At these words Davoust, burning with a rage which he had great difficulty to repress, replied, that “he proposed a retreat through a fertile country, by an untouched, plentiful and well supplied route, villages still standing, and by the shortest road, that the enemy might not avail himself of it, to cut us off from the route from Mojaisk to Smolensk, recommended by Murat.  And what a route! a desert of sand and ashes, where convoys of wounded would increase our embarrassment, where we should meet with nothing but ruins, traces of blood, skeletons and famine!

“Moreover, though he deemed it his duty to give his opinion when it was asked, he was ready to obey orders contrary to it with the same zeal as if they were consonant with his suggestions; but that the Emperor alone had a right to impose silence on him, and not Murat, who was not his Sovereign, and never should be!”

The quarrel growing warm, Bessieres and Berthier interposed.  As for the Emperor, still absorbed in the same attitude, he appeared insensible to what was passing.  At length he broke up this council with the words, “Well, gentlemen, I will decide.”

He decided on retreat, and by that road which would carry him most speedily to a distance from the enemy; but it required another desperate effort before he could bring himself to give an order of march so new to him.  So painful was this effort, that in the inward struggle which it occasioned, he lost the use of his senses.  Those who attended him have asserted, that the report of another warm affair with the Cossacks, towards Borowsk, a few leagues in the rear of the army, was the last shock which induced him finally to adopt this fatal resolution.

It is a remarkable fact, that he issued orders for this retreat northward, at the very moment that Kutusoff and his Russians, dismayed by the defeat of Malo-Yaroslawetz, were retiring southward.

CHAP.  V.

The very same night a similar anxiety had agitated the Russian camp.  During the combat of Malo-Yaroslawetz, Kutusoff had approached the field of battle, groping his way, as it were, pausing at every step, and examining the ground, as if he was afraid of its sinking beneath him; he did not send off the different corps which were dispatched to the assistance of Doctorof, till the orders for that purpose were absolutely extorted from him.  He durst not place himself in person across Napoleon’s way, till an hour when general battles are not to be apprehended.

Wilson, warm from the action, then hastened to him.—­Wilson, that active bustling Englishman, whom we had seen in Egypt, in Spain, and every where else, the enemy of the French and of Napoleon.  He was the representative of the allies in the Russian army; he was in the midst of Kutusoff’s army an independent man, an observer, nay, even a judge—­infallible motives of aversion; his presence was odious to the old Russian general; and as hatred never fails to beget hatred, both cordially detested each other.