Ahead of the troops a row had broken out between an Austrian column leader and a Russian general. The Russian general shouted for the cavalry to stop. The Austrian tried to explain that it wasn’t his fault – the top brass were to blame. Meanwhile the troops stood there, getting more and more bored and dispirited. After an hour’s delay they moved on at last, and began to march downhill. The fog that had thinned out on the hilltop lay thicker than ever down below where the troops were going. Ahead in the fog they heard a shot, then another, random firing at first, at irregular intervals; rat-a-tat-tat, then growing more regular and frequent. The battle of Holdbach (only a little stream) had begun.
Not expecting to confront the enemy down there at the stream, stumbling across them unexpectedly in the fog and hearing no word of encouragement from their commanding officers, frustrated to the last man by arriving too late, and with nothing visible ahead of them or on either side in the fog, the Russians loosed off a few desultory shots at the enemy, moved forward a little and then stopped again in the absence of any orders from the officers or adjutants, who were themselves blundering about in the fog on unfamiliar territory not knowing where their own divisions were. This was how the battle began for columns one, two and three, which had marched down together. Column four, with Kutuzov in it, had stayed behind on the Pratzen heights.
Down below where the action had started thick fog still obscured everything. Higher up it was getting clearer, but still nothing could be seen of the action ahead. Whether the full enemy strength was more than five miles away, as we had been assuming, or whether they were here in that patch of fog, no one knew until after eight o’clock.
Nine o’clock came. The low ground was engulfed in a sea of fog, but high up in the village of Schlapanitz, where Napoleon stood surrounded by his marshals, it was now completely clear. The sky overhead was bright blue, and the vast orb of the sun shimmered like a huge, hollow crimson float bobbing on the surface of the milky sea of fog. The French troops with Napoleon himself and all his staff were not on the other side of the streams and gullies near to the villages of Sokolnitz and Schlapanitz, which we had intended to pass before forming up ready for attack, they were on this side, so close to us that Napoleon could tell a cavalryman from a foot-soldier in our army with the naked eye. Napoleon was positioned just ahead of his marshals, mounted on a little grey Arab horse, wearing the same blue overcoat he had worn through the Italian campaign. He was staring in silence at the hills which seemed to stride up out of the sea of mist, watching the Russian troops as they moved across them in the distance, and he was listening to the sound of gunfire in the valley. Not a muscle twitched on his face, which in those days was still rather thin; his eyes glinted as he stared at one spot. His predictions had come true. Part of the Russian army was going down towards the ponds and lakes in the valley; the other part was abandoning the heights of Pratzen, which he had planned to attack, since it was the crucial position. Through the fog he scanned the hollow between two hills near the village of Pratzen and watched as the Russian columns with bayonets gleaming moved as one man down into the valleys and disappeared one by one into the mist. Intelligence received overnight, the sounds of wheels and footsteps heard during the night at the outposts and all the confusion in the marching Russian columns, everything told him that the allies thought he was a long way away, that the columns on the move near Pratzen constituted the centre of the Russian army and that the centre itself was now too weak to mount a successful attack. But still he held back; the battle did not yet begin.
Today was a day of celebration for him – the anniversary of his coronation. He had slept for a few hours before dawn and woken up feeling fresh, in good health and high spirits. Enjoying that happy frame of mind when nothing seems impossible and everything succeeds, he had mounted his horse and ridden out. He sat there now without moving, looking at the heights rising from the fog, and his cold face wore the odd look of well-earned but over-confident pleasure that you might see on the face of a lucky young man in love. Behind him stood the marshals, not daring to distract him. He stared at the heights of Pratzen, and then at the sun floating up out of the mist.
