Till midday on the nineteenth, the activity--the eager talk, running to and fro, and dispatching of adjutants--was confined to the Emperor's headquarters.

But on the afternoon of that day, this activity reached Kutuzov's headquarters and the staffs of the commanders of columns.

By evening, the adjutants had spread it to all ends and parts of the army, and in the night from the nineteenth to the twentieth, the whole eighty thousand allied troops rose from their bivouacs to the hum of voices, and the army swayed and started in one enormous mass six miles long.

The concentrated activity which had begun at the Emperor's headquarters in the morning and had started the whole movement that followed was like the first movement of the main wheel of a large tower clock.