instincts were likely to give the French victory in such a war. His corps’ movements would be better coordinated, opportunities more quickly spotted, and any advantage more ruthlessly exploited. If this was true in all cases, it was doubly so in present circumstances when the Russians were heavily outnumbered and were operating with two independent armies whose commanders had very different perceptions and instincts.
Above all, Barclay remained faithful to the strategy on which he and Alexander had agreed before the war started. It was far easier to express this honestly to outsiders than to his own increasingly hostile and frustrated generals. On 11 August he wrote to Admiral Chichagov, whose Army of the Danube was marching northwards towards Napoleon’s rear, that ‘the enemy’s desire is to finish this war by decisive battles and we on the contrary have to try to avoid such battles because we have no army of any sort in reserve which could sustain us in the event of a defeat. Therefore our main goal must be to gain as much time as possible which will allow our militia and the troops being formed in the interior to be organized and made ready.’ Until that happened First and Second armies must not take any risks which might lead to their destruction.
Subsequently Barclay was to justify his strategy in very similar terms to Kutuzov, stating that he had sought to avoid decisive battles because if First and Second armies were destroyed no other forces yet existed in the rear to continue the war. Instead, he had attempted with considerable success ‘to stop the enemy’s rapid advance only by limited engagements, by which his forces were diminished more and more every day’. As he wrote to Alexander at the end of August, ‘had I been guided by a foolish and blind ambition, Your Imperial Majesty would perhaps have received many dispatches telling of battles fought but the enemy would be at the walls of Moscow without it being possible to find any forces to resist him’.39
As the Russian official history of the war subsequently recognized, though Barclay was almost in a minority of one at the time, in fact he was right and his opponents were wrong. Among other things, they greatly underestimated the strength of Napoleon’s forces and they exaggerated the extent to which they were dispersed. But Barclay’s ‘offensive’, crippled by his doubts, brought him only ridicule at the time. Even his loyal aide-de-camp, Vladimir Lowenstern, wrote that ‘it was the first time that I wasn’t entirely happy with his performance’.40
As agreed with Bagration at the council of war of the previous day, on 7 August Barclay advanced to the north of the river Dnieper towards Rudnia and Vitebsk. But he did so with the proviso that he would not initially go more than three marches from Smolensk. No serious offensive was possible with such equivocation and uncertainty. When Barclay was informed in the night of 8 August that a large enemy force had been discovered to his north at Poreche he immediately believed that this was the outflanking movement he had feared. As a result he shifted his line of march northwards to meet the threat, only to discover that the ‘large enemy force’ was little more than a figment of his scouts’ imagination. Bagration complained that ‘mere rumours shouldn’t be allowed to alter operations’. Officers and men grumbled as uncertainty reigned and the troops marched and counter- marched.41
Moving ahead of Barclay down the road to Rudnia, Platov routed a large force of French cavalry near the village of Molevo-Bolota, capturing General Sebastiani’s headquarters and much of his correspondence in the process. When these documents seemed to show that the French had been tipped off about the offensive an ugly wave of xenophobia and spy-mania spread in the Russian army. A number of officers at headquarters who were not ethnic Russians, including even some officers such as Lowenstern who were the emperor’s subjects, were escorted to the rear under suspicion of treason. Bagration wrote to Arakcheev: ‘I just cannot work with the minister [i.e. Barclay]. For God’s sake send me anywhere you like, even to command a regiment in Moldavia or the Caucasus but I just cannot stand it here. The whole of headquarters is packed with Germans so it is impossible for a Russian to live there.’42
While the Russians were dithering and arguing Napoleon struck. He concentrated his army near Rasasna south of the river Dnieper and on 14 August marched on Smolensk via Krasnyi. The only Russian forces in his way were the 7,200 men commanded by Dmitrii Neverovsky, whose core were the regiments of his own 27th Division. These regiments had been formed just before the war, mostly from new recruits and soldiers from the disbanded garrison regiments. Given time and efficient training, most of the recruits and garrison soldiers could be turned into good troops. The big problem was finding good officers to train and lead them. Most of the officers were initially drawn from the former garrison regiments but they quickly proved useless. In the Odessa Regiment, for example, within a few weeks only one of the initial twenty-two former garrison officers was considered fit for front-line service. Desperate measures were sometimes required to find officers. Dmitrii Dushenkovich, for instance, was commissioned as an ensign into the newly formed Simbirsk Regiment aged only 15, after a crash course as a cadet in the Noble Regiment.43
Neverovsky’s force was buttressed by two experienced regiments of line infantry and included one dragoon regiment, some Cossacks and fourteen guns. Nevertheless it should have been very easy meat for the far larger enemy advance guard under Marshal Murat which it faced on 14 August. In fact Neverovsky lost some guns and possibly as many as 1,400 men, but the bulk of his force escaped, despite between thirty and forty assaults by Murat’s cavalry.
Napoleon’s secretary, Baron Fain, had the following to say about the affair at Krasnyi:
our cavalry dashes forward, it attacks the Russians in more than forty consecutive charges: many times our squadrons penetrate into the square;…but the very inexperience of the Russian peasants who make up this body gives them a strength of inertia which takes the place of resistance. The elan of the horsemen is deadened in this mob which packs together, presses against each other, and closes up all its gaps. Ultimately the most brilliant valour is exhausted in striking a compact mass which we chop up but cannot break.44
Fighting in what to many of them seemed to be Europe’s semi-savage periphery, many of the French have left descriptions of the 1812 campaign that have a ring of cultural arrogance more familiar from European descriptions of colonial warfare. Not surprisingly, Russian descriptions of the battle at Krasnyi are rather different from Fain’s account.
Dmitrii Dushenkovich experienced his first battle before his sixteenth birthday. He wrote in his memoirs:
Anyone who has been through the experience of a first hot, dangerous and noisy battle can imagine the feelings of a soldier of my age. Everything seemed incomprehensible to me. I felt that I was alive, saw everything that was going on around me, but simply could not comprehend how this awful, indescribable chaos was going to end. To this day I can still vividly recall Neverovsky riding around the square every time the cavalry approached with his sword drawn and repeating in a voice which seemed to exude confidence in his troops: ‘Lads! Remember what you were taught in Moscow. Follow your orders and no cavalry will defeat you. Don’t hurry with your volleys. Shoot straight at the enemy and don’t anyone dare to start firing before my word of command.’45
After retreating over 20 kilometres under intense pressure Neverovsky’s men were relieved by Major-General Ivan Paskevich’s 26th Division, which Bagration had rushed forward to rescue them. Paskevich wrote that ‘on that day our infantry covered itself in glory’. He also recognized Neverovsky’s excellent leadership. He pointed out, however, that if Murat had shown minimal professional competence the Russians would never have escaped. It was true that the double line of trees on either side of the highway down which Neverovsky retreated had impeded the French attacks. That was no excuse, however, for complete failure to coordinate the cavalry attacks and use his overwhelming superiority in numbers to slow the Russians’ march. It was also elementary tactics that cavalry attacking disciplined infantry in square needed the help of horse artillery. ‘To the shame of the French one has to note that though they brought up 19,000 cavalry and a whole division of infantry they only deployed one battery of artillery.’ Whether this omission occurred through sheer incompetence or whether Murat wanted all the glory for his horsemen Paskevich could not guess.46
Maybe Paskevich was a little unfair. French sources claimed that their artillery had been stopped by a broken bridge. Nor was the fight at Krasnyi in itself very significant. The fate of Neverovsky’s 7,000 men would hardly decide the campaign one way or another. Neverovsky’s action did not even seriously slow down the French advance. But what happened at Krasnyi was to prove symptomatic. During August 1812, in and around Smolensk, Napoleon was to have a number of opportunities seriously to weaken the Russian army and possibly even to decide the campaign. These chances were lost because of failures in executing his plans, above all by his senior generals.
When he heard of Neverovsky’s plight and the threat to Smolensk Bagration ordered Nikolai Raevsky’s corps (which included Paskevich’s division) back to the city at top speed. By the late afternoon of 15 August when Napoleon’s army approached Smolensk, Raevsky and Neverovsky were deployed behind its walls. Even together, however, their force probably only added up to 15,000 men and if Napoleon had pushed hard from dawn on 16
