efforts cut across Eugen’s. Meanwhile the confusion confirmed Kutuzov’s doubts about his army’s ability to manoeuvre. He refused to allow even Miloradovich’s corps, let alone the Guards, to attack, despite the fact that the French were badly outnumbered and would almost certainly have been routed.23
Perhaps the most extraordinary point amidst all this chaos is that the Russians did actually win the battle of Tarutino. Murat was driven off the battlefield with a loss of 3,000 men and many cannon, standards and other booty. This was small consolation for most of the Russian generals, and above all for Bennigsen and Toll who had masterminded the operation. Given Murat’s carelessness and Russian numbers, the surprise attack should have destroyed much of his detachment. Bennigsen saw Kutuzov’s refusal to commit Miloradovich’s troops as deliberate sabotage born of the field-marshal’s envy of any rival who might steal his glory. Though the battle of Tarutino spread the poison at headquarters, its impact on the junior officers and men was the exact opposite. They rejoiced in the fact that for the first time in 1812 the main army had attacked and defeated the enemy. Kutuzov made sure that all the trophies captured on 18 October were laid out for his men to see. He organized a Te Deum to celebrate the victory, which he reported in glowing terms to Alexander. Whatever his limitations as a tactician, Kutuzov was a master when it came to public relations and his troops’ morale.24
Napoleon heard the news of Murat’s defeat while inspecting troops near the Kremlin. The emperor was always acutely sensitive to anything that reflected on his own prestige and his army’s victorious reputation. Now not merely would he be retreating from Moscow but would be doing so after a defeat. On the next day, 19 October, he left the city with his army’s main body, leaving a substantial rearguard behind to complete the evacuation and blow up the Kremlin. During the month of October he had contemplated a number of possible moves after leaving Moscow. The most conservative would be to retreat the way he had come, down the highway to Smolensk. This was the quickest way to get back to his supply bases at Smolensk, Minsk and Vilna and took him down Russia’s best road, which was a major consideration given the vast and motley baggage train he was dragging along in his wake. But the area along the road had been devastated and his army would find little food or quarters.25
The obvious alternative was to move on Kaluga, Kutuzov’s main supply base one week’s march to the south-west of Moscow. Napoleon even contemplated then turning towards the great armaments centre at Tula, at least an additional three days’ march to the south-east. Capturing Tula would badly damage the whole Russian war effort. Taking Kaluga might net some supplies for Napoleon and would disrupt any subsequent Russian pursuit of his army. It would also conveniently hide the fact that the French were retreating. From Kaluga, Napoleon could withdraw down the relatively good road which led through Iukhnov to Smolensk and Belorussia.
With November and winter only two weeks away Napoleon could not afford detours and delays. There were strict limits to how much food he could carry with him from Moscow. As always, the biggest problem was the enormously bulky fodder for the horses. Every day of extra marching brought hunger, winter and disintegration that much closer. To be sure, he could feed and quarter his army more easily along the Kaluga–Smolensk road than on the Moscow–Smolensk highway but the advantages of this should not be exaggerated. To survive, his army would need to forage well away from the road and the overwhelmingly superior Russian light cavalry would make this impossible. The French army was never likely to match the steady discipline of Russian rearguards. In addition, by late October 1812 the state of Napoleon’s horses meant that his rearguards would lack two crucial components: sufficient cavalry and fast-moving artillery. While facing Russian light cavalry and horse artillery in overwhelming numbers, there was no chance of the French maintaining a steady, methodical retreat. Speed was the only option and rapid retreats turned easily into rout.
The basic point was that by mid-October Napoleon had no safe options. Unless he was very lucky or the Russians blundered terribly his army was going to suffer great losses during its retreat. The key to minimizing these losses would be discipline. If the men abandoned their units and disobeyed their officers, disaster would be inevitable. Every scrap of food in Moscow had to be collected and a system of fair distribution established down the hierarchy of command. Not merely would this ensure that everyone got their share, it was also a vital method of maintaining control and discipline. Superfluous baggage, civilians and plunder had to be reduced to a minimum. Elementary precautions – such as shoeing the horses against winter ice – needed to be taken in time.
Just to list what needed to be done more or less describes what did not happen. The fire of Moscow had encouraged all the army’s worst plundering instincts but ever since Napoleon’s first great campaign in Italy in 1796–7 his troops had plundered on a grand scale wherever they went. Segur comments that the army leaving Moscow ‘resembled a horde of Tatars after a successful invasion’, but the emperor could not ‘deprive his soldiers of this fruit of so many toils’. While carts bulged with plunder, some food supplies were burned before leaving Moscow. Finding enough to eat quickly became a matter of every man for himself in many units, Fezensac commenting that the system of distribution was uneven and chaotic. Caulaincourt is even more scathing about the near total and entirely avoidable failure to provide winter horseshoes, which in his opinion killed many more horses than even hunger. Sir Robert Wilson’s comment that ‘never was a retreat so wretchedly conducted’ might seem the biased view of an enemy were it not confirmed by Caulaincourt: ‘The habit of victory cost us even dearer in retreat. The glorious habit of always marching forwards made us veritable schoolboys when it came to retreating. Never was a retreat worse organized.’26
Napoleon marched out of Moscow on 19 October down the Old Kaluga Road which led towards Kutuzov’s headquarters at Tarutino. About halfway to Tarutino he swung to the west down the side roads which brought him out on to the New Kaluga Road near Fominskoe. His goal was to get ahead of Kutuzov on the road to Kaluga. The emperor’s movements were shielded by Murat’s advance guard. The presence of enemy troops near Fominskoe was quickly discovered by the Russians and Kutuzov sent Dmitrii Dokhturov’s Sixth Corps to attack them. Just in time, in the evening of 22 October, Russian partisans warned Dokhturov that the enemy force at Fominskoe was not an isolated detachment but Napoleon’s main army, including the Guards and the emperor himself. Armed with this information Kutuzov was able both to stop what would have been a disastrous attack on overwhelmingly superior enemy forces and to send Dokhturov scurrying southwards to block the New Kaluga Road at the small town of Maloiaroslavets, thereby denying Napoleon the chance to take Kaluga. Kutuzov himself marched cross-country from Tarutino to Maloiaroslavets to support Dokhturov.27
Napoleon’s advance guard on the New Kaluga Road was the largely Italian corps commanded by his stepson, Eugene de Beauharnais. The first units of this corps crossed the river Luzha in the evening of 23 October and entered Maloiaroslavets, a town with 1,600 inhabitants, from the north. At dawn the next day the first regiments of Dokhturov’s corps arrived from the south and drove the enemy out of most of the town.
All that day the battle swung back and forth in the streets of Maloiaroslavets as one assault succeeded another. Some 32,000 Russian troops fought 24,000 Italians. If Eugene’s men had not succeeded in barricading themselves behind the stout walls of the Chernoostrov Nicholas monastery in the centre of the town it is possible that the Russians would have driven them out of Maloiaroslavets and back over the river. The Russians had the advantage of attacking downhill towards the river valley. Eugene’s Italians fought with immense courage and pride. So too did the Russian regiments, their ranks filled with new recruits and militiamen. At the forefront of Dokhturov’s attacks was, for instance, the 6th Jaeger Regiment. This was a fine unit whose inspiring colonel-in-chief, Prince Petr Bagration, had led it through Suvorov’s Italian campaign of 1799 and many rearguard actions in 1805. At Maloiaroslavets, however, 60 per cent of its men were new recruits or militia.
By the end of the day the largely wooden town of Maloiaroslavets had burned to the ground. With it burned hundreds of wounded Russian and Italian soldiers, who had been unable to drag themselves away from the flames. The narrow streets of the town were an appalling sight, with bodies pulped into sickening mounds of blood and flesh by the infantry and guns which had fought their way up and down the steep sides of the valley. In tactical terms the battle was more or less a draw. Napoleon’s troops held the town itself, while the Russians ended the day deployed in a strong position just south of the town but blocking the road to Kaluga. Casualties were roughly equal too, both sides having lost some 7,000 men.28
To the fury of most of his generals, Kutuzov decided on the following day to fall back towards Kaluga. He subsequently claimed that he had done so because Prince Poniatowski’s Polish corps was advancing through the small town of Medyn to his left and threatening his communications with Kaluga. Meanwhile, after wavering for two days, Napoleon himself decided to retreat up the road which led through Borovsk to the Moscow–Smolensk highway at Mozhaisk. He took this decision despite the fact that Kutuzov’s retreat meant that he could have marched along the road that led out westwards from Maloiaroslavets through Medyn and thence to Iukhnov and Smolensk. Perhaps he believed that it would be both quicker and safer to march down the highway rather than to entrust his army and its baggage to unknown country roads infested by swarms of Cossacks and with Kutuzov’s army hovering
