Note 38 — Chapter XII · THE EAGLES OF THE LAST ARMY

To the Army, Louis XVIII. was only a King imposed on them by their enemies; by the triumphant enemies of France, the European Coalition. He was merely the “protégé of foreign bayonets,” placed over them by the English and Prussians; “l’émigré rentré en croupe derrière un cosaque!” To the soldiers he only personified defeat and disaster; and the memories that they gloried in had been of set purpose obliterated by him and his creatures. The very charter under which he had assumed authority was dated the 19th year of his reign, as though Napoleon had never been. He had proscribed their Eagle standards before which all Europe had trembled. By his ordinances he had abolished and insulted the memory of their victories. In addition he had disbanded and turned adrift their officers, and had left them to starve, without the pay that was their due, in wretchedness and rags.

Fuel was added to the fires of disaffection in the ranks by the tales that went round of every barrack-room of personal ill-usage of and affronts to officers who had won the respect of all on campaign, and before the enemy under fire. Ci-devant colonels and captains in long-forgotten corps of the old-time Royal Army were appointed at one stride Lieutenant-Generals and Major-Generals on the Active List, ousting and sending into unemployment men, whom Napoleon himself had picked out for command, whose names were household words to the Army. In almost every regiment officers who had grown grey in war-service before the enemy, who had won distinction on a hundred battlefields, were shelved; set aside for émigrés, who, a quarter of a century before, had been boy subalterns in the army of the ancien régime, and had not set foot in France since they fled the country at the outbreak of the Revolution. These were brought back and posted wholesale as colonels and chefs de bataillon all through the Army, superseding and driving into poverty veterans who had raised themselves to their ranks and positions through personal merit and war-service, and had qualified step by step in the different grades. At a levée one day, after a review before the Duc de Berri, a grey-headed old regimental officer stepped forward, according to custom, and made a request to have granted to him for his services the Cross of St. Louis. “What have you done to deserve it?” was the Prince’s reply, uttered in a cold and sneering tone. “I have served in the Army of France for twenty years, your Royal Highness!” “Twenty years of robbery!” was the cruel and insolent answer as the Duc de Berri turned his back on the veteran. The words were repeated everywhere among the soldiers and had the worst effect. Another tale that caused deep resentment throughout the Army was that of the treatment which Marshal Ney had received at Court when protesting against rudeness which had been shown by certain ladies of title to his wife one day at the Tuileries. They had openly insulted the Maréchale Ney by making sarcastic and contemptuous comments on her comparatively lowly birth. Marshal Ney personally complained to the King, but was coldly referred to the Court Chamberlain. He laid his complaint before that functionary and was personally rebuffed “in a harsh and insolent manner”—as the only reply to which the Marshal with his wife had withdrawn from Paris altogether. And more than one other officer of eminence, it was told, had in like manner been forced to cease attendance at Court. When the moment came for the reappearance of Napoleon in their midst, the Army was more than ready to receive their old leader with open arms and rally once more to the Eagles.