For the soldiers a dinner of double rations at the Emperor’s expense wound up the Day of the Eagles; for the great personages there was “a banquet at the Tuileries, at which the Pope and the Emperor sat side by side at the same table, arrayed in their Pontifical and Imperial insignia and waited upon by the Grand Officers of the Crown.” Afterwards, without delaying in the capital, the deputations set off on their return to rejoin their regiments. Their arrival at their various destinations was celebrated everywhere, by Imperial order, by a full-dress parade and State reception of the Eagle by each corps; the occasion being further treated as a fête-day and opportunity for a general carousal in camp or garrison. At Boulogne the regiments of the “Army of England” took over their Eagles at a grand review on December 23, Marshal Soult presiding over the ceremony. [Sidenote: THE CLOSE OF THE DAY] The old standards of the Consulate, some bearing on them the battle-scars of Marengo and Hohenlinden, remained where General Thiébault’s assistants had left them stacked, leaning up against the wall in one of the corridors of the Military School, until they were carted off in artillery tumbrils to the central dépôt at Vincennes. There, on New Year’s Day of 1805, they were officially made away with; burned to ashes in the presence of an ordnance department official told off to certify to their complete destruction. That was the authorised method in France of disposing of the standards of a discredited _régime_; but all the same it was a hard fate for national emblems that had waved victoriously over so many a hard-fought field. Such were the principal scenes and incidents of the Day of the Field of Mars when Napoleon presented the Eagles of the Empire to the Soldiers of the Grand Army. CHAPTER III IN THE FIRST CAMPAIGN:-- UNDER FIRE WITH MARSHAL NEY The Eagles made their _début_ on the battlefield amid a blaze of glory. Within a twelvemonth of the Field of Mars they had swooped irresistibly across half the Continent, leading forward victoriously through the cannon-smoke in combat after combat, to achieve the crowning triumphs of Ulm and Austerlitz. Within the twelvemonth they witnessed the overwhelming defeat of more than 200,000 foes, the capture of 500 cannon, while 120 standards had been paraded before them as spoils of victory. In the first fortnight of September 1805, Austria and Russia, as the protagonists in Pitt’s great European Coalition against Napoleon, declared war on France, and an army of 80,000 Austrians traversed Bavaria in hot haste, to take post at Ulm by the Danube, on the frontiers of Würtemberg. There they proposed to hold Napoleon in check, until their Russian allies, whose advance by forced marches through Poland had already begun, could join hands with them. After that they would press forward in resistless force to cross the Rhine and invade France. [Sidenote: NAPOLEON’S OPENING MOVE]