Chief among the most celebrated battle-chargers of the nineteenth century was “Marengo,” Napoleon’s favorite war-horse. He was named in honor of one of the most remarkable victories ever achieved by the illustrious soldier. The day was lost by the French, and then gained by the resistless charges of cavalry led by Desaix and Kellermann. Their success caused the beaten infantry to rally and, taking heart, to attack the Austrians with fury, and the field was finally won. In view of the several hundred biographies of Bonaparte, it is certainly surprising that so little should be known with any degree of certainty concerning the world-famous Arab which he rode for eight hours at Waterloo, and previously in scores of battles, as well as during the disastrous Russian campaign. To an American visitor to the Bonapartes at Chiselhurst in the summer of 1872, Louis Napoleon, in speaking of his own horses and those of his uncle, said: The emperor’s “Marengo” was an Arabian of good size and style and almost white. He rode him in his last battle of Mont St. Jean, where the famous war-horse received his seventh wound. I mounted him once in my youth, and only a short time before his death in England at the age of thirty-six. Another favorite was “Marie,” and was used by the emperor in many of his hundred battles. Her skeleton is to be seen in the ancient castle of Ivenach on the Rhine, the property of the Von Plessen family. Of the other sixty or seventy steeds owned by Napoleon and used in his campaigns, perhaps the most celebrated were “Ali,” “Austerlitz,” “Jaffa,” and “Styrie.” He had nineteen horses killed under him. The American might have mentioned, but did not, that Field-Marshal Blücher had twenty shot in battle, while in the American Civil War Generals Custer of the North and Forrest of the South are believed to have lost almost as many in the short period of four years. “Marie” is thus described by Victor Hugo in the words of a soldier of the Old Guard: On the day when he [Napoleon] gave me the cross, I noticed the beast. It had its ears very far apart, a deep saddle, a fine head marked with a black star, a very long neck, prominent knees, projecting flanks, oblique shoulders, and a strong crupper. She was a little above fifteen hands high. When “Marengo” was slightly wounded in the near haunch, Napoleon mounted “Marie,” and finished his final battle on her. On his downfall, a French gentleman purchased “Jaffa” and “Marengo” and sent them to his English estate at Glastonbury, Kent. The tombstone of the former may be seen there, with the inscription, “Under this stone lies Jaffa, the celebrated charger of Napoleon.”