War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [522]
The main action of the battle of Borodino took place over a stretch of seven thousand feet between Borodino and Bagration’s flèches. (Outside that stretch, on one side, there was a show of Uvarov’s cavalry in the middle of the day, and on the other side, beyond Utitsa, there was a clash between Poniatowski and Tuchkov; but these were separate and weak actions compared with what was happening in the middle of the battlefield.) On the field between Borodino and the flèches, by the woods, on a stretch open and visible from both sides, the main action of the battle took place in the most simple, artless way.
The battle began with a cannonade from both sides out of several hundred guns.
Then, when smoke lay over the whole field, through this smoke, from the right (on the French side), the two divisions of Dessaix and Compans moved against the flèches, and from the left the viceroy’s regiments moved against Borodino.
From the Shevardino redoubt, where Napoleon stood, the flèches were two thirds of a mile away and Borodino more than a mile and a third away as the crow flies, and therefore Napoleon could not see what was going on there, the less so as smoke, merging with the mist, covered the whole terrain. The soldiers of Dessaix’s division, sent against the flèches, could be seen only until they descended into the gully that separated them from the flèches. As soon as they descended into the gully, the smoke of the cannon and musket fire on the flèches became so thick that it obscured the whole ascent up the other side of the gully. There were glimpses of something black through the smoke—probably men—and an occasional gleam of bayonets. But whether they were moving or standing still, whether they were French or Russian, could not be seen from the Shevardino redoubt.
The sun rose brightly, and its slanting rays struck Napoleon straight in the face as he looked at the flèches from under his hand. Smoke spread in front of the flèches, and now it seemed that the smoke was moving, now that the troops were moving. The shouts of men were occasionally heard through the gunfire, but it was impossible to know what was being done there.
Napoleon, standing on the barrow, looked through a field glass, and through the small circle of the field glass he saw smoke and people, sometimes his own, sometimes Russians, but when he looked again with the naked eye, he could not tell where what he had seen was.
He went down from the barrow and began pacing in front of it.
Now and then he stopped, listened to the gunfire, and peered at the battlefield.
Not only from the place below, where he was standing, not only from the barrow where some of his generals now stood, but from the flèches themselves, on which, together or alternately, there were now Russian, now French soldiers, dead, wounded, and alive, frightened or panic-stricken, it was impossible to understand what was happening on that place. In the course of several hours on that place, amidst the incessant firing of muskets and cannon, there appeared now only Russian soldiers, now only French, now infantry, now cavalry; they appeared, fell, fired, collided, not knowing what to do with each other, shouted, and ran back again.
From the battlefield the adjutants he had sent and his marshals’ orderlies constantly came galloping to Napoleon with reports on the course of events; but all these reports were false: both because in the heat of battle it is impossible to tell what is going on at a given moment, and because many of the adjutants did not reach the actual place of battle, but told what they had heard from others; and also because, while an adjutant was riding the mile or more that separated him from Napoleon, the circumstances changed, and the news he was bringing became incorrect. Thus an adjutant arrived from the viceroy with news that Borodino had been taken and the bridge over the Kolocha was in the hands of the French. The adjutant asked Napoleon if he ordered the troops to cross it. Napoleon ordered them to form ranks on the other side and wait; but not only as Napoleon was