Napoleon had already divined their secret.  In his order of battle he took his troops into his confidence, telling them that, while the enemy marched to turn his right, they would expose their flank to his blows.  To announce this beforehand was strangely bold, and it has been thought that he had the plan from some traitor on the enemy’s staff.  No proof of this has been given; and such an explanation seems superfluous to those who have observed Napoleon’s uncanny power of fathoming his adversary’s designs.  The idea of withdrawing one wing in order to tempt the foe unduly to prolong his line on that side, and then to crush it at the centre, or sever it from the centre, is common both to Castiglione and Austerlitz.  It is true, the peculiarities of the ground, the ardour of the Russian attack, and the vastness of the operations lent to the present conflict a splendour and a horror which Castiglione lacked.  But the tactics which won both battles were fundamentally the same.

He had studied the ground in front of Austerlitz; and the priceless gift of strategic imagination revealed to him what a rash and showy leader would be certain to do on that ground;[42] he tempted him to it, and the announcement of the enemy’s plan to the French soldiery supplied the touch of good comradeship which insured their utmost devotion on the morrow.  At midnight, as he returned from visiting the outposts, the soldiers greeted him with a weird illumination:  by a common impulse they tore down the straw from their rude shelters and held aloft the burning wisps on long poles, dancing the while in honour of the short gray-coated figure, and shouting, “It is the anniversary of the coronation.  Long live the Emperor.”  Thus was the great day ushered in.  The welkin glowed with this tribute of an army’s heroworship:  the frost-laden clouds echoed back the multitudinous acclaim; and the Russians, as they swung forward their left, surmised that, after all, the French would stand their ground and fight, whilst others saw in the flare a signal that Napoleon was once more about to retreat.

December the 2nd may well be the most famous day of the Napoleonic calendar:  it was the day of his coronation, it was the day of Austerlitz, and, a generation later, another Napoleon chose it for his coup d’etat.  The “sun of Austerlitz,” which the nephew then hailed, looked down on a spectacle far different from that which he wished to gild with borrowed splendour.  Struggling dimly through dense banks of mist, it shone on the faces of 73,000 Frenchmen resolved to conquer or to die:  it cast weird shadows before the gray columns of Russia and the white-coats of Austria as they pressed in serried ranks towards the frozen swamps of the Goldbach.  At first the allies found little opposition; and Kienmayer’s horse cleared the French from Tellnitz and the level ground beyond.  But Friant’s division, hurrying up from the west, restored the fight and drove the first assailants from the village.  Others, however, were pressing on, twenty-nine battalions strong, and not all the tenacious bravery of Davoust’s soldiery availed to hold that spot.  Nor was it necessary.  Napoleon’s plan was to let the allied left compromise itself on this side, while he rained the decisive blows at its joint with the centre on the southern spur of the Pratzenberg.