After the long wait to get to grips with each other, both sides fought furiously. Roundshot was loaded on top of cannonball, and the advancing French infantry fell in hundreds; the French loaded their field pieces with grapeshot and poured death into the Russian ranks. The redoubt had been hastily and inexpertly constructed, and the cannon were so mounted that they could not swivel, limiting their field of fire. As dusk fell, the French outflanked the redoubt, firing into the Russian ranks defending from the rear; a bayonet charge followed, the Russians were driven back, and the redoubt was taken.
It was a blow to pride, to see the Russian musketmen scrambling back to the line; but the redoubt by that time was filled with dead bodies and dismounted guns, its earthworks so severely battered that its usefulness was now minimal to either side. Nevertheless, the fiery Prince Bagration, unable to bear so early a reversal, or to allow the French first blood, on his own initiative marched a division of his grenadiers up to attack, and after another bloody interlude, drove the French out of the redoubt they had just possessed.
The sun had long set. In the twilight the French threw in another division, and in increasing darkness, made still darker by the smoke, the battle was renewed. It became almost impossible to tell friend from foe in the hand-to-hand struggle in the darkness; completely impossible for anyone even a hundred yards away to tell what was going on. Both sides seemed to have been seized by fighting madness; neither would yield, and as more and more men fell, it seemed that the battle would go on all night. At last, at ten o’clock, Kutuzov sent Colonel Toll to Bagration to order him to give up what was by now in any case a useless position, and leave the redoubt in the hands of the French. Reluctantly, Bagration obeyed; the firing thinned out and ceased, and the Russians fell back.
During the night, Kutuzov sent Tolly and Kirov round the lines, counting divisions and making an estimate of the cost of the first action. Their calculations were depressingly high. Helped by Prince Bagration’s freakish humour, they had lost six thousand men dead and wounded, as well as the eight heavy guns, which could now be used against them. It seemed a high price to pay for pride. Bagration stuck out his jaw and refused to defend himself, renewing the argument instead for reinforcements on his wing, especially for the defence of the old post road.
Kutuzov yielded, and sent Colonel Kirov to General Tuchkov with orders to take his eight thousand men of the third corps down to the rear of Utitsa. Young Uspensky, Kirov thought as he rode towards the reserves’ position, was going to see action sooner than he had expected.
Anne heard the firing begin, and hurried out on to the terrace to look down. She saw the columns of the French advancing, heard the stirring trumpet calls, and even, tiny and far away, the ant-soldiers’ cheers. When the guns fired, the tiny figures collapsed and tumbled down the slopes of the redoubt, and more took their place. It was hard to remember that they were real men, bleeding and dying amongst the lengthening shadows.
Soon smoke from the guns obliterated the scene. As darkness fell there was nothing to be seen but the orange flashes from the gunmouths, which occasionally silhouetted some soldier in his moment of personal drama. The cannon-fire sounded heavy and flat, like doors being continuously slammed; the musket fire prickled the darkness with a pattering sound.
Pauline came out to her to try to persuade her to come in, for it was cold and beginning to drizzle, but she could not bring herself to move. Why did they go on fighting? Surely they could not fight the entire battle in darkness? She had always understood that battles ceased at sundown. Pauline came out again with a cloak, but Anne did not even notice its being draped round her shoulders. Only when the firing tailed off and finally stopped did she become aware she was cold and hungry; but still she waited, needing to know what had happened, not knowing how she could come by that knowledge.
But as the smoke slowly cleared from the valley, the bivouac fires became visible like the stars coming out, pinpricks of still light in the blackness, spreading across the valley and up the hillside. There seemed a comfortingly large number of them. Of the Shevardino redoubt she could see nothing. It lay in the blackness between the two armies, and the dead needed no cooking-fire. She wouldn’t think of that: she fixed her mind instead on the Russian soldiers cooking soup and buckwheat porridge in their bivouacs, and smoking their pipes and telling stories. The fires said that everything was still all right.
The cloak round her shoulders was dewed with rain. She shivered suddenly, and went in to supper and to bed.
The next morning, Friday the 6th of September, she was up early. She thought that the battle would probably begin at dawn; she dressed herself hastily without waiting for Pauline, and hurried out into the grey morning with her hair still hanging loose down her back. But all was quiet. Down below, there were the orange points of cooking-fires, their smoke rising in faint ribbons in the damp air. There were movements in the horse lines as the troopers tended their animals; small domestic comings and goings amongst the infantry lines. As the sun came up, it caught and flashed on stacked bayonet tips, glowed on the polished bronze of mute gun barrels. The sun alone seemed to have any sense of urgency.
She turned her eyes to the French camp, and saw similar activity. But there was one person riding from place to place on a white horse, and she wondered if that were Napoleon himself, inspecting his lines – the whole world knew of his predilection for white horses. She remembered him as she had seen him in Paris, the cold piercing eyes which his smile never touched. She reached into herself for some burning hatred to throw out at him, as if she might curse him from on high like an old Roman deity; but she felt nothing for him. The scene below was like something in a theatre: a story whose ending she wanted to know. It was not real life.
There was no battle. Throughout the day the two armies sat facing each other, and went on with their preparations, as if they knew in some way that it was not to be today. Some common consent seemed to invest them – as swallows will gather through a series of autumn days, and then fly all at once on one day no different, to the observer, from its predecessors.
Saturday, the 7th of September, Anne came out on to the terrace before sunrise, and saw the whole valley filled with white fog. The air was chill, the grass silver-grey with a heavy dew. She thought of the soldiers, waking on the hard earth to find their blankets heavy with it; the patient tethered horses, their thick manes beaded as if sewn with pearls, their sweet breath smoking on the cold air. She imagined them stirring, shifting from foot to foot and shaking themselves as the camp came slowly awake. Someone would rake up the cooking-fire embers, shivering as the thought of warmth made the dawn seem chillier; a twig thrust into the red and fluttering heart would suddenly bloom a golden crocus flame. The first troopers, stretching their stiff legs, banging their cold hands together, would go towards the horses; someone would chirrup, and a ripple would pass down the line: heads turning, pricked ears and soft whickers of eagerness as they looked for their morning feed.
He would be there, too, waking chilled under a blanket on his army cot; feeling the first morning stiffness of limbs, his old campaigner’s mind waking before his body. Would he think of her? Perhaps for an instant, just once, before a thousand preoccupations, discarded for the brief night’s sleep, crowded in on him. Adonis would come into his tent with hot water for shaving, bringing the damp smell of fog with him. She envied Adonis briefly and passionately for being able to be with him and useful to him; she was jealous of their man’s intimacy which gave Adonis a place where she could not be.