Nine o’clock came. The fog lay stretched in an unbroken sea over the plain, but at the village of Schlapanitz on the high ground where Napoleon was, surrounded by his marshals, it was now perfectly clear. There was bright blue sky over his head, and the vast orb of the sun, like a huge, hollow, purple float, quivered on the surface of the milky sea of fog. Not the French troops only, but Napoleon himself with his staff were not on the further side of the streams, and the villages of Sokolnitz and Schlapanitz, beyond which we had intended to take up our position and begin the attack, but were on the nearer side, so close indeed to our forces that Napoleon could distinguish a cavalry man from a foot soldier in our army with the naked eye. Napoleon was standing a little in front of his marshals, on a little grey Arab horse, wearing the same blue overcoat he had worn through the Italian campaign. He was looking intently and silently at the hills, which stood up out of the sea of mist, and the Russian troops moving across them in the distance, and he listened to the sounds of firing in the valley. His face—still thin in those days—did not stir a single muscle; his gleaming eyes were fixed intently on one spot. His forecasts were turning out correct. Part of the Russian forces were going down into the valley towards the ponds and lakes, while part were evacuating the heights of Pratzen, which he regarded as the key of the position, and had intended to take. He saw through the fog, in the dip between two hills near the village of Pratzen, Russian columns with glittering bayonets moving always in one direction towards the valleys, and vanishing one after another into the mist. From information he had received over night, from the sounds of wheels and footsteps he had heard in the night at the outposts, from the loose order of the march of the Russian columns, from all the evidence, he saw clearly that the allies believed him to be a long way in front of them, that the columns moving close to Pratzen constituted the centre of the Russian army, and that the centre was by this time too much weakened to be able to attack him successfully. But still he delayed beginning the battle.
That day was for him a day of triumph—the anniversary of his coronation. He had slept for a few hours in the early morning, and feeling fresh, and in good health and spirits, in that happy frame of mind in which everything seems possible and everything succeeds, he got on his horse and rode out. He stood without stirring, looking at the heights that rose out of the fog, and his cold face wore that peculiar shade of confident, self-complacent happiness, seen on the face of a happy boy in love. The marshals stood behind him, and did not venture to distract his attention. He looked at the heights of Pratzen, then at the sun floating up out of the mist.
When the sun had completely emerged from the fog, and was glittering with dazzling brilliance over the fields and the mist （as though he had been waiting for that to begin the battle）, he took his glove off his handsome white hand, made a signal with it to his marshals, and gave orders for the battle to begin. The marshals, accompanied by adjutants, galloped in various directions, and in a few minutes the chief forces of the French army were moving towards those heights of Pratzen, which were left more and more exposed by the Russian troops as the latter kept moving to the left towards the valley.
