guns were lost, and Murat’s personal camp-baggage train, which included “his silver canteens and cooking utensils, in which cats’ and horse flesh were found prepared for food”—a discovery that opened the eyes of the Russians to the precarious position of affairs in Napoleon’s army. Murat himself, according to one story, “rode off on the first alarm in his shirt.” He only got away, according to another, by cutting his way through the Russians sword in hand, at the head of his personal escort of carabineers. Two Eagles were spoils of the surprise; the first to fall into Russian hands in the war. They were lost in the general scrimmage, their bearers being sabred at the outset of the Russian onslaught. The Eagles were at once sent off to St. Petersburg to be presented to the Czar Alexander.

On the other hand nine Eagles were saved, their escorts fighting their way successfully through the Russians.

Many stories are recorded in memoirs of survivors of the Grand Army of heroic endeavours made repeatedly by officers and men to save their Eagles from the enemy amid the disasters and horrors of the retreat. Their devotion and self-sacrifice had their reward in the preservation of seven Eagles in every ten.

Two Eagles were lost fourteen days after leaving Moscow, in the disastrous battle at Wiasma on November 2, halfway on the road back to Smolensk, where the advanced columns of the pursuing Russians attacked and all but cut the retreating French army in two. The rearguard of the Grand Army, Marshal Davout’s corps, with the Italian corps of the Viceroy Eugène Beauharnais, was overpowered and driven in and broken up; crushed under the overpowering artillery fire of the Russians. They left behind 6,000 dead, 2,000 prisoners, and 27 guns. Two Eagles were taken, their regiments being virtually annihilated, but twenty-one were saved. They were safeguarded through the rout by groups of brave-hearted officers and men, who beat off the rushes made at them by the Russian cavalry and the Cossacks. They fought their way through until they met Ney’s troops, who had heard the firing and turned back, arriving in time to stem and check the Russian pursuit and enable what was left of the two shattered army corps to rally under their protection.

One infantry regiment at Wiasma perished on the battlefield to a man, but saved its Eagle. It was the rearmost of all, and was isolated and surrounded beyond reach of help. In vain its men formed square and tried to fight their way after the rest through the surging masses of the Russians. They made their way for a time until the enemy brought up artillery. A Russian battery galloped up, unlimbered close to them, and opened fire with murderous effect. The Frenchmen tried desperately to charge the guns, but were beaten back by a rush of cavalry. At last, in despair, they formed square and faced the cruel slaughter that the guns made in their ranks, in the hope that help might reach them. Terms were offered them and refused. They would not surrender, and fought on till dusk, when their ammunition gave out. The Russians were closing round for a final decisive charge on the small handful of survivors, when the wounded colonel, seeing all was over, made the attempt that saved the Eagle. The scanty remnant of what had that morning been a regiment of 3,000 men formed round in a ring, facing towards the enemy with bayonets levelled. The Eagle-staff was broken up and the fragments thrust under the ground. With flint and steel a match was lighted and the silken tricolor consumed. The Eagle was then tied up in a havresac and entrusted to an old soldier who was known to be a good rider. The colonel, giving up his own charger to the man, bade him watch his chance and, as the enemy came on in the dark, dash through them and ride his hardest. “Carry the Eagle to his Majesty,” were the colonel’s words. “Deliver it to him, and tell him that we have done our duty!” The man rode off. He was able to get through the nearest Russians under cover of the darkness, having to fight his way before he got clear, and receiving several wounds. Then his horse fell dead from its injuries. On foot he stumbled on, and before midnight reached, not Napoleon, but Marshal Ney, to whom he gave up his precious charge. No officer or man of the others of the luckless regiment was ever heard of in France again. No prisoners from it ever returned—only the Eagle survived.

Three days after Wiasma the Russian winter suddenly set in on the doomed host. It brought about at once the disintegration and disorganisation of the Grand Army. Already, demoralised by their privation, hundreds of men had fallen out of the ranks, flinging away their muskets and knapsacks, and straggling along in disorderly groups. A third practically of the Army ceased to exist as a fighting force within the first fortnight of the retreat, before the first snows fell. The others, though, still kept to their duty. Marching in the ranks day after day, they strove their hardest to beat back the incessant attacks of the swarms of Cossacks, hovering round on the watch to raid the baggage-convoys at every block or stoppage on the road. With the coming of the snow the doom of the Grand Army was sealed. It was impossible to maintain discipline with the thermometer at twenty degrees below zero. Men dropped dead from cold by the score every half-mile.

On November 6 the sun disappeared; a grey fog enshrouded everything; the frost set in; and a bitter north wind in howling gusts swept over the face of the land; with it came down the snow, falling hour after hour by day and night without ceasing.

“From that day the Army lost its courage and its military instinct. The soldier no longer obeyed his officer. The officer separated himself from his general. The disbanded regiments marched in disorder. In their frantic search for food they spread themselves over the plain, pillaging and destroying whatever fell in their way.” So a survivor wrote.

The snow came down “in large broad flakes, which at once chilled and blinded the soldiers: the marchers, however, stumbled forward, men often struggling and at last sinking in holes and ravines that were concealed from them by the new and disguised appearance of the country. Those who yet retained discipline and kept their ranks stood some chance of receiving assistance; but amid the mass of stragglers, the men’s hearts, intent only on self-preservation, became hardened and closed against every feeling of sympathy and compassion. The storm-wind lifted the snow from the earth, as well as that steadily pelting down from above, into dizzy eddies round the soldiers. Many were hurled to the ground in this manner, while the same snow furnished them with an instant grave, under which they were concealed until the next summer came, to display their ghastly remains in the open air.”

The Cossacks redoubled their attacks on the retreating army after Wiasma. They had harassed the French incessantly from the day after Napoleon passed Mojaisk, but after Wiasma their audacity increased a hundredfold. They captured prisoners hourly, from among the stragglers mostly; in droves, by fifties and hundreds at a time. Day after day they hung on the flanks, swooping down with loud shouts on the unfortunate wretches, rounding them up like sheep, and driving them before them towards their own camps at the points of their long lances. Many they killed on the spot, or stripped naked to perish in the snow. Others they drove along to the nearest camp of Kutusoff’s regulars for the sake of the money reward offered for prisoners brought in alive. Others again, to save themselves the trouble of driving them all the way to the army camp, they handed over to peasants in the villages, selling them at a rouble a head, for the peasants to make sport of and maltreat or kill. The brutalities and ruthless devastations that the French army had committed in its advance to Moscow had infuriated the Russian peasantry. Intent on vengeance they now made use of their opportunity to the full. They burned alive some of their captives, by tossing them into pits half filled with blazing pine-logs. Seventy were done to death in this horrible way in one village. Others they buried up to their necks in the ground and left to die; or else tied them to trees for the wolves to tear to pieces.33 Others they clubbed or flogged to death, tying down the wretched Frenchmen to logs on the ground, hounding on the women and children to hammer their heads to pieces with thick sticks. A common method of Cossacks and peasants alike for making prisoners was to light great watch-fires at night, a little way off from the retreating column, and as the frozen and starving stragglers came crowding up to the blaze they surrounded them and carried them off wholesale.

After the snow set in, guns and baggage-wagons were abandoned to the Cossacks at almost every hundred yards. It was impossible for the weakened and dying horses to drag them along; even to keep their footing on the frozen ground. Within the first week after Wiasma the appalling number of 30,000 horses either died of starvation, there being no way of getting fodder for them because of the snow, or were frozen to death.

In spite of everything, some of the regiments still kept together and marched in military formation, with their Eagles at their head; those in particular of Marshal Ney’s corps. They formed the rearguard and chief protection to the army from Wiasma onwards; held together by the heroic example and personality of their indefatigable leader, ever present where there was fighting, ever calm and confident, and ready with words of encouragement. Not an Eagle was lost along the line of march between Moscow and Smolensk by Ney’s men; rallying round them to beat off the Cossack attacks time and again with the cry, “Aux Aigles! Voici les Cosaques!”

This incident, not unlike the cuirassier ride to recover the Eagle left on the field at Borodino, is said to have taken place between Wiasma and Smolensk. One regiment of Ney’s cavalry missed its Eagle after a sharp fight on the road, the Eagle-bearer having apparently fallen during the encounter, unseen by the survivors. That night round the bivouac fire lots were drawn, and two officers rode back amid blinding snow squalls to try to find the Eagle. They successfully evaded the Cossacks and made their way ten miles back to the scene of the combat, where, after scaring off some wolves, they searched in the snow and found the dead officer’s body with the Eagle by its side. They brought it back safely to the regiment and restored it to their comrades. Their limbs were frost-bitten and rigid from cold, so that they had to be lifted off their horses, but the brave men were content—they had saved their Eagle.

At Krasnoi, on November 19, between Smolensk and the Beresina, Napoleon underwent another severe defeat from the pursuing Russians, 10,000 prisoners and 70 guns falling into the victors’ hands. Two Eagles were carried off from the battlefield and despatched to St. Petersburg by special courier, together with Kutusoff’s report to the Czar. Twenty-seven Eagles, however, got past the Russians, fighting their way through, thanks to the endurance of brave men who rallied round them. Krasnoi it was that gave the death-blow to Napoleon’s last hope of rallying the Grand Army. After it less than 30,000 men remained under arms with the main column, including the 8,000 survivors of the Imperial Guard. Up to then, according to the Russian official returns, 80,000 prisoners, 500 guns, and “40 standards and flags of all kinds” had fallen into the hands of the pursuers. Not more than ten, however, of the forty standards taken were Eagles: the two taken at Murat’s surprise at Vinkovo; the two taken at Wiasma; the two taken at Krasnoi; also two taken before Napoleon reached Smolensk, from a brigade sent from Smolensk to help him on the road, which blundered into the middle of the Russian army and had to surrender; and two captured elsewhere, from the French flanking armies of Marshal Macdonald and Marshal St. Cyr. An eleventh Eagle was taken in the second battle at Krasnoi, from Ney’s rearguard; the only Eagle that Ney actually lost in fight throughout the 600 miles’ march between Moscow and the frontier.

At Krasnoi, Ney’s rearguard, following at a day’s march behind the rest of the army, found its way barred. The Russians, after defeating Napoleon’s main column, a day’s march in advance, had waited on the scene of the former fighting for Ney. They held a position that it was practically impossible for Ney’s comparatively small force to get past. After vainly attempting to break through, Ney had to draw back, and make a forlorn-hope effort to avoid destruction by a long détour, in the course of which he had to abandon guns, baggage, and horses, and cross the Dnieper on ice hardly thick enough to bear the weight of a man.

On the eve of Krasnoi, indeed, the rearguard found itself in so desperate a position, that Ney ordered all its Eagles to be destroyed. His regiments had suffered so severely in their continuous fighting, that it was impossible adequately to safeguard the Eagles. Every musket and bayonet was wanted in the fighting line. It was impossible to supply sufficient Eagle-escorts. So far, in spite of the dreadful straits to which some of the regiments had been reduced, all had marched openly with their Eagles, and fought round them, guarding them sedulously by night and day. “When excess of fatigue constrained us to take a few moments of repose,” describes Colonel De Fesenzac of the 4th of the Line, “we (what was left of the regiment able to carry arms—not 100 men) assembled together in any place where we could find shelter, a few of the men standing by to mount guard for the protection of the regimental Eagle.”

“Then,” describes the colonel, “came the order that all the Eagles should be broken up and buried. As I could not make up my mind to this, I directed that the staff should be burned, and that the Eagle of the 4th Regiment should be stowed in the knapsack of one of the Eagle-bearers, by whose side I kept my post on the march.” The Eagle of the 4th, it may be added by the way, was the identical Eagle that Napoleon had presented to the regiment in place of that lost at Austerlitz, in exchange for, as has been told, two captured Austrian flags.

Other officers did the same as Colonel De Fesenzac. One officer, however, the colonel of the 18th of the Line, flatly refused to have his regimental Eagle either broken up or hidden away. “The Eagle,” he says in his journal, which still exists, “had throughout, until then, been carried at the head of the regiment, and I declined to obey the order on behalf of the 18th. It seemed to us a monstrous ignominy. Our Eagles were not given us to be made away with or hidden: they ought to perish with us.” The Eagle of the 18th did actually perish with the regiment. In the rearguard repulse at Krasnoi the entire regiment was destroyed, except for some twenty survivors, including the colonel, severely wounded. “Our Eagle,” says the gallant colonel, proudly recording its fate, “remained among our dead on the field of battle.”

That Eagle of the 18th was the only one of Marshal Ney’s Eagles to fall into the hands of the Russians in battle. Some ten of the Eagles now at St. Petersburg were found on the bodies of officers and men who had been either frozen to death or had fallen dead on the march during Ney’s retreat after Krasnoi; they were not taken in fight.

Ney rejoined Napoleon with only 1,500 men left out of 12,000, of which the rearguard had consisted when it left Smolensk. It was while making his last effort to get past the Russians after his attempt to break through at Krasnoi had failed, that Ney, overtaken on the banks of the half-frozen Dnieper on the evening before he risked his perilous crossing, and summoned by the Russians to surrender, made that proudly defiant reply which has ever since been a treasured memory to the French Army: “A Marshal of France never surrenders!” Six hours later he had evaded capture and, with the remnant of his corps, was across the river. All the world has heard how Napoleon, hopeless of seeing him again, welcomed Ney with the words: “I have three hundred millions of francs in the vaults of the Tuileries; I would have given them all for Marshal Ney!”

The remaining Eagles had by now been assembled for preservation under the protection of what troops of the main column, which Napoleon accompanied, still continued under arms. Further effort to rally the shattered host was beyond possibility. Only portions of the two army corps of Marshals Victor and Oudinot, called in from holding the line of communications, still retained military formation, together with the reduced battalions of the Old Guard which had kept near Napoleon throughout. To save the remaining Eagles, the officers of broken-up and disbanded regiments, with some devoted soldiers who stood by them, took personal charge of the Eagles, and carried them with their own hands. Banding together and marching in company side by side, they tramped on, plodding through the snow day and night for 200 miles; the collected Eagles all massed in the centre. They attached themselves to the column of the Old Guard, and kept their way close by Napoleon.

A survivor of the retreat from Moscow, in his memoirs, describes how he saw Napoleon and the Eagles pass by him on the way to the Beresina on the morning of November 25:

“Those in advance seemed to be generals, a few on horseback, but the greater part on foot. There was also a great number of other officers, the remnant of the Doomed Squadron and Battalion, formed on the 22nd and barely existing at the end of three days. Those on foot dragged themselves painfully along, almost all of them having their feet frozen and wrapped in rags or in bits of sheep’s-skin, and all nearly dying of hunger. Afterwards came the small remains of the Cavalry of the Guard. The Emperor came next, on foot, and carrying a staff. He wore a large cloak lined with fur, and had a red velvet cap with black-fox fur on his head. Murat walked on foot at his right, and on his left the Prince Eugène, Viceroy of Italy. Next came the Marshals Berthier—Prince of Neufchatel—Ney, Mortier, Lefebvre, with other marshals and generals whose corps had been annihilated.

“The Emperor mounted a horse as soon as he had passed; so did a few of those with him: the greater part of them had no horses to ride. Seven or eight hundred officers and non-commissioned officers followed, walking in order and perfect silence, and carrying the Eagles of their different regiments, which had so often led them to victory. This was all that remained of 60,000 men.

“After them came the Imperial Guard on foot, marching also in order.”

Four Eagles were lost in the fighting at the passage of the Beresina, where a whole division of Marshal Victor’s corps (General Partonneaux’s) was cut off and compelled to surrender. On the last night, when either massacre under the Russian guns or laying down their arms was all that was left to them, they broke up and buried their Eagles in the ground underneath the snow. The officers of one regiment, it is told, broke up their Eagle before burying it, burned the flag at their last bivouac fire, mixed the ashes with thawed snow, and swallowed the concoction.

The little column of officers with their Eagles passed the Beresina with the Guard, and thus escaped that last catastrophe, the crowning horror of the bridge disaster, when 24,000 ill-fated human beings were sent to their account; either killed in the fighting with the Russians, or drowned in the river, jammed together on the burning bridge, while the Russian guns from the rear thundered on them with shot and shell.

The officer-escort with the Eagles tramped on until Wilna was reached; until after Napoleon had left the army and set off for Paris. Then, on the final falling apart of the remnants of the stricken host, the officers themselves dispersed, to escape as best they could individually and get to the Niemen; breaking up the Eagle-poles and concealing the Eagles and flags in knapsacks or under their uniforms. The dispersal, says one officer, was at Napoleon’s own instance. “He ordered all the officers who had no troops to make the best of their way at once to the Niemen, considering that their services had best be saved for the future army he was going to Paris to raise and organise.” That is one story. According to another officer, utter despair at their frightful position, abandoned by their chief, was the cause of the break-up at Wilna and the final débâcle. “Until then a few armed soldiers, led by their officers, had still rallied round the Eagles. Now, however, the officers began to break away, and the soldiers became fewer and fewer, and those left were finally reduced, of necessity, some to conceal the Eagles in knapsacks, others to make away with them.” Some of the officers fell dead on the way to the Niemen, struck down suddenly by the cold, and their Eagles remained with them. Others who died, with their last strength tried to put their charges beyond reach of the enemy by scraping or digging holes in the frozen ground, and burying the Eagles.34

The Eagle of the Old Guard recrossed the Niemen at Kovno, while Ney was making his final stand, defending the gate of the town; the marshal fighting musket in hand at the last, with less than twenty soldiers. That Eagle was still carried openly—the only one still so displayed—carried defiantly aloft on its staff, borne to the last with its escort in military formation, in the midst of the ranks of the 400 men of the Old Guard who were all that were able to reach the frontier.

At Bay in Northern Germany—1813

There were yet dark days in store for the Eagles after the retreat from Moscow was over. The tale of their misfortunes was not yet ended. There was yet to be the sequel to the great catastrophe; further humiliations in the War in Germany of 1813, and the Winter Campaign of 1814 in Eastern France, which followed as the consequence and result of the overthrow in Russia.

No fewer than fifteen of the Eagles that the devotion of their officers brought through the retreat from Moscow are now—making allowance for difficulties of identification, owing to defective records—among the trophies of victory to be seen at Berlin and Potsdam, in Vienna, and also at St. Petersburg. Those in Germany are mostly kept in the Garrison Church of Potsdam, suspended triumphantly above the vault in which lies the sarcophagus of Frederick the Great. They were placed there of set purpose as an act of retribution, as a votive offering to the manes of the Great Frederick; as a Prussian rejoinder to Napoleon’s act of wanton desecration after Jena. The four trophy Eagles at Vienna are in the Imperial Arsenal Museum there. Two of them are the spoils of Kulm; displayed together with the keys of Lyons, Langres, Troyes, and the fortress of Mayence, which were surrendered during the march of the Allies on Paris. The Russian trophy Eagles of 1813 are at St. Petersburg, displayed with the Eagles which fell into Russian hands in the retreat from Moscow.

What the annihilation of the Grand Army in Russia meant for Europe, with what dramatic rapidity its import for the vassal states of Napoleon was realised and turned to account, is a familiar story. Prussia led the revolt at once, and all Northern Germany rose in arms en masse to commence the “War of Liberation,” joining hands with Russia as the pursuing armies of the Czar crossed the frontier. Then Austria, after negotiations rendered abortive at the last by Napoleon’s infatuated pride and overweening self-confidence, threw her sword into the balance and turned the scale decisively against France. Napoleon’s hastily raised conscript levies, outnumbered and outmanœuvred, were defeated on battlefield after battlefield, and driven in rout across the Rhine to their final surrender at the gates of Paris; and then came the abdication of Fontainebleau.

Yet, with all that, in those dark hours of their fate the Eagles died hard. The trophy-collections of Berlin, Vienna, and St. Petersburg testify to that. Only a percentage of the Eagles which faced their fate on the battlefield became spoils to the victors. Marshal Macdonald’s army, routed by Blücher on the Katzbach, thanks to the devotion of the regimental officers and some of their men, saved all its Eagles from the enemy except three. Ney’s army, no less roughly handled at Dennewitz, managed to retain in like manner all its Eagles except three. Vandamme’s army, annihilated and dispersed at Kulm, saved its Eagles all but two. Oudinot was routed at Gross Beeren, with the loss of guns and many prisoners; Gérard underwent the same fate near Magdeburg; Bertrand was surprised and defeated with heavier losses still; but not one Eagle was left as spoil of these disasters in the hands of the victorious foe.

In one battle the Eagle of Napoleon’s Irish Legion was only just kept from being to-day among the trophies displayed in the Garrison Church of Potsdam over the tomb of Frederick the Great. It was immediately after Macdonald’s defeat on the Katzbach. The Irish Legion was one of the regiments in one of Macdonald’s divisions, that of General Puthod. They had had a hard fight of it, and their retreat was barred by the river Bober in flood. Under stress of the continuous attacks of the Prussians in ever-increasing force, the 12,000 men of Puthod’s Division had been reduced to barely 5,000. They had used up their last cartridges, and had been driven back to the river-bank, where the Prussian army closed in on them “in a half-moon.” The Prussians halted for one moment until they realised that the troops before them had no more ammunition. Then, aware that they had their foe at their mercy, they rushed forward, cheering exultantly, to deliver the coup de grâce. “All of a sudden,” describes an Irish officer, “30,000 men ran forward on their prey, of whom none but those who knew how to swim could attempt to escape.” The greater number of the French, all the same, jumped into the river, and took the risk of drowning rather than surrender. Less than five hundred got across the stream, and after that they had to wade waist-deep for half a mile over flooded marshes under a pitiless fire from the Prussian batteries. In the end only 150 men reached dry ground alive. Among the survivors were just 40 men of the Irish Legion, with their Eagle—Colonel Ware, eight officers, the Eagle-bearer, and thirty privates. The Irish remnant made their way eventually to Dresden, and reported themselves to Napoleon.

That adventure, by the way, was the Irish Eagle’s second escape from falling into an enemy’s hands since Napoleon presented it to the Legion on the Field of Mars. On the first occasion it came within an ace of being now among our British trophy Eagles at Chelsea; of, indeed, being the first Napoleonic Eagle to be brought as spoil of war to England. The Irish Legion was in garrison at Flushing in 1809, when the fortress surrendered to the British Walcheren Expedition. On the night before the final capitulation, Major Lawless of the Irish Legion took charge of the Eagle, and in a rowing-boat made a risky passage among the British ships of war in front of the batteries. He escaped up the Scheldt to Antwerp, where he delivered the Eagle personally to Marshal Bernadotte. Napoleon sent for the major to Paris, decorated him for saving the Eagle, with the Cross of the Legion of Honour, and promoted him lieutenant-colonel.

In the disaster on the Bober also, a soldier of the 134th of the Line saved the Eagle of another regiment, the 147th. The two regiments, as the Prussians charged down on them after their cartridges gave out, in desperation rushed to meet their assailants with the bayonet. They were overpowered and hurled back in confusion to the bank of the river, all intermingled in the mêlée. The Eagle-bearer of the 147th fell dead, shot down, and a Prussian officer made for the Eagle. A soldier of the 134th bayoneted the officer as he got to it, picked up the Eagle, and, seeing only more Prussians round him, flung himself, still holding on to the Eagle, into the river. The man could not swim, and was fired at as he floundered in the water, but he was not hit. Unable to reach the other side, he somehow got on to a shallow patch, and, still holding fast to the Eagle, kept his footing there, until, to get away from the hail of bullets all round him, he again risked drowning by trying to drift downstream. He managed to keep his head above water, and got over to a bed of rushes, fringing the farther bank. Creeping in there, still holding on closely to the Eagle, the brave fellow hid for six hours until dark, embedded in mud to his armpits most of the time. After nightfall he worked his way through and crawled ashore. Finally, after wandering across country for eight days, feeding on berries and what he could pick up, in constant peril of discovery among the hostile peasants and parties of Prussian dragoons scouring the district, the heroic soldier at length found his way to Dresden. There he was brought before Marshal Berthier, to whom he delivered the Eagle.

At the battle of the Katzbach the colonel of the 132nd of the Line threw away his life under the mistaken impression that he saw the Eagle of his regiment captured by the enemy. He was short-sighted, and suddenly missed it in the middle of a charge. Thinking he saw the Eagle being carried off by a party of Prussians he rode straight through the enemy at them, to fall mortally wounded halfway, with his horse shot beneath him. Some of the men saw the colonel fall, and charged after him. They got to him and carried him off the field, and in the retreat until a place of safety was reached, where the survivors of the regiment had rallied. There the officers came round to bid farewell to their dying chief. The Eagle-bearer of the regiment was among them, and he, to the amazement of all, produced the Eagle from his havresac, broken from its staff, and held it up before the eyes of the dying colonel. No enemy’s hand, he declared, had contaminated it. Finding himself and the Eagle, he explained, in imminent danger of capture, he had wrenched the Eagle off the staff and hidden it—his act causing the disappearance which the colonel had marked, and which had resulted in his fatal dash among the enemy.

The 17th of the Line saved their Eagle and themselves after Vandamme’s defeat at Kulm, and made their way to safety, as one of the officers relates, after an extraordinary series of adventures. They had joined Vandamme’s army at the beginning of the first day’s fighting—the battle lasted three days—coming in after a week’s march from Dresden, through pouring rain most of the time. They numbered four battalions, 4,000 men in all. Vandamme was successful on the first two days and the 17th by themselves routed an Austrian regiment and captured a gun. On the evening of the second day the French advanced again, driving the enemy before them into the valley of Kulm. They bivouacked on the ground they had won, anticipating a final triumph on the morrow. But during that night two Russian and Prussian army corps reinforced the Austrian columns unknown to the French.

One of the officers of the 17th, Major Fantin des Odoards, during the night had his suspicions aroused about the enemy, and made a discovery; but Vandamme would not listen to him.

He was unable to sleep, says Major Fantin, and, learning from a patrol that mysterious sounds were being heard in the direction in which the Austrians had retreated, he left the bivouac and went out alone beyond the outposts, to creep in the dark towards the Austrian watch-fires. At times, as he crawled forward, describes the major, he lay flat and listened with his ear to the ground. In the end he felt certain that he heard the tramp and stir of a vast number of men, and also the rumble of artillery wheels moving across the front. Apparently, from the direction the unseen troops were taking, they were marching to cut off the retreat of the army from Dresden, Napoleon’s base of operations throughout the campaign.

Major Fantin returned to the bivouac and went at once to report to the general, finding him asleep. He aroused Vandamme and told what he had heard and suspected; only, however, to be rebuffed and rudely answered that he was quite mistaken. Vandamme, a surly and ill-conditioned boor to deal with at all times, awoke in a vile temper. “You are a fool!” was what he said in reply. “If the enemy are on the move at all, they are in retreat, trying to escape me. To-morrow will see them flying, or my prisoners.” With that Vandamme terminated the interview, and turned over and went to sleep again.