We quickly attained the foot of the redoubt; the palisades had been shattered, and the earth ploughed up by our balls. The soldiers rushed upon these new ruins with cries of “Vive l’Empereur!” with more vigor than one would have expected to hear from men who had already cheered so much.
I raised my eyes, and never shall I forget the spectacle that I saw. Most of the smoke had lifted and remained suspended like a canopy about twenty feet above the redoubt. Through a bluish vapor, behind their half-ruined parapet, one could descry the Russian grenadiers, firearms raised, immobile as statues. I think I can see each soldier yet, the left eye fastened upon us, the right hidden behind his levelled musket. In an embrasure, a few feet from us, a man holding a lighted fuse stood beside a cannon.
I shuddered, and I believed that my last hour had come.
“The dance is about to commence,” cried out my captain. “Good-night!”
These were the last words that I heard him utter.
A roll of drums resounded within the redoubt. I saw every musket lowered. I closed my eyes, and I heard an appalling crash, followed by cries and groans. I opened my eyes, surprised to find myself still living. The redoubt was anew enveloped in smoke. I was surrounded with the bleeding and the dead. My captain was stretched out at my feet: his head had been crushed by a bullet, and I was covered with his brains and his blood. Of all my company none remained but six men and me.
To this carnage succeeded a moment of stupor. The colonel, putting his hat on the point of his sword, was the first to scale the parapet, crying: “Vive l’Empereur!” He was followed instantly by all the survivors. I do not remember clearly just what followed. We entered within the redoubt, how I do not know. We fought body to body amid a smoke so dense that we could not see one another. I believe that I smote, for I found my sabre was all bloody. At last I heard the cry, “Victory!” and, the smoke diminishing, I saw blood and dead bodies completely covering the earthworks of the redoubt. The cannons especially were buried beneath piles of corpses. About two hundred men, in the French uniform, were grouped without order, some loading their muskets, others wiping their bayonets. Eleven hundred Russian prisoners were with them.
The colonel was lying all covered with blood upon a broken caisson near the entrance. Several soldiers bestirred themselves around him: I approached.
“Where is the senior captain?” he inquired of a sergeant.
The sergeant shrugged his shoulders in a manner most expressive.