these six weeks Kutuzov’s regular cavalry had received just 150 recruits and no reinforcements from the militia. This made good sense since useful cavalrymen could not be trained in a hurry. But many new horses had arrived for his 10,000 regular cavalrymen, often donated by the nobility of the neighbouring provinces.15
Above all, Kutuzov’s army was reinforced by twenty-six regiments of Don Cossacks, a total of 15,000 new irregular cavalry. The total mobilization of the Don Cossack reserves was a great success, for which the Cossack ataman, Matvei Platov, was made a count. Sometimes these new Cossack regiments are described as militia but this is misleading. Ordinary Russian militiamen in 1812 had no previous military experience. All able-bodied Cossacks had served in the army, however, and were expected to bring their own weapons as and when they were recalled to service. The twenty-six new Cossack regiments were therefore well armed, and packed with veterans. In normal circumstances such an enormous number of irregular cavalry might have been excessive but in the conditions of the autumn and winter campaign of 1812 their impact was to be devastating. Back in April 1812 Colonel Chuikevich’s memorandum had stressed the damage that Russian cavalry would do to a retreating enemy. Kutuzov was a shrewd and experienced campaigner. He knew that his cavalry would confine the enemy to the road on which they were retreating, force them to march at great speed, and deny them any chance of foraging away from their column. It took little imagination to realize what this would imply for an army marching into the Russian winter. Kutuzov therefore allowed his Cossacks, hunger, the weather and French indiscipline to do his work for him. Quite rightly, he was in no hurry to commit his infantry to battle.16
Obviously Napoleon made a fatal mistake in dwelling almost six weeks in Moscow while his cavalry withered, reinforcements poured in to Kutuzov and winter approached. Had he rested his troops in Moscow even for a fortnight, he could still have made it safely back to Smolensk long before the first snows or the arrival of Kutuzov’s Cossack regiments from the Don. Instead he hung on, awaiting Alexander’s response to his hints about peace. Perhaps the only thing one can say in Napoleon’s defence is that most European statesmen and much of the Russian elite shared some of his doubts about Alexander’s strength of will. Inevitably, however, Napoleon’s peace feelers themselves fed Russian confidence and gave them every opportunity to encourage him to stay in Moscow while awaiting some response from Alexander. The basic point, however, was that Napoleon had failed to destroy the Russian army and had completely miscalculated the effect of Moscow’s fall on both Alexander and the Russian elites. Having made this mistake he was too stubborn to listen to wise advice, to cut his losses, and to retreat in time.
Subsequently Kutuzov was to have a revealing discussion with a captured senior official of the French commissariat, the Viscount de Puybusque. Puybusque wrote that the Russian commander had asked him ‘through what form of blindness had he [Napoleon] failed to spot a trap which was visible to the whole world? In particular, the field-marshal was astonished at the ease with which all the ruses employed to keep him in Moscow had succeeded and at his absurd cheek (
By mid-October even Napoleon acknowledged that Alexander had duped him and that he must retreat. His departure from Moscow was hastened, however, by an attack by Kutuzov’s army on Marshal Murat’s detachment, which was watching the Russian camp at Tarutino. Left to his own devices, Kutuzov is unlikely to have ordered the attack. He was happy for Napoleon to stay in Moscow for as long as possible. In addition, as he told Miloradovich, ‘we are not yet up to complicated movements and manoeuvres’. But the commander-in-chief was under pressure from Alexander to take the offensive and liberate Moscow. Kutuzov’s generals were also raring for action, with Bennigsen stressing the need to inflict a heavy blow on Napoleon before the arrival of Marshal Victor’s reinforcements from Smolensk. Above all, Russian reconnaissance showed that Marshal Murat’s corps was vulnerable. Murat was heavily outnumbered and might be crushed long before reinforcements could arrive. Especially on its eastern flank, his camp could easily be stormed by a surprise attack from the nearby forest. French outposts and patrols were slack, which made the idea of a surprise attack all the more enticing.18
The initial plan was to attack early in the morning of 17 October. Kutuzov’s orders had to be passed to the troops through Aleksei Ermolov, as chief of staff of the now combined First and Second armies. On the evening of 16 October, however, Ermolov had gone to a fellow-general’s headquarters for dinner and was not to be found, so the attack had to be postponed. Ermolov’s memoirs are silent on this subject and this is by no means the only occasion where they have to be read with a critical eye. Conceivably Ermolov proved non-cooperative because he believed that the attack was Bennigsen’s brainchild and would not bring him any personal credit, but perhaps this is too harsh. Kutuzov was more angry about the bungling on 16 October than at any other time during the campaign.19
The mess which occurred on the evening of 16 October reflected the confusion in the army’s structure of command. Kutuzov by now deeply distrusted his chief of staff, Levin von Bennigsen, but he could not yet get rid of him. Instead he brought Petr Konovnitsyn into his headquarters, officially as duty-general but in reality as a substitute for Bennigsen. Inevitably this caused still further enmity between Kutuzov and his chief of staff. Moreover, for all his virtues as a front-line commander, Konovnitsyn had neither the training nor the aptitude for staff work.
By mid-October Kutuzov and Bennigsen had between them succeeded in humiliating Barclay de Tolly sufficiently to make him resign.20 Logically at this point the whole headquarters of combined First and Second armies should have been dismantled and orders passed straight down from Kutuzov to the corps commanders. Since the army’s overall structure had been decreed by the emperor, however, only he could authorize such a change. Meanwhile Ermolov resented both the fact that Konovnitsyn had been inserted into the chain of command and that his inefficiency created additional bother for himself. The army’s high command was therefore a maze of overlapping jurisdictions poisoned by personal rivalries among its senior officers. Nikolai Raevsky, the commander of Sixth Corps, wrote at the time that he kept as far as possible from headquarters since it was a viper’s nest of intrigue, envy, egoism and calumny.21
Postponed for one day, the attack went ahead early in the morning of 18 October. The plan was for Count Vasili Orlov-Denisov’s cavalry to attack out of the forests on the right of the Russian line, crush Murat’s left flank and storm into his rear. On Orlov-Denisov’s left he would be supported by a column of two corps, commanded by General Baggohufvudt. Next to Baggohufvudt would advance another column, made up of Aleksandr Ostermann- Tolstoy’s Fourth Corps. Once these columns had attacked, the two corps commanded by Mikhail Miloradovich would move up to their support from the western (i.e. left) end of the Russian line. Behind Miloradovich stood the Guards and cuirassiers in reserve. The main problem with this plan was that it entailed all these columns marching through the forests at night in order to take up their positions for a dawn attack. In addition, in order to achieve surprise, the columns must make no noise and strike at first light. Overall responsibility for planning and executing the army’s movements lay with Karl von Toll and the quartermaster-general’s staff.22
Orlov-Denisov’s column made its way successfully through the forests to its jumping-off point in the east. Since most of his men were Cossacks their ability to find their way was to be expected. The infantry columns of Baggohufvudt and Ostermann-Tolstoy were less successful. When dawn came Ostermann’s column was nowhere to be seen and only part of Baggohufvudt’s men were in place. When Karl von Toll arrived on the scene and found the columns in confusion he exploded into one of his rages, with Baggohufvudt and the nearest divisional commander, Eugen of Wurttemberg, as his targets. Karl Baggohufvudt was so infuriated by the insults being rained down not just on him but also on the emperor’s first cousin that he resigned his command and took himself off to the Fourth Jaegers, of which he was colonel-in-chief, vowing to die at their head.
Although the neighbouring columns were not yet in place, Orlov-Denisov could not delay his attack for fear of being spotted once daylight had arrived and the French had finally woken up. He therefore launched his Cossacks against the enemy’s eastern flank, which disintegrated and fled in all directions. To Orlov-Denisov’s left matters went less well for the Russians. Storming out of the forest with the only two jaeger regiments on the spot, Baggohufvudt was immediately killed by a cannon ball. Although the French were initially thrown into confusion by the attack, Murat rallied them and they showed their usual courage and fighting spirit on the battlefield. Eugen of Wurttemberg and Toll rearranged their troops for a renewed and more coordinated assault, which in the end pushed back the enemy. Further back in the forest was Bennigsen, to whom Kutuzov had devolved overall command of the operation. He too was doing his best to impose order and coordination on the advancing infantry brigades, but his
