This was a danger, the imminence of which Napoleon fully comprehended.  He might escape from it; daylight had not yet appeared.  He was at liberty to avoid this fatal engagement; to gain Orcha and Borizof by rapid marches along with Eugene and his guard; there he could rally his forces with thirty thousand French under Victor and Oudinot, with Dombrowski, with Regnier, with Schwartzenberg, and with all his depots, and be might again, the following year, make his appearance as formidable as ever.

On the 17th, before daylight, he issued his orders, armed himself, and going out on foot, at the head of his old guard, began his march.  But it was not towards Poland, his ally, that it was directed, nor towards France, where he would be still received as the head of a rising dynasty, and the Emperor of the West.  His words on taking up his sword on this occasion, were “I have sufficiently acted the emperor; it is time that I should become the general.”  He turned back into the midst of eighty thousand enemies, plunged into the thickest of them, in order to draw all their efforts against himself, to make a diversion in favour of Davoust and Ney, and to tear them from a country, the gates of which had been closed upon them.

Daylight at last appeared, exhibiting on one side the Russian battalions and batteries, which on three sides, in front, on our right, and in our rear, bounded the horizon, and on the other, Napoleon with his six thousand guards advancing with a firm step, and proceeding to take his place in the middle of that terrible circle.  At the same time Mortier, a few yards in front of his Emperor, displayed in the face of the whole Russian army, the five thousand men which still remained to him.

Their object was to defend the right flank of the great road from Krasnoe to the great ravine in the direction of Stachowa.  A battalion of chasseurs of the old guard, formed in a square like a fortress, was planted close to the high road, and acted as a support to the left wing of our young soldiers.  On their right, in the snowy plains which surrounded Krasnoe, the remains of the cavalry of the guard, a few cannon, and the four hundred cavalry of Latour-Maubourg (as, since they left Smolensk, the cold had killed or dispersed fourteen hundred of them) occupied the place of the battalions and batteries which the French army no longer possessed.

The artillery of the Duke of Treviso was reinforced by a battery commanded by Drouot; one of those men who are endowed with the whole strength of virtue, who think that duty embraces every thing, and are capable of making the noblest sacrifices simply and without the least effort.

Claparede remained at Krasnoe, where, with a few soldiers, he protected the wounded, the baggage, and the retreat.  Prince Eugene continued his retreat towards Liady.  His engagement of the preceding day and his night march had entirely broken up his corps; his divisions only retained sufficient unity to drag themselves along, and to perish, but not to fight.