The artillery came trotting out from the column following Murat, and advanced along Arbaty. When they reached the end of Vosdvizhenka the artillery halted and drew up in the square. Several French officers superintended the placing of the cannon some distance apart, and looked at the Kremlin through a field-glass. A bell was ringing in the Kremlin for evening service, and that sound troubled the French. They supposed that it was the call to arms. Several infantry soldiers ran to the Kutaf- yev gateway. A barricade of beams and planks lay across the gateway. Two musket shots rang out from the gates, just as an officer with some men were running up to them. The general standing by the cannons shouted some words of command to the officer, and the officer and the soldiers ran back.
Three more shots were heard from the gate. One shot grazed the leg of a French soldier, and a strange shout of several voices rose from behind the barricade. Instantaneously, as though at the word of command, the expression of good humour and serenity on the faces of the French general, officers, and men was replaced by a stubborn, concentrated expression of readiness for conflict and suffering. To all of them, from the marshal to the lowest soldier, this place was not Vosdvizhenka, Mohova, Kutaf, and the Troitsky gates; it was a new battlefield, likely to be the scene of a bloody conflict. And all were ready for that conflict. The shouts from the gates died away. The cannons were moved forward. The artillerymen quenched the burning linstocks. An officer shouted ‘Fire!’ and two whistling sounds of clinking tin rang out one after another. The grapeshot fell rattling on the stone of the gateway, on the beams and screens of planks, and two clouds of smoke rolled over the square.
Some instants after the echoes of the shots had died away over the stone Kremlin, a strange sound was heard over the heads of the French. An immense flock of jackdaws rose above the walls and swept round in the air with loud caws, and the whir of thousands of wings. Together with this sound, there rose a solitary human cry at the gate, and the figure of a man bareheaded, in a long peasant’s coat, came into sight through the smoke. Holding a gun up, he took aim at the French. ‘Fire! ’ repeated the artillery officer, and at the same instant one rifle shot and two cannon shots were heard. The gate was again hidden in smoke.
Nothing more stirred behind the barricade, and the French infantry soldiers with their officers passed in at the gate. In the gateway lay three
Tien wounded and four dead. Two men in long peasant-coats had run iway along the walls toward Znamenka.
‘Clear this away,’ said the officer, pointing to the beams and the corpses; and the French soldiers finished off the wounded, and flung the corpses over the fence below. Who these men were nobody knew. ‘Clear this away! ’ was all that was said of them, and they were flung away that they might not stink. Thiers has indeed devoted some eloquent lines to their memories. ‘These wretches had invaded the sacred citadel, had taken possession of the guns of the arsenal, and fired (the wretches) on the French. Some of them were sabred, and the Kremlin was purged of their presence.’
Murat was informed that the way had been cleared. The French entered the gates, and began pitching their camp on Senate-house Square. The soldiers flung the chairs out of the windows of the Senate-house into the square, and began making fires.
Other detachments marched across the Kremlin and encamped in Moroseyka, Lubyanka, and Pokrovka. Others pitched their camps in Vosdvizhenka, Znamenka, Nikolskaya, and Tverskaya. Not finding citizens to entertain them, the French everywhere bivouacked as in a camp pitched in a town, instead of quartering themselves on the houses.
