Thirty-six thousand, seven hundred and seventy-three officers and soldiers of both armies lay killed or wounded on the field and round the walls of Vienna; while, as related in the memoir of Count O'Reilly, corpses in every variety of uniform, gashed and bloody, floated in hundreds down the dark waters of the Danube, or were daily thrown upon its shores to feed the wolves or to fester and decay. Such was the field of Wagram, and it was the culminating point in the fortunes of Stephen Macdonald. Napoleon, though little disposed to view him with favour, when the field was won, sprang from his horse, and embraced him with ardour, exclaiming,-- "Now, Macdonald, we are together for life and death!" He complimented him before his staff, extolled him in the bulletin, and on the field of battle made him at last a Marshal of the Empire. Of all the French marshals he was the only one who thus received a baton in the field, and soon after he was created Duke of Tarentum, from a town of that name in Naples. "Among all the marshals of France," says the editor of Bourienne's _Memoirs_, "there is not one so pure from every stain on the soldier's character--so daringly honest with Napoleon in his prosperity--so lastingly true to him in his adversity, as this, his only Scottish officer." Napoleon thus bore honourable testimony to the value of his service at Wagram, the glory of which another marshal sought to appropriate to himself. "As his majesty commands his army in person," says Napoleon, in a private order, dated Camp of Schoenbrunn, 9th of July, 1809, "to him belongs the exclusive right of assigning the degree of glory which each merits. His majesty owes the success of his arms to the French troops, and not to strangers. Prince Ponte Corvo's order of the day, tending to give false pretensions to troops, at best not above mediocrity, is contrary to truth, to discipline, and to national honour. The corps of the Prince of Ponte Corvo did not remain immovable as iron. It was the first to retreat. His majesty was obliged to cover it by the corps of the Guard and the division commanded by Marshal Macdonald, by the division of heavy cavalry commanded by General Nautsonby, and by a part of the cavalry of the Guard. _To Marshal Macdonald belongs the praise which the Prince of Ponte Corvo arrogates to himself._ His majesty desires that this testimony of his displeasure may serve as an example to every marshal not to attribute to himself the glory which belongs to others."[27] After Wagram he commanded in the duchy of Gratz, and maintained in his army a discipline so severe in repressing plunder and outrage, that on his departure at the peace with Austria, before his division began its homeward march for France, the States prayed him to accept an offering of two hundred thousand francs, but he resolutely declined them. "Messieurs," said he, "I am a soldier--I have done but my duty."