A few Russian girls, voluntary captives, also followed.  It looked like a caravan, a wandering nation, or rather one of those armies of antiquity returning loaded with slaves and spoil after a great devastation.  It was inconceivable how the head of this column could draw and support such a heavy mass of equipages in so long a route.

Notwithstanding the width of the road and the shouts of his escort, Napoleon had great difficulty to obtain a passage through this immense throng.  No doubt the obstruction of a defile, a few forced marches and a handful of Cossacks, would have been sufficient to rid us of all this incumbrance:  but fortune or the enemy had alone a right to lighten us in this manner.  As for the Emperor, he was fully sensible that he could neither deprive his soldiers of this fruit of so many toils, nor reproach them for securing it.  Besides, the provisions concealed the booty, and could he, who could not give his troops the subsistence which he ought to have done, forbid their carrying it along with them?  Lastly, in failure of military conveyances, these vehicles would be the only means of preservation for the sick and wounded.

Napoleon, therefore, extricated himself in silence from the immense train which he drew after him, and advanced on the old road leading to Kalouga.  He pushed on in this direction for some hours, declaring that he should go and beat Kutusoff on the very field of his victory.  But all at once, about mid-day, opposite to the castle of Krasnopachra, where he halted, he suddenly turned to the right with his army, and in three marches across the country gained the new road to Kalouga.

The rain, which overtook him in the midst of this manoeuvre, spoiled the cross-roads, and obliged him to halt in them.  This was a most unfortunate circumstance.  It was not without difficulty that our cannon were drawn out of the sloughs.

At any rate the Emperor had masked his movement by Ney’s corps and the relics of Murat’s cavalry, which had remained behind the Motscha and at Woronowo.  Kutusoff, deceived by this feint, was still waiting for the grand army on the old road, whilst on the 23rd of October, the whole of it, transferred to the new one, had but one march to make in order to pass quietly by him, and to get between him and Kalouga.

A letter from Berthier to Kutusoff, dated the first day of this flanking march, was at once a last attempt at peace, and perhaps a ruse de guerre.  No satisfactory answer was returned to it.

CHAP.  II.

On the 23rd the imperial quarters were at Borowsk.  That night was an agreeable one for the Emperor:  he was informed that at six in the evening Delzons and his division had, four leagues in advance of him, found Malo-Yaroslawetz and the woods which command it unoccupied:  this was a strong position within reach of Kutusoff, and the only point where he could cut us off from the new road to Kalouga.