Julian had passed through the terrible battle unscathed. It seemed to him, when fighting had ceased for the day, that it was almost miraculous a single man should have survived that storm of fire. While the fight had actually been going on, the excitement and the ardour of battle had rendered him almost insensible to the danger. With the soldiers as with their generals the capture of the three small redoubts became, as the day went on, a matter on which every thought was bent, every energy concentrated; it was no longer a battle between French and Russians, but a struggle in which each man felt that his personal honour was concerned. Each time that, with loud cheering, they stormed the blood-stained works, they felt the pride of victory; each time that, foot by foot, they were again forced backwards, there was rage in every heart and a fierce determination to return and conquer.
In such a struggle as this, when men's passions are once involved, death loses its terror; thickly as comrades may fall around, those who are still erect heed not the gaps, but with eyes fixed on the enemy in front of him, with lips set tightly together, with head bent somewhat down as men who struggle through a storm of rain, each man presses on until a shot strikes him, or he reaches the goal he aims at. At such a time the fire slackens, for each man strives to decide the struggle, with bayonet or clubbed musket. Four times did Julian's regiment climb the side of the ravine in front of the redoubts, four times were they hurled back again with ever-decreasing numbers, and when at last they found themselves, as the fire slackened, masters of the position, the men looked at each other as if waking from some terrible dream, filled with surprise that they were still alive and breathing, and faint and trembling, now that the exertion was over and the tremendous strain relaxed. When they had time to look round, they saw that but one-fourth of those who had, some hours before, advanced to the attack of the redoubt of Chewardino remained. The ground around the little earthworks was piled thickly with dead Frenchmen and Russians, and ploughed up by the iron storm that had for eight hours swept across it. Dismounted guns, ammunition boxes, muskets, and accoutrements were scattered everywhere. Even the veterans of a hundred battles had never witnessed such a scene, had never gone through so prolonged and terrible a struggle. Men were differently affected, some shook a comrade's hand with silent pressure, some stood gazing sternly and fixedly at the lines where the enemy still stood unconquered, and tears fell down many a bronzed and battle-worn face; some sobbed like children, exhausted by their emotions rather than their labours.
The loss of the officers had been prodigious. Eight generals were killed and thirty wounded, and nearly two thousand officers. The colonel and majors of Julian's regiment had fallen, and a captain, who was but sixth on the list when the battle began, now commanded. Between three o'clock and dusk the men were engaged in binding up each other's wounds, eating what food they carried in their haversacks, and searching for more in those of the fallen. Few words were spoken, and even when the order came to evacuate the position and retire to the ground they had left that morning, there was not a murmur; for the time no one seemed to care what happened, or what became of him. Once on the ground where they were to bivouac, fresh life was infused into their veins. The chill evening air braced up their nerves; great fires were lighted with brushwood, broken cartridge-boxes, and the fragments of gun-carriages and waggons; and water was brought up from the stream. Horse-flesh was soon being roasted, and as hunger and thirst were appeased, the buzz of conversation rose round the fires, and the minds as well as the tongues of men seemed to thaw from their torpor.
"Well, comrade, so you too have gone through it without a scratch," Julian's friend, the sergeant, said to him. "Well, you will never see such a fight again if you grow gray in the service. Where are those who scoffed at the Russians now? They can fight, these men. It was a battle of giants. No one could have done more than we did, and yet they did as much; but to-morrow we shall win."
"What! do you think we shall fight again to-morrow?"
"That is for the Russians to say, not for us. If they stand we must fight them again. It is a matter of life and death for us to get to Moscow. We shall win to-morrow, for Napoleon will have to bring up the Imperial Guard, 20,000 of his best troops, and the Russians put their last man into the line of battle to-day, and, never fear, we shall win. But I own I have had enough of it. Never before have I hoped that the enemy in front of us would go off without a battle, but I do so now. We want rest and quiet. When spring comes we will fight them again as often as they like, but until then I for one do not wish to hear a gun fired."
"I am sure I do not, sergeant," Julian agreed; "and I only hope that we shall get peace and quiet when we reach Moscow."
"Oh, the Russians will be sure to send in to ask for terms of peace as soon as we get there," the sergeant said confidently.
"I hope so, but I have great doubts, sergeant. When people are ready to burn their homes rather than that we should occupy them, to desert all that they have and to wander away they know not where, when they will fight as they fought to-day, I have great doubts whether they will talk of surrender. They can bring up fresh troops long before we can. They will have no lack of provisions. Their country is so vast that they know that at most we can hold but a small portion of it. It seems to me that it is not of surrender they will be thinking, but of bringing up fresh troops from every part of their empire, of drilling and organizing and preparing for the next campaign. I cannot help thinking of what would happen to us if they burnt Moscow, as they have burned half a dozen towns already."
"No people ever made such a sacrifice. What, burn the city they consider sacred!—the old capital every Russian thinks of with pride! It never can be, but if they should do so, all I can say is, God help us all. Few of us would ever go back to France."