Napoleon, with his first division of the grand army, reached Gjatz[197] without any other inconvenience than arose from the state of the roads, and the distresses of the soldiery. From Gjatz he advanced in two marches to Wiazma, and halted there to allow Prince Eugene and Marshal Davoust to come up, who had fallen five days' march to the rear, instead of three days only, as had been directed. On the 1st November, the Emperor again resumed his painful retreat, leaving, however, the corps of Ney at Wiazma to reinforce and relieve the rear-guard under Davoust, who, he concluded, must be worn out with the duty. He resumed with his Old Guard the road to Dorogobouje, on which town he thought it probable the Russians might be moving to cut him off, and it was most important to prevent them. Another order of Napoleon's confirms his sense of the danger which had now begun to oppress him. He commanded the spoils of Moscow, ancient armour, cannon, and the great cross of Ivan, to be thrown into the lake of Semelin, as trophies which he was unwilling to restore, and unable to carry off.[198] Some of the artillery, which the unfed horses where unable to drag forward, were also now necessarily left behind, though the circumstance was not communicated in every instance to Napoleon, who, bred in the artillery department, cherished, like many officers of that branch of service, a sort of superstitious reverence for his guns. The Emperor, and the vanguard of his army, had hitherto passed unopposed. It was not so with the centre and rear. They were attacked, during the whole course of that march, by clouds of Cossacks, bringing with them a species of light artillery mounted on sledges, which, keeping pace with their motions, threw showers of balls among the columns of the French; while the menaced charge of these irregular cavalry frequently obliged the march to halt, that the men might form lines or squares to protect themselves. The passage of streams where the bridges were broken down, and the horses and waggons were overturned on the precipitous banks, or in the miry fords, and where drivers and horses dropped down exhausted, added to this confusion when such obstacles occurred. The two divisions, however, having as yet seen no regular forces, passed the night of the 2d November in deceitful tranquillity, within two leagues of Wiazma, where Ney was lying ready to join them. In that fatal night, Miloradowitch, one of the boldest, most enterprising, and active of the Russian generals, and whom the French were wont to call the Russian Murat, arrived with the vanguard of the Russian regulars, supported by Platoff and many thousand Cossacks, and being the harbinger of Koutousoff, and the whole grand army of Russia.