ov!" Kutuzov called to his adjutant. "Sit down and write out
the order of the day for tomorrow. And you," he continued, addressing
another, "ride along the line and announce that tomorrow we attack."

While Kutuzov was talking to Raevski and dictating the order of the day,
Wolzogen returned from Barclay and said that General Barclay wished to
have written confirmation of the order the field marshal had given.

Kutuzov, without looking at Wolzogen, gave directions for the order to
be written out which the former commander in chief, to avoid personal
responsibility, very judiciously wished to receive.

And by means of that mysterious indefinable bond which maintains
throughout an army one and the same temper, known as "the spirit of
the army," and which constitutes the sinew of war, Kutuzov's words, his
order for a battle next day, immediately became known from one end of
the army to the other.

It was far from being the same words or the same order that reached the
farthest links of that chain. The tales passing from mouth to mouth at
different ends of the army did not even resemble what Kutuzov had said,
but the sense of his words spread everywhere because what he said was
not the outcome of cunning calculations, but of a feeling that lay in
the commander in chief's soul as in that of every Russian.

And on learning that tomorrow they were to attack the enemy, and hearing
from the highest quarters a confirmation of what they wanted to believe,
the exhausted, wavering men felt comforted and inspirited.

CHAPTER XXXVI

Prince Andrew's regiment was among the reserves which till after one
o'clock were stationed inactive behind Semenovsk, under heavy artillery
fire. Toward two o'clock the regiment, having already lost more than
two hundred men, was moved forward into a trampled oatfield in the gap
between Semenovsk and the Knoll Battery, where thousands of men perished
that day and on which an intense, concentrated fire from several hundred
enemy guns was directed between one and two o'clock.

Without moving from that spot or firing a single shot the regiment here
lost another third of its men. From in front and especially from the
right, in the unlifting smoke the guns boomed, and out of the mysterious
domain of smoke that overlay the whole space in front, quick hissing
cannon balls and slow whistling shells flew unceasingly. At times, as
if to allow them a respite, a quarter of an hour passed during which