For Captain Victor Ilyich Padorin a battle was, among other things, a good way to ruin an enjoyable morning's ride, but his more daring exploits on the battlefield had served to raise his standing in the ballrooms and certain more intimate chambers of Moscow and Petersburg society.  The trick to surviving was to ride out as you would on any other field and not let the smoke, noise and lead whistling past your ears spoil your posture, no more than you would bad weather.  Cower, duck and weave and you damn well deserved to be unhorsed.  Musket-fire or driving rain, it was all the same: a good cavalry officer rides proud and tall in the saddle, or not at all.

Even in retreat.  Chased by the chuff and crack of a line of French muskets.

It had been a hard morning, watching from just forward of the woods north of Tatarinovo, while the Frenchies wiped out the sunlit landscape, slapping down their colours of choice over the canvas of the plain below: angry clouds erupting and drifting up in grey smears, stippled blocks of blue coats pushed into the centre where they clashed with the black of the Russians and poured over the muddy browns of the gouged earthworks and redoubts.  Colours merged, especially in and around those fortifications between the two tracts of woodlands, smart formations breaking apart as randomly as the clouds of smoke and washing this way and that across the defensive line stretching between Borodino and Utitsa.  The canvas got greyer and greyer, and it was all rather tedious for those on the Russian right.  Padorin was an admirer of art generally, but was hanged if he would ever choose to stand by and watch a painter at work.

The thin scent of gunpowder piqued his nostrils even from here, diluted by the more mundane aromas of the day: the air, grass, trees, and far too much piss and horse-dung.  Not quite the thing to stir the senses.

In the hours since dawn, he had petitioned his commanding officer, unsuccessfully, six times for courier errands, chasing any duty to alleviate the boredom and thrust him into some form of action other than pacing up and down close to his horse.  The tiny village of Semionovskaya was little more than a bonfire of houses in the middle of the scene and Padorin had seen French infantry closing on the church spire of Borodino, and the most he had done was relieve himself a couple of times over by the treeline.

Younf Alexander had grinned at his friend's impatience and joked that Kutuzov was only keeping his most ferocious hounds chained until Bonaparte himself showed his face through the trees.  To which Padorin had merely ground his teeth in forced good humour and warned of dire consequences for the Frenchies when he was set loose.

Then word came from Field Marshal Kutuzov's headquarters over at Gorky: the Hussars and a sizable proportion of the right flank were being moved into the centre.  Padorin leaped up into his saddle, keen to be let off his leash.

On a battlefield as much as in a ballroom, time will stand and wait or dance a polka, stamp her hooves or gallop like the wind, just as she chooses.  And she had galloped apace since they'd ridden on to the plain.  Into the landscape of smoke and shouts and sabres and guns.