‘Of course, you never show fear to your men – they expect you to be more than human. That’s what you’re there for. And hiding it from them helps you hide it from yourself.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Uspensky, and his eyes were shining with hero worship now. ‘I understand, sir.’
Kirov began to find it a little embarrassing, and with a kindly nod, mounted his horse and rode on. It did not seem so very long ago that he was Uspensky’s age, he thought wryly; now he was old enough to be regarded by him as a hero.
On the slope above the main battle area he paused and looked down. The bivouac fires were burning yellow and gold all across the plain, and around them the regular troops were polishing the buttons and boots of their best uniforms in preparation for the great day. Under the admiring eyes of the militiamen, they sang satisfyingly mournful songs, and boasted of the drunken nights they would enjoy in Moscow after the victory. Kirov felt a brief spasm of pity for them. Conscription to the ranks was for life: this war had brought them far from their home villages, which, win or lose, they would never see again. The regiment was now their home, and cold comfort that must be.
He turned his gaze upwards towards the hills, where so lately he had rested in Anne’s arms. She must be safely away by now, he thought, and that was his cold comfort: the selfish part of him wanted her near. He thought briefly about making love with her, and shivered. Those thoughts were best not indulged in now; but afterwards, he thought, afterwards he was going to retire from public service – definitely retire this time – and dedicate the rest of his life to selfish pleasure. When this was over, he never wanted to go further from home than the boundaries of his estate.
Anne had watched the regiments marching up, watching with a mixture of anxiety and ironic amusement as they deployed themselves across the plain below her. So it was to be here, then, the battle for Russia! She felt a painful kind of excitement which made her stomach flutter. Since Vilna, nearly three months ago, everyone in Russia – perhaps everyone in the world – had been waiting for the clash between these two great forces; now it was to be here, in this very place! Borodino – an utterly unimportant little country town on a sleepy and sluggish little river, where nothing had ever happened, probably, in its entire history, more serious than a petty theft or a drunken tavern brawl. Now chance had marked it out for fame. She was going to witness history in the making. The prospect was terrifying, and yet exhilarating. Not for anything would she abandon her post now.
She expected some protest or rebellion from her servants, and eyed them cautiously as they watched the troops marching up; but they seemed to feel safe, or at least detached from the scene down below. Stenka and Zina, indeed, hardly cast a glance that way when their duties brought them on to the terrace. They had lived in this house all their lives, and it would never cross their minds to leave it. If the French had marched right in here, they would have effaced themselves, endured what came, and simply waited with peasant stoicism for the invaders to leave so that they could resume their lives.
Adonis came to deliver the Count’s message, which was the expected one – that she should leave at once for a place of safety. She received it with outward docility, nodded obediently as though she were already packed and poised to leave; but when she met Adonis’s eye, she saw that he knew she would not go.
‘What will you tell him?’ she asked, half anxious, half defiant.
‘Nothing, now,’ he said. ‘It would do no good to worry him. Let him think you are safe away. If the need arises, I will tell him you are here.’
They regarded each other steadily for a moment, and then Anne’s hands unclenched. ‘Thank you,’ she said simply. ‘You are a good friend to him – and to me.’
He shrugged. ‘We both serve him in our own ways.’ He looked around. ‘You’ll be safe enough here, unless from deserters – it’s too high and too far for the battle or the wounded. Have you a gun?’
Her eyebrows rose, but she said, ‘There is a gun room. This used to be a hunting lodge.’
Adonis grunted. ‘Take me there. Deserters on the run are usually desperate fellows. I had better show you how to load and fire a gun, just in case.’
‘Oh, but I–’
‘I have to be able to face him, if he is angry with me for not making you go. When he is angry with me,’ he amended indifferently.
‘You could not make me. It is not your responsibility.’
‘He will know that, afterwards. But I will show you all the same.’
When he had gone, she had called her male servants together – coachman, groom and footman – and asked if any of them knew how to handle a gun. They all said they did; and after a brief pause, the coachman asked diffidently whether the French would come here.
‘No. It is too far from the road. But there may possibly be deserters on the run,’ she said, eyeing them cautiously. This was the moment, she thought, when their fears would surface.
But they had nodded calmly, and the coachman had said, ‘We can frighten them off all right, Barina. Don’t be afraid.’
‘No,’ she said, enormous relief vying with gratitude for their quiet loyalty. ‘No, I’m not afraid.’
Early in the morning of the 5th of September the sound of gunfire was heard from the direction of the Gzhatsk – presumably a clash between the advancing French and Miloradovich’s rearguard. Shortly afterwards the Cossack detachment came cantering over the brow of the hill, and after them the rearguard, retreating at a quick march to withdraw behind the safety of the Russian lines.
Within minutes, the French advance guard – General Murat’s famous cavalry – appeared over the last rise and halted at the sight of the Russians drawn up below them. There was a stirring in the Russian ranks – for some of them, it was the first sight they had had of the enemy before whom they had been withdrawing for three months. Evidently the French felt something of the same interest: faintly on the breeze they could be heard cheering, and there was a flash in the sun as Murat himself drew his sword and held it aloft in a challenging salute.
The Russians replied with a roar. Loudest of all cheered the Cossacks, who, as part of the rearguard, had had a great deal of contact with Murat, whom they always referred to by his title of King of Naples. They had an exaggerated respect for him. His daring and courage in the face of the enemy was legendary; they liked his flamboyant, colourful clothing, his horsemanship, the way he was always to the front of his men, and the last to withdraw. He was like themselves, they thought, and they had agreed privately that if he was captured by them, he was not to be killed.
All day the French troops marched up, and were disposed across the field, while the Russian commanders observed them through field glasses, noting happily the depth of mud on their trousers and the thinness of their horses, and noting unhappily the still-huge number of them. The sun began to slide down the afternoon sky, dipping behind the clouds on the horizon, throwing them into dark relief, so that they stretched like tattered, smoke-blackened banners over the sunset sky, their edges rimmed in liquid fire. It was a sky of portent, Kirov thought; and then smiled at himself. Any kind of sky would have been portentous, when two armies finally took position for battle within sight of each other.
Towards sunset, while the French rearguard was still marching up, Napoleon ordered the first attack, by a division of artillery and two of infantry, on the Russian forward position, the Shevardino redoubt. A tense hush fell across the main body of the Russian army as the French artillery peeled off and formed a line behind which the two columns marched steadily forward towards the redoubt. It was a silence of nervous tension, yet there was pleasure in it too, that at last the waiting was over. Suddenly the French field pieces spat fire, and sprays of earth shot upwards into the golden afternoon air; the guns of the redoubt boomed in answer, the sound echoing flatly off the hills; and the hillock disappeared behind a pall of smoke.