Russia Against Napoleon

overriding concern for his right flank and for the New Smolensk Road, which was his line of communications and supply to his base at Moscow.

In the two days before the battle, many of Kutuzov’s senior generals pointed out the vulnerability of the Russian left flank. Napoleon’s attack on Shevardino seemed to presage an assault on this section of Kutuzov’s line. Even quite junior officers were aware that the enemy was likely to strike in the south. Kutuzov made some changes to counter this danger. Above all, he moved Nikolai Tuchkov’s corps out of the reserve and onto the Old Smolensk Road to block any attempt to outflank the Russian left. But despite pleas from, among others, Barclay de Tolly, he insisted on keeping the corps of Baggohufvudt and Ostermann on his right flank beyond Gorki.⁴⁶

An uncharitable explanation for this might be mere stubbornness, for which Kutuzov’s chief adviser, Karl von Toll, was noted. Given antagonisms within the high command, to change the army’s deployment on the advice of rival generals might smack of humiliation. More probably, Kutuzov and Toll were unwilling to weaken the force guarding their vital line of communication until absolutely convinced that Napoleon did not intend to strike in this direction. The price of defensive tactics is that troops must be deployed on the basis of assumptions and fears about where the enemy will strike. Given Napoleon’s reputation for surprise and daring this might result in many units being wasted far from the battlefield. Once again a comparison with Waterloo may be useful. Deeply concerned by what proved to be a non-existent threat to his communications with the sea, Wellington kept 17,000 men under Prince Frederick of the Netherlands inactive at Hal for the duration, many kilometres from the battlefield. At least the 23,000 men of Ostermann and Baggohufvudt did join the battle of Borodino, albeit dangerously late.

Nevertheless the mis-deployment of Second and Fourth Corps had serious consequences. In their absence, Kutuzov was forced to send most of the army’s supposed reserve into the front line by early on 7 September, contrary to all normal practice and much to Barclay’s indignation. The fact that the Guards were moved without Barclay even being informed speaks to the confusion and divisions in the Russian command structure. In the end the two right-wing corps did act as a substitute reserve, but it took desperate appeals from Bagration to shift Baggohufvudt’s men and two hours for them to arrive on the army’s threatened southern wing. Ostermann’s Fourth Corps moved even later. By the time all these reinforcements were on the spot, enormous losses had been suffered by Bagration’s outnumbered Second Army.⁴⁷

Disputes about exactly how many men each side brought to Borodino have rumbled on ever since 1812, partly out of a rather childish effort by historians to boost their side’s prowess by proving it to have been outnumbered. The Russians certainly had more men but only if one counts the 31,000 militiamen from Moscow and Smolensk who were mostly armed with pikes and axes and had no military training. The militia was not totally useless, because it fulfilled auxiliary tasks such as collecting the wounded and acting as military police. But these militia units could not and in fact did not take any part in the fighting. If one discounts the militia entirely, Napoleon probably had a slight numerical edge: perhaps 130,000 of his soldiers faced somewhat less than 125,000 Russians. Certainly Napoleon had the edge if one discounts the 8,600 Cossacks in the Russian army. Though far more useful than the militia, most Cossack units could not be expected to stand against regular cavalry, let alone infantry, on a battlefield.⁴⁸

As regards the quality of the two armies’ regular units, even men who had started the campaign as rookies could now almost be seen as experienced troops. Weaklings had long since fallen out of the ranks during ten weeks of gruelling marches and battles. The one exception to this were the 13,500 men of the fourth (i.e. Recruit Depot) battalions commanded by General Mikhail Miloradovich, who joined Kutuzov one week before the battle and were dispersed among the regiments of First and Second armies. These men had been adequately trained but, as usual in the peacetime army, target practice had been constrained by shortage of lead and none of them had ever previously fired a shot in anger. On the other hand, the elite units of both armies were present in strength. In the Russian case this meant the regiments of Guards and Grenadiers. In Napoleon’s it included the Guards, Davout’s First Corps, and many excellent German and French heavy cavalry regiments.⁴⁹

The two armies prepared for battle in ways that reflected their rather different natures, but both were highly motivated and itching to fight after weeks of frustrating marches. As the decisive battle loomed, postponed so often and for so many weeks, both sides knew that they were fighting for very high stakes.

Kutuzov ordered the famous Icon of the Smolensk Mother of God, which had been evacuated from the city, to be carried down the line of his army. Segur recalls that the religious procession was visible from Napoleon’s headquarters: they could see how ‘Kutuzov, surrounded with every species of religious and military pomp, took his station in the midst of it. He had made his popes and archimandrites dress themselves in those splendid and majestic insignia, which they had inherited from the Greeks. They marched before him, carrying the venerated symbols of their religion.’ Kutuzov was a master of speaking to his soldiers in terms they understood but after watching Smolensk and many other Russian towns burn, they barely needed his appeals to defend their native land and its faith to the last.⁵⁰

By contrast the French army of 1812 was entirely secular, having preserved many of the republican norms of the 1790s. Moreover, the force which fought at Borodino included tens of thousands of Poles, Germans and Italians. Napoleon’s order of the day, read out to his troops by their commanders, therefore spoke neither of religion nor patriotism. It appealed to the pride and confidence they should derive from their past victories and invoked the glory they would obtain in the eyes of posterity by having triumphed in a battle ‘under the walls of Moscow’. More prosaically, but very much to the point, it stressed the necessity of victory: ‘It will give you abundance, good winter quarters and a rapid return to your homeland.’⁵¹

Well into the afternoon of 6 September, while Napoleon was reviewing the Russian position from near Borodino, Marshal Davout approached him with a proposal to abandon plans for a frontal assault on Bagration’s army and instead to authorize a flanking movement by 40,000 men of his and Poniatowski’s corps down the Old Smolensk Road in order to envelop and roll up the Russian left flank. In principle this was a good idea. Napoleon needed a decisive victory and there had to be doubts whether this could be achieved by a frontal assault. The toughness and stubbornness of Russian troops were legendary. A flanking movement might bring on a battle of manoeuvre rather than attrition, which could only work to Napoleon’s advantage.

Nevertheless the emperor was right to reject Davout’s suggestion. Given the quality of their light cavalry the Russians were unlikely to be surprised by a flanking movement but in any case a threat to his flank might simply inspire Kutuzov to decamp which after so long a pursuit Napoleon dreaded. To redeploy Davout’s corps for such a movement would by now require large-scale movements in the dark through the forests on the French right, which was a recipe for chaos. Moreover, the Russian strategy of whittling down Napoleon’s army now bore fruit. Earlier in the campaign he could easily have spared 40,000 men for such a movement but by now his margin for risk and error was much more tight.⁵²

Soon after first light on 7 September the battle of Borodino began. At about six in the morning the Russian Guards Jaeger Regiment was driven out of the village of Borodino and back across the river Kolocha, with heavy losses. The French attacked under cover of a mist and in overwhelming numbers. Either the regiment should not have been left in so exposed and isolated a spot or it had failed to take proper precautions. Barclay believed the former to be true and had urged the Jaegers’ withdrawal on Kutuzov. But army gossip often blamed the regiment’s commanders for the defeat. The French units which had taken Borodino pursued the Guards Jaegers over the river Kolocha and were then ambushed and driven back with heavy losses, so in tactical terms the battle was a draw. Its broader significance was that it enabled the French artillery pounding the Raevsky Redoubt to be brought forward and given excellent positions to enfilade the Russian lines. This initial blow towards the northern end of the Russian line may also have persuaded Kutuzov that Napoleon might strike his right wing after all. If so, it can only have increased his hesitation about sending Ostermann and Baggohufvudt southwards.⁵³

Shortly after the attack on Borodino the vastly bigger assault on the Bagration fleches began. Though initially the assault was made by Davout’s men, quite soon Marshal Ney threw his corps into the battle as well. Russian sources claim that by the end of the fight 400 enemy guns supported the advance on the fleches. This sounds exaggerated but there is no question that the three divisions of Borozdin’s Eighth Corps, the only Russian infantry initially deployed in this area, were heavily outnumbered and subjected to an immense bombardment. The three fleches – their earthen walls soon shattered by the French bombardment – were held by Count Mikhail Vorontsov’s Second Combined Grenadier Division, which was annihilated in the course of the fighting and subsequently disbanded. Vorontsov himself was severely wounded. So too were most of the other generals of Second Army, who showed outstanding courage and self-sacrifice. Within three hours Petr Bagration, his chief of staff Emmanuel de Saint-