“He must have meant to march on Kaluga,” Raevsky said to Laurence, as they flew: that city being presently the main supply base of Kutuzov’s army, and the gateway to the munitions factories of the south. “God favors Russia at last: if Dokhturov had not caught him, he could have done us some more mischief yet.”
The distance was only twenty miles: two hours put them in sight of the town, and the plumes of smoke rising; several of the buildings were burning, and the cannon roared ferociously on both sides. Zhao Lien brought them around wide, to the south behind the Russian advance guard which was ferociously holding the small town against Napoleon’s advance. More prepared this time for the hop-skip of the Chinese landing, Raevsky’s corps were disembarked in not half-an-hour; his sergeants were already bawling for order and forming the men into their regiments as the Chinese dragons lifted off again, to form up aloft.
Temeraire hovered longingly beside Zhao Lien as she sent forth the first jalan through the climbing smoke. Dokhturov had only one aerial regiment of six heavy-weights, and with them two dozen light-weights whom, in defiance of tradition, he had flung into battle to give his men a little cover against the French skirmishing attack. The French dragons, some twenty in number and wearing the emblem of the corps of Eugène de Beauharnais, had been handily outfighting them and dropping bombs upon the Russian troops, who were taking a dismal shelter against a handful of buildings now all of them in flames.
The Chinese legions drove in and at once turned the tide in the air: the French infantry fell back and dug themselves grimly into the stone monastery at the center of town behind their guns, and the French dragons turned tail and simply fled, as quickly as they could go. “Look, Laurence, you see they are just running away!” Temeraire said, in rather exultant tones, as they watched the retreat from the southern end of the town.
Five niru set off in pursuit; but the crews of the French middle-weights abruptly swung below and cut loose their belly-netting, dropping their munitions. And thus lightened, the French middle-weights could just barely outdistance the Chinese and began to pull away. One niru did manage to pounce on a lagging beast, however, and skillfully dragged him down to the ground. The remainder escaped: but meanwhile the soldiers below were now exposed, and the Russian supply corps had labored to some purpose in these intervening weeks to provide the Chinese legions with their own bombs, which now their crews began to hurl down on the entrenched Frenchmen.
The French answer came in the form of round-shot. The French used stones and bricks from the shattered walls and streets of the town to elevate their guns until they were pointing nearly directly over their heads, and in so doing managed to inflict a casualty of their own: a ball tore into the belly of one of the Shao Lung and erupted through its back, and the poor creature fell stone-dead from the sky, smashing through a burning building and leaving its wreck sprawled across the streets of the town. Raevsky’s men had now dragged their guns into position, with the aid of horses snatched from Dokhturov’s corps: the battlefield was no place for cavalry, with fire on every side and the narrow streets choked with rubble nearly impassable even for men on foot. Their guns began to thunder in company.
The French—whom Laurence realized, when the smoke cleared well enough to see their uniforms, were not Frenchmen but Italians, recruited from another of Napoleon’s conquests—would surely have retreated in the face of their disadvantages, if any opportunity offered them; but as they were behind the only stone walls in their vicinity, they could get no better shelter than where they were, and by removing themselves from it would have exposed themselves both to the relentless artillery and to the snatching talons of the dragons above.
From necessity they held their position, answering as best they could, and so valiantly that they could only be winnowed down a little at a time, and the fires of the town crept ever closer towards them.
They held for an hour, pushed back slowly, and then Laurence through his glass saw movement through the immense towering clouds of smoke. “Temeraire,” he said, “take us aloft, if you please,” but Zhao Lien’s scouts were already darting back to report to her: Davout’s corps had arrived, with fifty French dragons in support.
For the next four hours, the battle roared back and forward through the town: at first the French fell back, under their newly arrived air cover, and the Russians with a shout charged into its narrow lanes and took possession; then they themselves were forced back by the terrible weight of the French artillery and their advantage in infantry. The town changed hands five more times, that dreadful afternoon: many of the wounded could not be rescued, and a sudden change in the wind drove the spreading flames abruptly further on. As those who could not walk were engulfed by the spreading flames, the shrieks of the dying rose like a noise out of perdition from the smoke.