Count Lobau was dismayed by so great a disaster, which he believed to be his own work.  The emperor, seated in front of his tent, contemplated in silence this awful spectacle.  It was as yet impossible to ascertain either the cause or the result, and the night was passed under arms.

About three in the morning, one of Davoust’s subalterns ventured to the foot of the wall, which he scaled without noise.  Emboldened by the silence which reigned around him, he penetrated into the city; all at once several voices and the Sclavonian accent were heard, and the Frenchman, surprised and surrounded, thought that he had nothing to do but to sell his life dearly, or surrender.  The first rays of the dawn, however, showed him, in those whom he mistook for enemies, some of Poniatowski’s Poles.  They had been the first to enter the city, which Barclay had just evacuated.

After Smolensk had been reconnoitred and its approaches cleared, the army entered the walls:  it traversed the reeking and blood-stained ruins with its accustomed order, pomp, and martial music, triumphing over the deserted wreck, and having no other witness of its glory but itself.  A show without spectators, an almost fruitless victory, a sanguinary glory, of which the smoke that surrounded us, and seemed to be our only conquest, was but too faithful an emblem.

CHAP.  V.

When the emperor knew that Smolensk was entirely occupied, and its fires almost extinguished, and when day and the different reports had sufficiently instructed him; when, in short, he saw that there, as at the Niemen, at Wilna, at Witepsk, the phantom of victory, which allured him forward, and which he always imagined himself to be on the point of seizing, had once more eluded his grasp, he proceeded slowly towards his barren conquest.  He inspected the field of battle, according to his custom, in order to appreciate the value of the attack, the merit of the resistance, and the loss on both sides.

He found it strewed with a great number of Russian dead, and very few of ours.  Most of them, especially the French, had been stripped; they might be known by the whiteness of their skin, and by their forms less bony and muscular than those of the Russians.  Melancholy review of the dead and dying! dismal account to make up and to render!  The pain felt by the emperor might be inferred from the contraction of his features and his irritation; but in him policy was a second nature, which soon imposed silence on the first.

For the rest, this calculation of the dead the day after an engagement was as delusive as it was disagreeable; for most of ours had been previously removed, but those of the enemy left in sight; an expedient adopted with a view to prevent unpleasant impressions being made on our own troops, as well as from that natural impulse, which causes us to collect and assist our own dying, and to pay the last duties to our own dead, before we think of those belonging to the enemy.