War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [584]
XXVI
Towards four o’clock in the afternoon, Murat’s troops were entering Moscow. At their head rode a detachment of Württemberg hussars; on horseback behind them, with a large suite, rode the king of Naples himself.
Around the middle of the Arbat, by St. Nicholas the Revealed, Murat stopped to wait for news from the advanced detachment about the state of things in the city’s fortress, “le Kremlin.”
A small bunch of people from among the inhabitants who had remained in Moscow gathered around Murat. They all looked with timid perplexity at the strange, long-haired commander adorned with feathers and gold.
“What, is he their tsar himself or something? Not bad!” quiet voices were heard.
An interpreter rode up to the bunch of people.
“Take your hat off…your hat,” they said in the crowd, addressing each other. The interpreter turned to an old yard porter and asked if it was far to the Kremlin. The yard porter, listening in perplexity to the Polish accent, which was foreign to him, and not recognizing the sounds of the interpreter’s talk as Russian speech, did not understand what was being said to him and hid behind the others.
Murat approached the interpreter and told him to ask where the Russian troops were. One of the Russians understood what was asked and several voices suddenly began to answer the interpreter. A French officer from the advanced detachment rode up to Murat and reported that the gates of the fortress were closed and there was probably an ambush inside.
“Very well,” said Murat, and, turning to one of the gentlemen of his suite, he ordered four light guns moved forward to fire on the gates.
The artillery trotted out from behind the column following Murat and went along the Arbat. Going down to the end of Vzdvizhenka Street, the artillery stopped and lined up on the square. Several French officers took charge of the guns, setting them up and looking at the Kremlin through field glasses.
Inside the Kremlin, the bells were ringing for vespers,18 and this ringing confused the French. They supposed it was a call to arms. Several infantrymen ran to the Kutafyevsky gates. In the gateway lay beams and wooden screens. Two musket shots rang out from the gateway, as soon as an officer with a unit began running towards it. The general who stood by the guns shouted a command, and the officer and soldiers came running back.
Three more shots were heard from the gateway.
One shot grazed a French soldier’s leg, and the strange shouting of a few voices came from behind the screens. On the faces of the French general, officers, and soldiers the former expression of cheerfulness and calm was replaced all at once, as if on command, by the stubborn, concentrated expression of a readiness to fight and suffer. For all of them, from marshal to the last soldier, this place was not Vzdvizhenka, Mokhovaya, Kutafaya, and the Troitsky gates, but the new terrain of a new and probably bloody battle. And they all prepared for that battle. The shouting from the gateway ceased. The guns were moved forward. The artillerymen blew the snuff from their wicks. The officer commanded, “Feu!”*557 and the whistling sounds of two tin canisters rang out one after the other. Shot rattled against the stone of the gateway, the beams, the screens; and two clouds of smoke billowed over the square.
A few moments after the rolling of the shots over the stone Kremlin died away, a strange noise was heard over the heads of the French. A huge flock of jackdaws rose above the walls and, crowing and flapping thousands of wings, circled in the air. Along with that sound came a solitary human shout in the gateway, and from behind the smoke appeared the figure of a man without a hat, wearing a kaftan. He was holding a musket and aiming at the French. “Feu!” repeated the artillery officer, and one musket shot and two cannon shots rang out simultaneously. Smoke again covered the gateway.
Nothing stirred anymore