'Hey, my friend! Come!' he called in French to another officer. Sheathing his sabre he fumbled in a pistol holster for a flask which he beckoned the other to share.

'What does the esteemed representative of the staff think of today's work?' He held out the flask, his blue eyes intently observing him. 'We made short work of those French bastards, didn't we, eh?'

The staff-officer grinned, but his eyes kept returning to the valley below them, into which they had charged twenty minutes earlier.

'They were Lasalle's bastards, you know, Count. The best light cavalry in the Grand Army'

'And we beat them, by Almighty God.' The count crossed himself piously and his companion raised a sardonic eyebrow at the practice.

'We haven't finished the business yet,' he said, pointing to the southward, where the little town of Preussisch-Eylau lay engulfed in smoke. Only its church belfry showed above the pall as, house by house, it crumbled beneath the storm of shot from two massive Russian batteries close to its eastern outskirts. Beyond the town and spreading out over the gently rolling snow-covered countryside of East Prussia, the dark masses of the Grand Army of France and her allies attempted to roll up the Russian left wing.

Four miles away to the north, just beyond the frozen river at the other extreme of the contending armies and immediately in front of the Cossacks, Lasalle's repulsed hussars were re-forming. Between them the bloody corpses of two dozen men were already stiffening like the trampled and frozen reeds of the river margin. To the south of the French cavalry, the dark swirl of Marshal Soult's Fourth Army Corps had been thrown back from their own assault upon the Russians. The Cossack commander slapped his thigh and laughed with satisfaction.