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Volume I, Part Three, Chapter XIII

At five o'clock in the morning it was still quite dark. The troops of the center, the reserves, and Bagration's right flank stood still; but on the left flank the columns of infantry, cavalry, and artillery, which were to be the first to descend from the heights to attack the French right flank and drive it, according to the disposition, into the Bohemian mountains, were already stirring and beginning to rise from their bivouacs. The smoke of the campfires, into which everything superfluous was thrown, made the eyes smart. It was cold and dark. The officers hurriedly drank tea and breakfasted, the soldiers munched biscuit and beat a tattoo with their feet to warm themselves, and flocked round the fires throwing into the flames the remains of huts, chairs, tables, wheels, tubs, and everything superfluous that could not be taken along. Austrian guides moved among the Russian troops and served as heralds of the advance. As soon as an Austrian officer appeared near a regimental commander's quarters, the regiment began to move: the soldiers ran from the fires, thrust their pipes into their boots, their little bags into the carts, grabbed their muskets, and fell into line. The officers buttoned up their coats, put on their swords and pouches, and moved along the ranks shouting; the trainmen and orderlies harnessed, packed, and tied down the wagons. The adjutants, battalion and regimental commanders mounted, crossed themselves, gave their last orders, instructions, and commissions to the baggage men who remained behind, and the monotonous tramp of thousands of feet resounded. The columns moved forward, not knowing where they were going and unable to see from the people around them, from the smoke, and from the increasing fog, either the locality they were leaving or the one they were entering.

A soldier on the march is as hemmed in and borne along by his regiment as a sailor is by the ship on which he is sailing. However far he may have walked, into whatever strange, unknown, and dangerous latitudes he may have entered, around him — as for the sailor the same decks, masts, and rigging of his ship everywhere and always — are the same comrades, the same ranks, the same sergeant major Ivan Mitrich, the same company dog Zhuchka, the same commanders. A soldier rarely wishes to know the latitudes in which his whole ship is situated; but on the day of battle, God knows how and whence, a single stern note sounds in the moral atmosphere of the army, announcing the approach of something decisive and solemn, and awakening in them an unusual curiosity. Soldiers on days of battle try excitedly to step outside the interests of their regiment; they listen attentively, look about, and eagerly ask what is going on around them.

The fog had grown so dense that, though it was growing light, they could not see ten paces ahead. Bushes looked like gigantic trees, level ground like precipices and slopes. Anywhere, on any side, they might encounter an enemy invisible ten paces off. But the columns advanced for a long time, always in the same fog, descending and ascending hills, avoiding gardens and enclosures, over new and unintelligible ground, nowhere encountering the enemy. On the contrary, the soldiers became aware that our Russian columns were moving in the same direction, now in front, now behind, on all sides. Every soldier felt glad at heart to know that to the same place where he was going, that is, to the unknown, many, many more of our men were going.

— There now, the Kursk men have gone past, — they said in the ranks.

— It's terrible, brother, what a lot of our troops have gathered! In the evening I looked at the fires they lit, and there was no end to them. Like Moscow, in a word!

Though none of the column commanders rode up to the ranks or talked to the soldiers (the column commanders, as we saw at the council of war, were out of humor and dissatisfied with the undertaking, and therefore merely carried out orders and did not concern themselves with cheering the soldiers), in spite of this, the soldiers marched cheerfully, as they always do when going into action, especially an offensive one. But after marching for about an hour in the thick fog, the greater part of the troops had to halt, and an unpleasant consciousness of the disorder and confusion taking place spread through the ranks. How this consciousness is transmitted is very difficult to define; but it is certain that it is transmitted with extraordinary accuracy, and spreads rapidly, imperceptibly, and irresistibly, like water down a ravine. Had the Russian army been alone, without allies, it might perhaps have been a long time before this consciousness of disorder became a general conviction; but now, attributing the cause of the disorders with special pleasure and naturalness to the stupid Germans, everyone was convinced that a harmful confusion was occurring, which had been caused by the sausage makers.

— Why have we stopped? Have they blocked the way? Or have we already come across the French?

— No, we don't hear them. Otherwise they'd have started firing.

— They were in such a hurry to get us started, and now we've marched out and stopped in the middle of a field for no reason, — it's all those damned Germans muddling things up. What stupid devils!

— I'd have sent them on ahead, I would. But no, they're probably crowding together behind us. So now we stand here hungry.

— I say, will it be soon? They say the cavalry has blocked the road, — said an officer.

— Ah, those damned Germans, they don't know their own country, — said another.

— What division are you? — shouted an adjutant, riding up.

— The Eighteenth.

— Then why are you here? You ought to have been in front long ago; now you won't get there before evening.

— What foolish orders; they don't know what they're doing themselves, — said the officer, and rode off.

Then a general rode past and shouted something angrily, not in Russian.

— Tafa-lafa, what's he muttering, you can't make out a thing, — said a soldier, mimicking the general who had ridden away. — I'd shoot them, the scoundrels!

— We were ordered to be at the place by eight o'clock, and we haven't done half the distance. Fine orders these are! — was repeated from different sides.

And the feeling of energy with which the troops had started to go into action began to turn into vexation and anger at the stupid arrangements and at the Germans.

The cause of the confusion was that while the Austrian cavalry was moving on the left flank, the higher command found that our center was too far from the right flank, and all the cavalry was ordered to cross over to the right side. Several thousand cavalry crossed in front of the infantry, and the infantry had to wait.

At the front an altercation occurred between an Austrian guide and a Russian general. The Russian general shouted, demanding that the cavalry be halted; the Austrian proved that the fault was not his, but the higher command's. Meanwhile the troops stood, growing bored and dispirited. After an hour's delay, the troops finally moved on again and began to descend the hill. The fog that was clearing on the hill only spread the thicker in the hollows where the troops were descending. In front, in the fog, one shot, then another rang out, at first irregularly at different intervals: tratta... tat, and then more smoothly and frequently, and an action began over the Goldbach stream.

Not expecting to meet the enemy down by the stream, and having stumbled upon him unexpectedly in the fog, hearing no word of encouragement from their higher commanders, with a consciousness spreading through the troops that they were late, and, above all, unable to see anything in front or around them in the thick fog, the Russians exchanged fire with the enemy lazily and slowly, advanced and halted again, receiving no timely orders from their commanders or adjutants, who wandered about in the fog in an unfamiliar locality, unable to find their own units of troops. Thus the action began for the first, second, and third columns, which had gone down into the valley. The fourth column, with which Kutuzov himself was, stood on the Pratzen heights.

In the hollows where the action had begun there was still a thick fog; higher up it had cleared, but nothing could yet be seen of what was happening in front. Whether all the enemy's forces were, as we supposed, ten versts away from us, or whether he was here, in this line of fog, — no one knew until past eight o'clock.

It was nine o'clock in the morning. The fog lay like an unbroken sea in the hollows, but at the village of Schlapanitz, on the height where Napoleon stood surrounded by his marshals, it was quite light. Above him was a clear blue sky, and the huge orb of the sun, like an immense hollow crimson float, undulated on the surface of the milky sea of fog. Not only all the French troops, but Napoleon himself with his staff were not on the far side of the streams and hollows of the villages of Sokolnitz and Schlapanitz, behind which we intended to take up our position and begin the action, but on this side, so close to our troops that Napoleon could distinguish a horseman from an infantryman in our army with the naked eye. Napoleon stood somewhat in advance of his marshals on a small gray Arab horse, wearing the blue overcoat in which he had made the Italian campaign. He gazed silently at the hills that seemed to rise out of the sea of fog, and along which the Russian troops were moving in the distance, and he listened to the sounds of firing in the hollow. At that time not a single muscle of his thin face moved; his bright eyes were fixed motionless on one spot. His calculations had proved correct. Part of the Russian troops had already descended into the valley toward the ponds and lakes, and part were vacating those Pratzen heights which he intended to attack and regarded as the key to the position. He saw through the fog how, in a depression formed by two hills near the village of Pratzen, the Russian columns, their bayonets glittering, were all moving in the same direction towards the hollows, disappearing one after another into the sea of fog. From information he had received the evening before, from the sounds of wheels and footsteps heard by the outposts during the night, from the disorderly movement of the Russian columns, and from all calculations, he saw clearly that the allies believed him to be far in front of them, that the columns moving near Pratzen constituted the center of the Russian army, and that the center was already sufficiently weakened to be attacked successfully. But he still did not begin the engagement.

Today was a solemn day for him — the anniversary of his coronation. Before dawn he had dozed for a few hours, and then, healthy, cheerful, fresh, in that happy frame of mind in which everything seems possible and everything succeeds, he mounted his horse and rode out into the field. He stood motionless, looking at the heights visible above the fog, and on his cold face was that special shade of self-confident, well-deserved happiness that is seen on the face of a boy in love and happy. The marshals stood behind him and did not dare to distract his attention. He looked now at the Pratzen heights, now at the sun emerging from the fog.

When the sun had completely emerged from the fog, and splashed the fields and the fog with blinding brilliance (as if he had only been waiting for this to begin the action), he drew the glove from his handsome white hand, made a sign with it to the marshals, and gave the order to begin the action. The marshals, accompanied by their adjutants, galloped off in different directions, and a few minutes later the main forces of the French army moved rapidly toward those Pratzen heights which were being increasingly emptied by the Russian troops descending to the left into the hollow.