The war was in full swing, victory favouring the French troops, for the most part, though occasionally she would hearten the defending Russians with a smile or two of encouragement. Louise, with her fellow recruits, had joined Ney's army corps. Already she had been present in several minor engagements and had even received a slight flesh wound in the left hand. The army surgeon attending her had remarked upon the smallness of her hand. "It might be a woman's!" he said with a laugh. "There's nothing here to keep you out of the fun," he added; "get back to the colours as soon as you please."
The Russian General, Barclay de Tolly, was throughout unwilling to expose his troops to the risk of battle. He was no coward. In the face of much patriotic opposition from his fellow generals and the nation at large, he adhered to his own tactics, which were to lure the enemy constantly forward, striking only when a blow could be dealt with effect. The peasantry, patriots to a man, beseeched their general to bid them set fire to their standing crops, to their very homes and granaries, that the enemy might find but a desolate waste in his advance. Thousands of villages were so destroyed, their inhabitants preferring to wander homeless and hungry into the woods rather than allow the enemy to profit, even for a night, by the use of their property.
Michel Prevost, as Louise was called among her fellows, was soon a favourite in her regiment. No one had the slightest suspicion that she was anything but what she pretended to be, a young conscript like thousands of others who went to swell the Grande Armée. Occasionally remarks would be made—jokes as to her complexion, which was fair for a man's; her slight though well-knit figure, her modesty, her obvious dislike for coarse topics of conversation, but though occasionally a man might declare with a laugh that Michel was as much woman as man, barring his fencing, which was second to none, no one dreamed that in saying such a thing he was nearer the truth than he knew.
Never a day passed but Louise looked anxiously for the Baron d'Estreville. He belonged, she knew, to a fashionable light cavalry regiment, and this regiment she saw more than once, in the distance; but during the first month of her campaigning she never succeeded in catching a glimpse of her friend, an unkind arrangement of destiny which caused Louise to sigh daily.
Then came a day of stress and battle.
Barclay de Tolly had decided to vary, for once, his tactics by staying for a day his retrograde movement. If attacked and beaten, he could immediately recommence his slow retreat upon Moscow. Should he prove victorious—which he scarcely expected—it might be possible to inflict a blow upon Napoleon which, at this crisis, would be fatal to his further advance. Barclay decided upon this stand in deference to the complaints of his army. The result was disastrous, and involved, besides the loss of thousands of men, the burning and destruction of the splendid old city of Smolensk, on the Dnieper, into which stronghold he had thrown himself in his desperate attempt to stay the advance of the French.
Napoleon made the remark that the blazing town "reminded him of Naples during an eruption of Vesuvius".
During this day of fighting Louise suffered a shock, for she not only saw Henri close at hand for the first time during the campaign, but almost at the moment of recognising him, as he rode by at the head of his troop of Hussars, saw him also struck by a shot and knocked senseless from his saddle.
Her own regiment was at the moment rushing forward with cheers to assault a house held by marksmen of the enemy, whose shots from the windows had been a serious annoyance for an hour or more, and acting upon the inspiration of the moment Louise fell forward upon her face, as though struck by a bullet. She saw her comrades go forward shouting, laughing, cursing, leaving a man here and half a dozen there; she saw Henri's Hussars ride on also; then she rose and ran to the spot where she had seen the Baron fall.
Henri was unconscious but alive. She bathed his temples with tepid fluid from her own water-bottle. A bullet, she now saw, had passed through his left shoulder. She ripped the tunic and tore away the shirt and washed the wound. It bled fiercely, but she was able to stop the bleeding by means of a tight bandage.