Note 39 — Chapter XII · THE EAGLES OF THE LAST ARMY

It was the action of Marshal Ney that sealed the fate of the Bourbon régime.

Ney had accepted the Restoration as bringing peace to exhausted France; he had given in his allegiance to the Bourbons. Angry and sick at heart as he was over the ill-treatment meted out to his brother officers, and the humiliations that the new régime had inflicted on the Army, and sore over personal grievances of his own, he had, in spite of all, loyally held back from intriguing against the restored dynasty. Napoleon’s leaving Elba, when he first heard the news, he condemned outspokenly as a crime against France. Impulsive and headstrong by nature, he forgot his grievances, and hastened to Paris to offer his sword to the King. Napoleon, he said to the King at the interview at the Tuileries, which was immediately granted him, was a madman and deserved to be brought to Paris “like a bandit in an iron cage.” So hostile witnesses at Ney’s court-martial declared, though Ney himself emphatically denied using any words of the kind. His services were accepted gladly, for Ney was the most popular of all the marshals with the soldiers, and he was sent to lead the army against Napoleon. Besançon was proposed as his head-quarters, and he betook himself there.

Almost at once, however, anxieties and doubts beset Ney. On taking up his command he found but few regiments available. He was promised reinforcements, but none arrived, and while he waited, no news of the rapidly altering situation reached him from Paris. Meanwhile the news came steadily in from all sides that the soldiers could not be trusted to oppose Napoleon. Ney was still loyal to the Bourbons, and he moved his troops nearer the line of advance Napoleon was taking; to Lons le Saulnier, midway between Besançon and Lyons. To officers who hinted that the soldiers would not fight if Napoleon appeared, Ney answered angrily: “They shall fight. I will take a musket and begin the firing myself! I will run my sword through the first man who hesitates!”

But events were moving too fast: the tide of Bonapartism was rising visibly on all sides. Napoleon, Ney heard, was being received everywhere with acclamation; the soldiers were said to be declaring for him by thousands. Already in every garrison the soldiers were displaying their old Eagle cap-badges and tricolor cockades. “Every soldier in the Army,” relates Savary in his Memoirs, “had preserved his tricolor cockade and the Eagle-badge of his shako or cap. It was needless for any order to be given for their resumption; that had been done on the first intelligence of the Emperor’s landing in France.” Everywhere too, officers who had kept back and hidden the old regimental Eagles and tricolor standards, were bringing them out openly. In regiments where the Ministerial order had been obeyed and the Eagles sent to Paris for destruction, the soldiers now took out the Bourbon arms from the white flags, substituting a tricolor shield for the royal shield with the three fleurs-de-lis.

Ney next began to doubt what line of conduct he ought to adopt. On one side was his oath of allegiance to the King. On the other was the prospect of a civil war which would be ruinous to France, which he, at the head of his army, had it in his power to prevent. It became borne in on him as his duty to the country in the circumstances to throw his influence on the side of his old comrades and Napoleon. His personal grievances against the Bourbons rankled in his mind, and self-interest urged him to go with the stream; but it was rather a sense of duty and patriotism, to avert a civil war, that impelled Ney to take the action that he did. His final decision was influenced by an insidiously worded letter from Napoleon, playing on Ney’s personal feelings and calling him by his old name of “the Bravest of the Brave.” The letter was brought to him by two secret emissaries on the night of March 13, who urged on the marshal that his soldiers were about to abandon him, and that it was impossible for him single-handed to hope to stem the current of national feeling. That and the letter turned the scale. Ney decided to abandon the cause of the Bourbons.

Assembling his troops on parade next day, he publicly declared for Napoleon in a fiery proclamation addressed to the Army. “Officers, under-officers, and soldiers,” Ney began, reading out the proclamation from on horseback in front of the assembled battalions, “the cause of the Bourbons is lost for ever! The dynasty adopted by the French nation is about to reascend the throne. To the Emperor Napoleon, our Sovereign, alone belongs the right of reigning in our dear country.” The proclamation concluded with these words: “Soldiers, I have often led you to victory. I will now conduct you to that immortal phalanx which the Emperor Napoleon is leading towards Paris. It will arrive there within a few days, when our hopes and our happiness will be for ever realised. Long live the Emperor!”

The declaration came as fire to a train of gunpowder. Ney had hardly uttered a dozen words before frantic exclamations and shouts burst forth; shakos and caps and helmets were raised and waved on muskets and swords, amid tumultuous cries of “Vive l’Empereur!” “Vive le Maréchal Ney!” The men broke their ranks and rushed headlong round Ney, catching hold of him and kissing his hands and feet and uniform: “those not near enough kissing his embarrassed aides de camp.” Shouted some: “We knew you would not leave us in the hands of the émigrés!” The marshal at the close was escorted back to his quarters amid a crowd of excited soldiers cheering frantically.

The scene there was very different. Arrived in his quarters, Ney found himself at once surrounded by a group of anxious and nervous staff-officers and aides de camp. Said some: “You should have informed us of it before, M. le Maréchal! We ought not to have been made witnesses of such a spectacle!” One or two officers protested and resigned on the spot. One aide de camp, indeed, a former émigré, broke his sword in two and flung the pieces at Ney’s feet. “It is easier,” he exclaimed passionately, “for a man of honour to break iron than to break his word.”

“You are children,” was the marshal’s answer. “It is necessary to do one thing or the other. What would you have me do? Can I stop the advancing sea with my hands? Can I go and hide like a coward to avoid the responsibility of events I cannot alter? Marshal Ney cannot take refuge in the dark! There is but one way to deal with the evil—to take one side and avert civil war. So we shall get into our hands the man who has returned, and prevent his committing further follies. I am not going over to a man, but to my country.”