Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace

by Dominic Lieven

  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 flèches 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 flèches. 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 flèches – 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-Priest, and Mikhail Borozdin were all out of action.54

  Both the French and the Russian armies used basically similar tactics. Attacks were mounted behind a cloud of skirmishers and with strong artillery support but the bulk of the infantry was deployed in columns. As Jomini pointed out in his theoretical writings, if the attacking force was sufficiently numerous and determined it was unlikely to be stopped by the musketry of enemy infantry themselves largely deployed in column. Having broken into the front line, however, the attacker would then be very vulnerable to immediate counter-attack by fresh enemy forces as yet untouched by the fighting and already deployed for a counter-strike in battalion columns. If both sides were equally motivated, attack would follow counter-attack and the pendulum would swing between the two sides until the first one to exhaust its reserves was defeated and withdrew. Great efforts have been expended by Russian historians to discover how many times waves of French infantry assaulted the flèches but this is almost impossible to establish and not that important. For all their immense courage the outnumbered Russians were finally forced to withdraw over the Semenovsky stream and redeploy on either side of the village of Semenovskoe.55

  In the course of the ferocious battle for the flèches Bagration drew in reinforcements from both his right and his left. On the right this meant that some of the infantry of Nikolai Raevsky’s Seventh Corps, positioned just to the left of the Raevsky Redoubt, redeployed southwards towards Semenovskoe. Meanwhile on the far left of the Russian line Nikolai Tuchkov was forced to send one of his two infantry divisions under Petr Konovnitsyn to help Bagration.

  As a result, Tuchkov was hard pressed when Prince Poniatowski’s Polish corps began its advance down the Old Smolensk Road towards the village of Utitsa. Fortunately for the Russians, Poniatowski had been forced to make a big detour to avoid getting lost in the forests, which suggests what kind of fate would have awaited Davout’s much larger force had he attempted his proposed flank attack. When Poniatowski did advance, his 10,000 men forced the outnumbered Tuchkov to fall back to a stronger position anchored by a hill just to the east o
f Utitsa.

  For the rest of the day fierce but ultimately indecisive fighting continued around Utitsa and the Old Smolensk Road. The Poles were reinforced by most of Junot’s Westphalian corps. On the other side, Karl Baggohufvudt’s Second Corps arrived to rescue Tuchkov. Meanwhile in the Utitsa forest between the Old Smolensk Road and the open ground where the flèches had been constructed Prince Ivan Shakhovskoy’s jaeger regiments put up a tremendous fight, tying down a larger enemy force and, in the words of a German historian, showing ‘not only their courageous endurance but also a skill which Russian light infantry did not always and everywhere display’.56

  Once Baggohufvudt arrived, the battle on the Russian far left became something of a sideshow. Given the relatively even balance of forces in the area, it was very unlikely that Poniatowski would succeed in pushing far down the Old Smolensk Road and into the Russian rear. Much more dangerous was the situation around the Raevsky Redoubt. If the French broke through here they would split the Russian line in two. They would also be within easy striking distance of the New Smolensk Road, Kutuzov’s key line of communication to the rear.

  For more than two hours after the fall of Borodino the enemy’s artillery and skirmishers poured fire on the defenders of the Raevsky Redoubt, but no mass attack was made by the infantry of Eugeène de Beauharnais, who commanded the left wing of Napoleon’s army. When the order for the attack did finally come, its weight was too great for the redoubt’s defenders, who were driven off the mound. One problem for the Russians was that their artillery in the redoubt was running short of ammunition. In addition, the advancing columns were concealed by the dense clouds of smoke which clung around the redoubt in the still morning air. Panic resulted when the French infantry suddenly emerged out of the smoke and swarmed over the redoubt. Precise timings for the various episodes during the battle of Borodino are very difficult to establish. The one certainty as regards the attack on the redoubt is that it occurred shortly after Petr Bagration was wounded and after part of Nikolai Raevsky’s corps had left the area of the redoubt to go to his aid.57

  On hearing the news that Bagration was a casualty, Kutuzov sent Aleksei Ermolov down to Second Army to help its remaining commanders and report back on the situation. Together with Ermolov rode Major-General Count Aleksandr Kutaisov, the overall commander of the artillery. Kutaisov was an able young artillerist, passionately committed to his profession. He was also handsome, kindly, charming and cultured, which helped to make him one of the most popular figures in the army. In this there was some irony since his grandfather, the first Count Kutaisov, was a universally loathed and barely literate former Turkish prisoner of war whom Paul I had made his close confidant and a count, partly to spite the Russian aristocracy.58

  As Ermolov and Kutaisov were riding past the Raevsky Redoubt on their way to Second Army they saw the Russian troops in the neighbourhood in full flight. It was crucial for the Russians to counter-attack immediately before the enemy could consolidate its hold on the redoubt.

  Aleksei Ermolov was just the right man for such an emergency. He immediately took command of the troops which remained in his vicinity and led them in a successful counter-attack. When Ermolov’s men – mostly from the Ufa Regiment of Dokhturov’s Sixth Corps – fought their way back into the redoubt they found other units from Sixth Corps, led by Barclay’s aide-de-camp Vladimir Löwenstern, storming into the position from the other side of the hill. Meanwhile Ivan Paskevich had rallied the remnants of his own 26th Division and advanced in support of Löwenstern and Ermolov to the left of the redoubt. The Russian counter-attack succeeded because the Russian officers on the spot acted immediately, resolutely and on their own initiative, without waiting for orders. In addition, General Morand’s division, which had spearheaded the assault, had moved ahead of Eugène de Beauharnais’s other divisions and was isolated.59 For the Russians the most important casualty of the counter-attack was Aleksandr Kutaisov, who was killed in the retaking of the redoubt. His body was never found. No doubt the army’s chief of artillery should not have risked his life in this way, and subsequently Kutaisov’s death was used to explain mistakes in the way in which the Russian artillery was handled during the battle. Explanations were certainly in order. The Russians had 624 guns on the battlefield and, in particular, had many more heavy twelve-pounders than the French. Nevertheless they fired only the same number of rounds. Problems occurred with the re-supply of ammunition to batteries. Much worse, though individual batteries fought with great skill and courage, the Russians failed to concentrate their artillery fire. In key areas of the battlefield the Russian batteries were heavily outnumbered and smothered by enemy fire. After they were destroyed or forced to retire, the new batteries brought up from the reserve in ones and twos often then suffered a similar fate. According to Ivan Liprandi, this failing had little to do with Kutaisov’s death. In his view, the Russians always failed to concentrate their artillery in 1812, though by 1813 they had learned their lesson and sometimes did better.60

  In normal circumstances the repulse of Morand’s division should have been followed by a renewed attack by the rest of Eugène’s corps. In fact, however, hours passed before the next major attack, which was launched after three o’clock in the afternoon. The delay proved crucial. More than half of Paskevich’s 26th Division were casualties and Barclay sent the division to the rear to rest and reorganize itself. He was able to do this because in the meantime the whole of Aleksandr Ostermann-Tolstoy’s Fourth Corps had arrived and could be used to plug the gap between the Raevsky Redoubt and the Russian troops involved in the ferocious battle around the village of Semenovskoe. The ‘lull’ around the redoubt was strictly relative. Ostermann-Tolstoy’s men were subjected to a devastating artillery barrage. But the full-scale infantry attack which might have broken through the weakened Russian defences near the redoubt in the late morning never occurred.61

  The reason for this delay was that Eugène was distracted by a Russian cavalry raid which came in from the north and threatened his rear. The raid was initiated by Matvei Platov, whose Cossack corps stood on the far right of the Russian line. Early in the morning of 7 September his patrols reported that there were no French troops in front of them and that it was possible for cavalry to ford the river Kolocha and work their way southwards behind the French lines. As a result, not only Platov’s Cossacks but also Fedor Uvarov’s First Cavalry Corps were ordered off to harass Eugène. In reality a few thousand cavalry, unsupported by infantry and with just two batteries of horse artillery, were unlikely to achieve much. Platov’s Cossacks raided Eugene’s baggage train while Uvarov’s regulars made a number of not very determined attacks on his infantry. At the time Kutuzov saw the attack as a failure and was annoyed by Uvarov’s lacklustre performance. It was only much later that the Russians came to understand what a difference the raid had made.

  Meanwhile throughout the late morning and early afternoon fierce fighting continued in and around the village of Semenovskoe, towards the Russian left. In the village and to its right were the remnants of Bagration’s Second Army and Prince Grigorii Cantacuzene’s small brigade of Grenadiers which had come up from the reserve to help them. To the left of the village stood Petr Konovnitsyn’s infantry division and three Guards regiments, the Izmailovskys, the Lithuania (Litovsky) Guards and the Finland Regiment. Some way behind the infantry were the six dragoon and hussar regiments of Karl Sievers’s Fourth Cavalry Corps but by the end of the day most of the Russian heavy cavalry had also been committed to the battle near Semenovskoe.

  All the Russian infantry near Semenovskoe were subjected to repeated attacks and devastating artillery fire. Casualties were immense. The Guards were worst placed since there was no cover to the left of the village. On the contrary, the area where they stood was dominated by the other bank of the Semenovsky stream on which Davout and Ney brought forward and deployed many batteries. The range was so short that at times the French guns were firing canister into the ranks of the Russian Guards. The latte
r were under repeated attack from a mass of French cavalry so they were forced to remain in squares, the juiciest of all targets for artillery. As at Waterloo, the attacks of the enemy cavalry became a welcome respite from the artillery fire. The Guards also had to deploy many skirmishers against the French infantry attempting to break out from the forest to their left. Nevertheless the three regiments held firm against all these threats. They kept the French cavalry and infantry at bay, and their steadiness was the rock around which the Russian defence coalesced.

  In all, the Izmailovskys and Lithuania Guards suffered more than 1,600 casualties. In the Lithuania Regiment, for example, all the majors and colonels were killed or wounded, some of them remaining in the ranks despite multiple wounds. Casualties were also very heavy in the Guards artillery batteries which moved forward in the regiments’ support and were smothered by the more numerous French guns. Among these casualties, for example, was the 17-year-old ensign Avram Norov, who lost a leg at Borodino but nevertheless later made a brilliant career, ending as minister of education. His battery commander ‘could not hold back his sorrow at seeing Norov, who was a handsome and fine young man – indeed really only a boy – disfigured for life. But Norov responded with his usual slight stammer. “Well, brother, but there’s nothing to be done! God is merciful and I will recover and then get back to the battle on crutches.”’ Kutuzov reported to Alexander that the Guards regiments ‘in this battle covered themselves in glory under the eyes of the whole army’. Borodino was in fact the day in the Napoleonic Wars when the Russian Guards came of age as ever-reliable elite troops whose commitment could turn the fate of a battle.62