Moments later Napoleon saw a bloom of orange in the murk and then heard the dull thud as a Prussian battery fired in the direction of the approaching French divisions. More enemy guns opened up and the rattle of musket fire accompanied the din as the skirmishers of both sides came into contact. On the Landgrafenberg the French gunners shifted their aim to target the dim flashes that revealed the positions of the enemy cannon. The firing from both sides grew more intense, but the fog prevented Napoleon from seeing how the attack was progressing. Then the first of the casualties came limping up the slope, nursing their injured limbs as they found what cover they could to wait out the battle and then find medical help.

‘I have to know what is going on,’ Napoleon snapped to one of the hussars of his personal guard. ‘Ride down there. Find Marshal Lannes and tell him to report his progress back to me at once.’

‘Yes, sire.’

The firing continued with growing intensity, as if a storm were raging below the smooth surface of the fog, and even though the rising sun began to burn off the mist thick banks of powder smoke still obscured much of the detail as the first hours of the battle raged. The first reports arrived from the leading divisions and Napoleon scanned the hurriedly written notes to learn that the nearest villages on the plateau had been taken, with heavy losses inflicted by enemy cannon firing at close range on the densely packed French assault columns. But the enemy had been driven back and Lannes had won sufficient space for the other corps of the Grand Army to join the attack.

By ten o’clock Soult’s men had reached their position on the right flank and launched an immediate attack on the Prussians, pushing them back.To the left, Augereau’s columns were striding out to take up their positions, and in the centre Ney’s fresh troops were marching up the road from Jena to reinforce Lannes. Only the last wreaths of fog lay in dips in the ground and now Napoleon had a clear view of the battlefield. The bodies of men from the assault columns littered the plateau, piled in small heaps where Prussian grapeshot had blasted into the French line. Beyond the villages of Closwitz and Lutzeroda the men of Lannes’s corps had paused to re-form in the face of fresh troops the Prussians had brought forward to meet the attack. There was a gap of nearly a mile between the reduced ranks of the men of Lannes’s corps and that of Augereau, and, as Napoleon watched, Ney’s column made for the gap and then continued forward alone towards the waiting Prussian artillery that had already done so much damage to Lannes’s men.