The battle began with a barrage mounted by hundreds of guns on both sides. Then, when the whole plain was covered with smoke, the French brought forward two righthand divisions under Desaix and Compans to attack the flèches, while the Viceroy’s regiments advanced on Borodino from the left. The flèches were not much more than half a mile from the Shevardino redoubt, where Napoleon was standing, but Borodino was nearly two miles further away in a straight line, so Napoleon could never have seen what was going on over there, especially with the intermingling of smoke and fog that completely obscured the whole locality. The soldiers of Desaix’s division moving in on the flèches remained visible only as far as the hollow between them and their target, where they dropped out of sight, and the smoke from cannon and musket in the flèches became dense enough to screen the whole slope on the far side. Through the smoke you could catch odd glimpses of black shapes likely to be men, and the occasional glint of a bayonet. But from the Shevardino redoubt you could not tell whether they were standing still or moving, or whether they were French or Russian.
The sun was now shining brightly, and its angled rays shone straight on Napoleon’s face as he looked over towards the flèches, shielding his eyes with one hand. Smoke wreathed over the ground in front of the flèches; at one moment the smoke itself seemed to move, the next it was the troops who seemed to be moving through the smoke. You might have heard the occasional shout through all the firing, but no one could tell what was going on over there.
Napoleon stood on his mound and peered through a telescope. There in the tiny circle of glass he could see smoke and soldiers, sometimes his own men, sometimes Russians, but when he looked again with the naked eye he could not find the place he had just been looking at. He walked down the mound, and started pacing up and down at the bottom.
From time to time he would stand still, listen carefully to the firing and peer out intently across the battlefield.
It was just not possible to work out what was happening in the flèches, not from down here where he was standing, not from the top of the mound where some of his generals were standing, not even inside the flèches themselves, because they were now constantly changing hands, occupied now by French, now by Russian soldiers, living, dead or wounded, panicking and scared out of their wits. For hours on end this was a scene of incessant cannon – and musket-fire, with control shifting between Russians and French, infantry and cavalry. They surged forward, fell, fired their guns, fought hand to hand, not knowing what to do with each other; all they could do was yell out and run back again.
Adjutants sent out by Napoleon and orderlies dispatched by the marshals were continually galloping in from the field with reports on the progress of the battle, but they were all false, partly because in the heat of battle no one can say what is actually happening at a given moment, partly because many of the adjutants never got to the battlefield as such, all they did was hand on what they had heard from other people, and also because in the time it took for an adjutant to ride the couple of miles that separated him from Napoleon circumstances would have changed, and the news he was bringing was already out of date. Thus an adjutant came galloping in from the Viceroy with news that Borodino had been taken and the bridge over the Kolocha was in French hands. What the adjutant wanted to know from Napoleon was: should the troops cross the bridge? Napoleon sent an order for them to form up on the far side and wait, but even as he issued it, in fact moments after the adjutant had set out from Borodino, the bridge had been retaken by the Russians and burnt down, in the very skirmish Pierre had become involved in first thing that morning.
Another adjutant galloped in ashen-faced and scared stiff from the region of the flèches, bringing word that the attack had been repulsed, Compans was wounded and Davout had been killed, while in actual fact the flèches had been captured by a different French unit just as the adjutant was being told they were lost, and Davout was alive and well except for a bit of bruising. Working on the basis of false reports like these, Napoleon issued a stream of instructions which had either been carried out already, or were not carried out at all, and never could have been.
