al, a passage had been effected across the Boristhenes
at several points; the roads to the two hostile capitals were
reconnoitred to the distance of a league, and the Russian infantry was
discovered in that leading to Moscow. Ney would soon have overtaken it;
but as that road skirted the Dnieper, he had to cross the streams which
fall into it. Each of them having scooped out its own bed, marked the
bottom of a valley, the opposite side of which was a position where the
enemy posted himself, and which it was necessary to carry: the first,
that of the Stubna, did not detain him long; but the hill of Valoutina,
at the foot of which runs the Kolowdnia, became the scene of an
obstinate conflict.

The cause of this resistance has been attributed to an ancient tradition
of national glory, which represented this field of battle as ground
consecrated by victory. But this superstition, worthy even still of the
Russian soldier, is far from the more enlightened patriotism of their
generals. It was necessity that here compelled them to fight: we have
seen that the Moscow road, on leaving Smolensk, skirted the Dnieper, and
that the French artillery, on the other bank, traversed it with its
fire. Barclay durst not take this road at night, for fear of risking his
artillery, baggage, and the waggons with the wounded, the rolling of
which would have betrayed his retreat.

The Petersburgh road quitted the river more abruptly: two marshy
cross-roads branched off from it on the right, one at the distance of
two leagues from Smolensk, the other at four; they ran through woods,
and rejoined the high-road to Moscow, after a long circuit; the one at
Bredichino, two leagues beyond Valoutina, the other farther off at
Slobpnewa.

Into these defiles Barclay was bold enough to commit himself with so
many horses and vehicles; so that this long and heavy column had thus to
traverse two large arcs of a circle, of which the high-road from
Smolensk to Moscow, which Ney soon attacked, was the chord. Every
moment, as always happens in such cases, the overturning of a carriage,
the sticking fast of a wheel, or of a single horse, in the mud, or the
breaking of a trace, stopped the whole. The sound of the French cannon,
meanwhile, drew nearer, and seemed to have already got before the
Russian column, and to be on the point of reaching and closing the
outlet which it was striving to gain.

At length, after an arduous march, the head of the enemy's convoy c