“What a hideous noise,” Tharkay said. The artillery had not ceased to fire, all this time.
Temeraire went aloft again after noon had passed, only to have a look; although privately he thought perhaps he might see an opportunity, of making a particularly significant attack. The battlefield was so thickly obscured by smoke, by now, that it was nearly impossible to see what any of the soldiers were doing on the ground. One could only guess at it, by listening to the roar of the guns, which went on and on and on. His own ears rang with it, the unpleasant brassy noise: he had never heard anything like, save at the battle of Shoeburyness, during the final great bombardment, which had lasted half-an-hour; here so far it had gone on more than half the day.
“Oh, there,” Temeraire said, when a breath of wind stirred and blew a great rolling cloud of powder away from before the French earthworks on their left flank, “now we will be able to see something, at any rate.” And then he paused, and was silent. The ground was littered thickly with the shattered bodies of horses and of men in both uniforms.
“Dear God, what a slaughter,” Laurence said, low. And the soldiers were yet fighting, bitterly, around the fence: the Russians had seized one end now and were striving forward with bayonets and swords and even in some instances bare fists to push back the French further along it.
“Surely we might help them,” Temeraire said, unhappily, but even as he half-stooped towards the struggle, involuntarily, another roaring sounded below, and he backwinged, recoiling instinctively: a hail of canister-shot went whistling by not a hundred feet distant.
“We have already helped them,” Laurence said to Temeraire, as they drew back. “We have put a stop to Napoleon’s aerial attacks: the French would otherwise be enacting a terrible bombardment against the Russian troops. And the guns which he is using to keep the Chinese legions off, he cannot direct against the infantry.”
“But he seems to have enough of them to do both,” Temeraire said: there were hundreds and hundreds of field guns, it seemed, on both sides. “Laurence, whyever is Napoleon insisting on such a battle? Surely he can see, as well as we can, that he is lost: that he is only dragging things out dreadfully, for everyone, and killing so many on all sides.”
“He has little alternative,” Laurence said, “save if he chose to abandon his army, and flee back to France in a state of ignominy: in a pursuit, our aerial advantage would shortly begin to tell ruthlessly against him; we would have been able to overwhelm his rear-guard, and catch him and his army strung out upon the road. Most likely he yet hopes for some mistake upon our part, which would permit him to use his own advantage in artillery and in ground troops.” But the Russians were being quite careful to avoid that: as the fortifications and the heavy woods kept them from coming at the full body of the French Army, General Barclay had positioned his soldiers along the road to Moscow to the south, to guard against any attempt on the part of the French to slip away again during the night, or to sneak some substantial portion out to flank the Russian Army.
Junichiro had unexpectedly begged to be allowed to come aloft with them, on every one of Temeraire’s passes: he had become, to Temeraire’s gratification, quite a reformed character, and in the course of their journey from China to Russia had acquired a great deal not only of English but of French; to-day he had been avidly studying the order of battle of the armies on both sides. He ventured now, from Temeraire’s shoulder, to say, “This seems something between a battle and a siege,” and Laurence nodded in agreement.
As a siege might take months or even years to lift, that was by no means encouraging, and it was only meager consolation when Laurence said, “They cannot have the supply to hold out for more than a few days, Temeraire, even if they eat the cavalry-horses: you can see for yourself they have virtually no cattle amongst their baggage.”