three o'clock
He would place Maurice on his right knee and Henriette on his left , and then for hours on end the narrative would run on in Homeric strain . But small attention was paid to dates ; his story was of the dire shock of conflicting nations , and was not to be hampered by the minute exactitude of the historian . Successively or together English , Austrians , Prussians , Russians appeared upon the scene , according to the then prevailing condition of the ever-changing alliances , and it was not always an easy matter to tell why one nation received a beating in preference to another , but beaten they all were in the end , inevitably beaten from the very commencement , in a whirlwind of genius and heroic daring that swept great armies like chaff from off the earth . There was Marengo , the classic battle of the plain , with the consummate generalship of its broad plan and the faultless retreat of the battalions by squares , silent and impassive under the enemy 's terrible fire ; the battle , famous in story , lost at three o'clock and won at six , where the eight hundred grenadiers of the Consular Guard withstood the onset of the entire Austrian cavalry , where Desaix arrived to change impending defeat to glorious victory and die . There was Austerlitz , with its sun of glory shining forth from amid the wintry sky , Austerlitz , commencing with the capture of the plateau of Pratzen and ending with the frightful catastrophe on the frozen lake , where an entire Russian corps , men , guns , horses , went crashing through the ice , while Napoleon , who in his divine omniscience had foreseen it all , of course , directed his artillery to play upon the struggling mass . There was Jena , where so many of Prussia 's bravest found a grave ; at first the red flames of musketry flashing through the October mists , and Ney 's impatience , near spoiling all until Augereau comes wheeling into line and saves him ; the fierce charge that tore the enemy 's center in twain , and finally panic , the headlong rout of their boasted cavalry , whom our hussars mow down like ripened grain , strewing the romantic glen with a harvest of men and horses . And Eylau , cruel Eylau , bloodiest battle of them all , where the maimed corpses cumbered the earth in piles ; Eylau , whose new-fallen snow was stained with blood , the burial-place of heroes ; Eylau , in whose name reverberates still the thunder of the charge of Murat 's eighty squadrons , piercing the Russian lines in every direction , heaping the ground so thick with dead that Napoleon himself could not refrain from tears .