The Illustrious Dead by Stephan Talty

Author:Stephan Talty [Talty, Stephan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-45975-6
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2009-06-01T16:00:00+00:00

As the clock ticked toward three o’clock, the Russians were forced to stand under a ferocious bombardment from the batteries around Semeonovskoie. Finally, the French infantry marched out, but the cavalry swept past them and reached the redoubt first. A squad of Polish and Saxon cuirassiers had been trotting from sector to sector all morning, avoiding the Russian guns and waiting impatiently to be called to action. Now they charged up the steep slope toward the battered earthworks and slipped their horses through the slots cut for the cannon, or wheeled their horses around the palisades and entered from behind, followed by the 5th Cuirassiers. Leading the 5th, General Caulaincourt was killed as he charged the walls, a musket shot cutting through his jugular. The Saxons and Poles smashed through the Russian defenses first, leaping over the bayonets of the defenders and chopping at the gunners with their sabers.

The first horsemen over the wall were met by musket fire but plunged into the enemy ranks regardless, and were met by bayonets, which the infantrymen stabbed up into the riders, breaking the blades on their iron breastplates or cutting blindly into thighs and groins. A roar went up from the French soldiers watching the action from the rear as they saw the sun wink off the cuirassiers’ helmets inside the distant redoubt. “It would be difficult to convey our feelings as we watched this brilliant feat of arms,” wrote Colonel Charles Griois, a cavalry officer, “perhaps without equal in the military annals of nations.” The Russians cut down the vanguard of cavalry, but more and more mounted troops poured in every available entryway and rushed in from behind, slashing at the enemy with their swords. Hopelessly outnumbered, the Russians fought to the death.

The body of one Russian gunner was decorated by three medals. “In one hand he held a broken sword, and with the other he was convulsively grasping the carriage of the gun he’d so valiantly fought with,” remembered one of his adversaries. But most of the dead were horribly chopped up and contorted, piled at the entrances, in the wolf pits outside the palisade walls, and trampled by horses or mixed in with dying mounts cut by bayonets and unable to stand. The fort was an abattoir in which the piles of dead told the story of the day like alternating layers of sedimentary soil. One soldier described the action inside as a “frenzy of slaughter,” with men slashing at each other or bludgeoning the enemy with musket stocks.

Barclay watched the action, rushing troops to fill the gaps the French were gashing in his front line. As the French attack progressed, he was conferring with another general when he looked up to see an enormous cloud of dust rolling over the turf toward the redoubt from the north. The Russians formed squares, with Barclay inside one, and waited for the cuirassiers to come within range. When the French appeared, the Russians fired and then advanced. One Russian general remembered what happened next:

It was a march into hell.

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