Far Flies the Eagle by Evelyn Anthony

Author:Evelyn Anthony
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media

Early on the 14th of September the leading French columns reached the top of the Hill of the Sparrows. Immediately a shout went up, and an officer of the Imperial Guard turned and galloped back to where the Emperor rode with a large suite.

“Your Majesty, Your Majesty, Moscow! You can see it from the hill-tops!”

Napoleon urged his horse forward and came galloping up between lines of cheering troops.

“Vive L’Empereur! Vive L’Empereur!”

Word had flown from mouth to mouth. ‘Moscow, we’ve reached Moscow.…’

He had kept his promise to them, given them victory as he had always done, and now at last they would have proper quarters, warmth, shelter and food. The cavalry reined in and the infantry stood cheering as he rode among them and then suddenly drew up on the crest of the hill.

It was another cloudless day, brilliant with cold sunshine, and below the Hill of the Sparrows the Holy City of Moscow lay before him like a multi-coloured jewel.

The hundreds of gold-painted cupolas shone against the background of blue sky; the delicate oriental towers, the red and yellow buildings, the dark crimson walls, and the minaret towers of the Kremlin itself were perfectly clear. He shaded his eyes with his hand and stayed on the hill crest looking down for several minutes, thinking that the enormous building with its fantastic design of nine cupolas must be the famous Church of St. Basil, whose architect had been blinded by the Czar Ivan IV so that he could never build another like it.

Moscow.

Napoleon said it aloud. That moment on the hill-top was the greatest in his life and he knew it; the triumphal entry into the city, the Banquet in the Kremlin, all the means he had devised to humiliate his enemies would never match that first sight of Moscow from the top of the hill. It was over; he had won the war. He had never admitted even to himself that the Russian campaign had been the most strenuous and anxious of his career. He hated the easy victories, the occupation of one burnt-out town after another, pursuing a phantom army who occasionally turned, fought like demons and then disappeared again.

The whole affair was almost eerie, even the country itself had begun to get on his nerves; the poverty, the miserable peasants who fled before them, more like animals than men with their tangled hair and beards, the women muffled in ragged shawls with their blank faces and cowed eyes; everywhere silence and suspicion, and the sickening smell of smoke drifting to meet them, the smoke of hovels and great houses set alight with the same purpose.

He hated the queer poetic place names, the orientalism which obtruded everywhere. Remembering the cultured, elegant Alexander, it seemed impossible to reconcile his rule with such a country.

‘But that,’ he thought, ‘was my mistake. He looks like a European, he is a European by blood, but in his own country the traditions of Europe might belong to another planet. He has the mind of an Eastern potentate, and I persisted in treating him as a European monarch.

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