The artillery came trotting out from the column of troops behind Murat, and rode off down the Arbat. When they got to the end of Vozdvizhenka the artillery came to a halt and formed up in the square. Several French officers supervised the siting and spacing of the cannons, and looked across at the Kremlin through a telescope.
The Kremlin bells were ringing for evening service, and the sound of them worried the French. They could only take this as a call to arms. A few infantrymen ran over to the Kutafyev gate. The entry was barricaded with beams and planks. Two musket shots rang out from the gateway the moment it was approached by an officer with some of his men. The general standing by the cannons yelled across some words of command, and the officer and the soldiers ran back.
Three more shots came from the gate. One grazed the leg of a French soldier, and a few voices could be heard uttering strange cries from behind the barricade. The faces of the French general, the officers and men changed in a flash, as if someone had given an order, expressions of quiet good humour giving way to looks of grim determination, close concentration and readiness for action and suffering. To every last man from the marshal to the humblest soldier, this was now not one of the streets in Moscow or the Trinity gate; it was another battlefield, and bloodshed was likely. They all stood ready to fight. The shouting on the other side of the gateway died down. The cannons were brought forward. The gunners blew the ash off their burnt-down linstocks. An officer shouted ‘Fire!’ and two canister-shots whistled over one after another. The shot rattled against the stone gateway, the beams and barriers, and two wavering smoke-clouds rose above the square.
A few seconds after the echoes of the shots had died away over the stonework of the Kremlin, the French heard a strange sound overhead. Thousands of jackdaws soared up from the walls and circled round in the air with raucous cawing and a great flapping of wings. Along with this sound a solitary human cry was heard from the gate, and through the smoke emerged the figure of a bare-headed man wearing a long peasant’s coat. He held up his musket and took aim at the French. ‘Fire!’ repeated the artillery officer, and a musket shot and two cannon shots rang out simultaneously. Once again the gate was enveloped in smoke.
There was now no movement from behind the barricade, and the French infantrymen approached the gate with their officers. There in the gateway lay seven Russians, three wounded and four dead. Two men in long peasant coats were seen running away along the walls down towards Znamenka.
‘Get rid of this lot,’ said the officer, pointing to the beams and the dead bodies. The French soldiers finished off the wounded, and threw the dead bodies over the parapet. Who these men were nobody knew. They were dismissed in a few words, ‘Get rid of this lot’, thrown down below and later cleared away to avoid a stink. The historian Thiers is unique in devoting a few eloquent lines to their memory: ‘These wretched men had invaded the sacred citadel, taken weapons from the arsenal and fired on the French (the wretches). Some of them were dispatched with swords, and the Kremlin was purged of their presence.’
Murat was informed that the way had been cleared. The French came in through the gate and began to set up camp on Senate Square. The soldiers threw chairs down into the square from the Senate House windows and lit fires with them.
Other detachments marched past the Kremlin and pitched camp along Moroseyka, Lubyanka and Pokrovka. Others set themselves up in Vozdvizhenka, Znamenka, Nikolsky and Tverskoy. With no hosts available, the French decided not to take over any houses; instead, they pitched camp as normal, but out in the town.
