Part 31 (1/2)
”That did he,” answered a veteran. ”I have even seen him get out of his traveling-carriage and stand at attention as an Eagle at the head of a regiment marched by.”
”I carried the Eagle in Marshal Macdonald's column at Wagram, messieurs,” said the old Eagle-bearer, stepping forward. ”It was there the bullet struck the wing tip, here.” He laid his hand tenderly upon it. ”Mon Dieu, that was a march! Twenty thousand men in solid columns going across the plain at steady step, with drums beating, the Austrians pouring shot and sh.e.l.l into us. You could hear the bullets crash through the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of the division like gla.s.s. My arm was numb from the bullet which struck the Eagle, but I changed hands and carried it forward. I can see the big Marshal still. The Emperor was looking on. It was terrible. It didn't seem that mortal man could make it, but we kept on, still, silent, until we came in touch with the Austrians and then we cut them in two. It was magnificent.”
”I was with Marshal Mortier when we were caught in the pa.s.s of Durrenstein,” broke out one of the privates, an old Eagle-guard. ”We fought all day and all night in that trap against awful odds, waiting, hoping, until toward morning we heard the thunder of Dupont's guns. We were so close together that we seized the throats of the Russians, and they ours. We begged the Marshal to use a boat we had found to cross over the Danube and escape. 'No,' he said, 'certainly not! I will not desert my brave comrades! I will save them or die with them.' Ah, he was a brave man that day.”
”And that such a man could betray the Emperor!” exclaimed another.
”I never could understand it,” said one of the soldiers.
”That was the day,” said a third, ”when our drums were shot to pieces and we had to beat the long roll on the iron cooking cans.”
”You remember it well, comrade.”
”I was a drummer there. I remember there were but two thousand of the six thousand in the division that answered roll call that day.”
”I carried that Eagle into Moscow,” said a scarred, one-armed veteran.
”I would have carried it back, but I was wounded at Malojaroslavets and would have died but for you, my friend.”
”And I carried it across the Niemen after that retreat was over,”
returned the other, acknowledging the generous tribute of his old fellow soldier.
”Sacre-bleu! How cold it was. Not many of you can remember that march because so few survived it. The battalions in Spain can thank G.o.d they escaped it,” said another.
”It was hot enough there, and those English gave us plenty of fighting,” added one of the veterans who had fought against Wellington.
”Aye, that they did, I'll warrant,” continued the veteran of Russia.
”The Emperor who marched on foot with the rest of us. Before crossing the Beresina--I shudder to think of the thousands drowned then. I dream about it sometimes at night--we were ordered to break up the Eagles and throw them into the river.”
”And did you?”
”Not I. That is the only order I disobeyed. I carried it with me, wrapped in my own clothes. One night my fingers froze to it. See!”
He lifted his maimed hands. ”But I held on. I crossed the Nieman before Marshal Ney. He threw away his musket, but I kept the Eagle.
He was the last man, I was just before him,” said the man proudly.
”It was Marteau who saved it at Leipsic,” said Lestoype, ”and again after he had hurled it into the Aube at Arcis he found it and brought it back. And it is here.”
Tears glistened in the eyes of the veterans and the youth alike.
Hearts beat more rapidly, breaths came quicker, as these brave and fragmentary reminiscences of the part the Eagle had played in past glories were recited.
”What shall we do with it now?” asked Lestoype at last.
CHAPTER XX
WHEN THE VIOLETS BLOOM AGAIN
Now there was not a man in the room who had not heard of the order to return the Eagles to Paris, where they were to be broken up and melted down, not a man in the army for that matter. Nor was there a man who had not heard some account of the resistance of other regiments to the order, which had been nevertheless enforced wherever possible, although in cases not a few Eagles had been hidden or disappeared mysteriously and had not been given up. There was scarcely a man in the regiment--unless some royalist officer or new recruit--who had not been glad that their own Eagle had been lost honorably in battle and buried, as they believed, in the river. It was more fitting that it should meet that end than be turned back to Paris to be broken up, melted down and cast into metal for ign.o.ble use--and any other use would be ign.o.ble in the estimation of the regiment.