"Good!" said Murat and, turning to one of the gentlemen in his suite,
ordered four light guns to be moved forward to fire at the gates.

The guns emerged at a trot from the column following Murat and advanced
up the Arbat. When they reached the end of the Vozdvizhenka Street they
halted and drew in the Square. Several French officers superintended the
placing of the guns and looked at the Kremlin through field glasses.

The bells in the Kremlin were ringing for vespers, and this sound
troubled the French. They imagined it to be a call to arms. A few
infantrymen ran to the Kutafyev Gate. Beams and wooden screens had been
put there, and two musket shots rang out from under the gate as soon as
an officer and men began to run toward it. A general who was standing
by the guns shouted some words of command to the officer, and the latter
ran back again with his men.

The sound of three more shots came from the gate.

One shot struck a French soldier's foot, and from behind the screens
came the strange sound of a few voices shouting. Instantly as at a
word of command the expression of cheerful serenity on the faces of
the French general, officers, and men changed to one of determined
concentrated readiness for strife and suffering. To all of them from
the marshal to the least soldier, that place was not the Vozdvizhenka,
Mokhavaya, or Kutafyev Street, nor the Troitsa Gate (places familiar in
Moscow), but a new battlefield which would probably prove sanguinary.
And all made ready for that battle. The cries from the gates ceased. The
guns were advanced, the artillerymen blew the ash off their linstocks,
and an officer gave the word "Fire!" This was followed by two whistling
sounds of canister shot, one after another. The shot rattled against
the stone of the gate and upon the wooden beams and screens, and two
wavering clouds of smoke rose over the Square.

A few instants after the echo of the reports resounding over the
stone-built Kremlin had died away the French heard a strange sound above
their head. Thousands of crows rose above the walls and circled in the
air, cawing and noisily flapping their wings. Together with that sound
came a solitary human cry from the gateway and amid the smoke appeared
the figure of a bareheaded man in a peasant's coat. He grasped a musket
and took aim at the French. "Fire!" repeated the officer once more,
and the reports of a musket and of two cannon shots were heard
simultaneously. The gate w