Essen gathered the details with a few quick questions to Clausewitz, and then he turned to Hornblower.
“I would have been here an hour ago,” he said, “but I was detained by the arrival of despatches.”
Essen’s massive countenance was gloomy; he took Hornblower’s arm and drew him out of earshot of the junior staff officers.
“Bad news?” asked Hornblower.
“Yes. The worst. We have been beaten in a great battle outside Moscow, and Bonaparte is in the city.”
That was the worst of news indeed. Hornblower could foresee a future time when he supposed that battle would rank along with Marengo and Austerlitz and Jena, as a smashing victory which laid a nation low, and the entry into Moscow would rank with the occupation of Vienna and Berlin. A week or two more and Russia would sue for peace – if she had not begun to do so already – and England would be left alone, with the whole world in arms against her. Was there anything in the world that could stand against Bonaparte’s craft and power? Even the British Navy? Hornblower forced himself to take the blow impassively, forced his face to bear no hint of his dismay.
“We shall fight it out here all the same,” he said.
“Yes,” said Essen, “my men will fight to the last. So will my officers.”
There was almost a grin on his face as he jerked his head towards Clausewitz; that was a man who had his neck in a noose if ever a man had, fighting against his own country. Hornblower remembered Wellesley’s hint to him that his squadron might well serve as a refuge for the Russian Court. His ships would be jammed with refugees fleeing from this, the last continental country in arms against Bonaparte.
The mist and smoke were thinning, and patches of the field of battle were visible now, and Hornblower and Essen turned their attention to the work in hand as if with relief from contemplating the future.
“Ha!” said Essen, pointing.
Portions of the approaches were in plain view, and here and there were jagged gaps in the parapets.
“Kladoff has carried out his orders, sir,” said Clausewitz.
Until those gaps were repaired, one by one, starting with the gap nearest the first parallel, no one would be able to reach the head of the sap, and certainly no strong force could use the approaches. Another two days had been won, decided Hornblower, gauging the amount of destruction with his eye – experience had brought him facility already in appreciating siege operations. There was still heavy firing going on as the rear-guard covered the retreat of the sallying forces to the ramparts. Essen balanced his huge telescope on the shoulder of his aide-de-camp and pointed it down at the scene. Hornblower was looking through his own glass; the big barges which had brought the landing party were lying deserted on the beach, and the boats which were conveying back his crews which had manned them were already safely out of range. Essen’s hand on his shoulder swung him round.
“See there, Commodore!” said Essen.
Hornblower’s glass revealed to him in a flash the thing to which Essen had wanted to call his attention. Isolated infantrymen from the besiegers were ranging over no-man’s-land on their way back to their own trenches and – Hornblower saw it done – they bayoneted the Russian wounded who lay heaped in their path. Perhaps it was only to be expected, in this long and bloody siege, that bitterness and ferocity should be engendered on this scale, especially among Bonaparte’s hordes who had wandered over Europe for years now, since boyhood, living on what they could gather from the countryside with the musket and bayonet as the only court of appeal. Essen was white with anger, and Hornblower tried to share his rage, but he found it difficult. That kind of atrocity was what he had come to expect. He was perfectly prepared to go on killing Bonaparte’s soldiers and sailors, but he would not flatter himself that he was executing justice by killing one man because some other man had murdered his wounded allies.
Down in the shattered remains of the village, as he walked along the trenches, those of the wounded who had been fortunate enough to drag themselves back were receiving treatment. Shuddering, Hornblower told himself that perhaps those who had been bayoneted in no-man’s-land were the lucky ones. He pushed past ranks of smoke-blackened and ragged Russian soldiers, talking with the noisy abandon of men who have just emerged from a hard-won victory.