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By Root 4126 0

on the surface of the milky sea of fog. The whole French army, including Napoleon himself and his staff, not only were not on the far side of the streams and bottomland of the villages of Sokolnitz and Schlapanitz, where we intended to take up a position and begin the action, but were on the near side, so close to our troops that Napoleon with his naked eye could distinguish between our troops on horseback and on foot. Napoleon sat a little in front of his marshals on a small gray Arabian horse, in his dark blue greatcoat, the same in which he had made the Italian campaign. He peered silently at the hills, which seemed to rise up from the sea of fog, and over which Russian troops were moving in the distance, and he listened to the sounds of gunfire in the hollow. On his face, still lean at that time, not a muscle stirred; his glistening eyes were fixed motionlessly on one place. His conjectures turned out to be correct. Part of the Russian army had already descended into the hollow towards the ponds and lakes, part was still clearing off from the Pratzen heights, which he intended to attack and considered the key to the position. He saw amidst the fog, in the depression between two hills near the village of Pratz, Russian columns, their bayonets glittering, moving all in one direction towards the hollows, and disappearing one after another into the sea of fog. From the information he had received in the evening, from the sounds of wheels and footsteps heard during the night at the outposts, from the disorderly movement of the Russian columns, from all his conjectures, he saw clearly that the allies considered him to be far ahead of them, that the columns moving near Pratz constituted the center of the Russian army, and that the center was already sufficiently weakened for him to attack it successfully. But he still did not begin the action.

That day was a solemn day for him—the anniversary of his coronation. Before morning he had dozed off for a few hours and, healthy, cheerful, fresh, in that happy state of mind in which everything seems possible and everything succeeds, he mounted his horse and rode out into the field. He stood motionless, gazing at the heights appearing from the fog, and on his cold face there was that particular tinge of self-confident, well-deserved happiness that can be seen on the face of a boy who has happily fallen in love. His marshals stood behind him, not daring to distract his attention. He looked now at the Pratzen heights, now at the sun floating out of the fog.

When the sun had fully emerged from the fog and its dazzling brilliance sprayed over the fields and the fog (it was as if he had only been waiting for that to begin the action), he took the glove from his beautiful white hand, made a sign to the marshals, and gave the order for the action to begin. The marshals, accompanied by adjutants, galloped off in various directions, and a few minutes later the main forces of the French army were moving swiftly towards those same Pratzen heights from which the Russian troops had cleared off more and more, descending to the left into the hollow.

XV

At eight o’clock Kutuzov rode to Pratz at the head of Miloradovich’s fourth column, the one which was to take the place of the columns of Przebyszewski and Langeron, which had already gone down. He greeted the men of the head regiment and gave the order to move, thus showing that he intended to lead the column himself. Having ridden to the village of Pratz, he halted. Prince Andrei, one of the enormous number of persons constituting the commander in chief’s suite, stood behind him. Prince Andrei felt excited, irritated, and at the same time restrainedly calm, as a man usually is when a long-desired moment comes. He was firmly convinced that this was the day of his Toulon or his bridge of Arcole.8 How it would happen, he did not know, but he was firmly convinced that it would be so. The locality and position of our troops were known to him, as far as they could be known to anyone in our army. His own strategic plan, which there obviously could