Russia Against Napoleon

by Lieven, Dominic

  Though the appointment of Kutuzov was certainly a great improvement it did not solve all problems in the Russian command structure and indeed created some new ones. Barclay de Tolly reacted loyally to Kutuzov’s appointment and understood its necessity, but the enormous criticism to which he had been subjected made him very sensitive to slights from his new commander, and these were not slow in coming, above all from the new chief of staff, Levin von Bennigsen. Meanwhile, though Barclay’s replacement by Kutuzov was a major concession to Russian sentiment it did not at all satisfy the leaders of the ‘Russian party’ at headquarters, Petr Bagration and Aleksei Ermolov. Perhaps Bagration himself dreamed of the supreme command, though this is hard to believe given that he knew how little favour he enjoyed with Alexander. Certainly, neither general thought highly of Kutuzov’s ability. As for the new commander-in-chief, he respected Bagration as a battlefield commander. Rather like Barclay, he appreciated Ermolov’s talent but had justified doubts about his loyalty.34

  The problems were structural as much as personal, however. It would have been rational for the new commander-in-chief to suppress First and Second armies and to subordinate their seven infantry and four cavalry corps directly to himself and to his chief of staff, Bennigsen. To have done this, however, would have meant public demotion and humiliation for Barclay, Bagration and their staffs. This was contrary to the modus vivendi of the tsarist elite. It would also have required the emperor’s assent, since he had appointed both generals and created their armies. The survival of both armies produced a cumbersome command structure, however. It also made conflict inevitable between the staffs of the supreme commander and those of Barclay and Bagration. In particular, Barclay soon found that general headquarters was poaching some of his staff officers and giving direct orders to some of his units.

  In this case too, structures and personalities intertwined. The new chief of staff, Bennigsen, had only been persuaded to take the job with difficulty and after Kutuzov stressed the emperor’s desire that he should do so. In traditional style, Alexander may have wanted to use Bennigsen to keep tabs on Kutuzov. He undoubtedly had more faith in Bennigsen’s ability, as well as in his energy. To do Alexander justice, Kutuzov and Bennigsen had been firm friends for many years before 1812 so the emperor did not anticipate that they would become deadly enemies in the course of that year. Kutuzov was always suspicious of any subordinate who might seek to steal his laurels. Bennigsen on the other hand was intensely proud and firmly convinced that he was a far more skilful general than Kutuzov, let alone Barclay. In time-honoured fashion, feeling himself rather isolated, Kutuzov increasingly leaned on the advice and support of Karl von Toll, his old protégé. For Bennigsen it was intolerable that anyone else’s advice should be preferred to that of the chief of staff but to be sidelined in favour of a mere bumptious colonel was a source of fury.35

  Ever since the army had evacuated Smolensk, a relay of staff officers had been sent back down the road to Moscow to find good positions on which the army could fight Napoleon. It was unthinkable to almost all senior officers to give up Russia’s ancient capital without a battle. Clausewitz describes well the difficulties these staff officers faced:

  Russia is very poor in positions. Where the great morasses prevail [i.e. in much of Belorussia], the country is so wooded that one has trouble to find room for a considerable number of troops. Where the forests are thinner, as between Smolensk and Moscow, the ground is level – without any decided mountain ridges – without any deep hollows; the fields are without enclosures, therefore everywhere easy to be passed; the villages of wood, and ill adapted for defence. To this it must be added, that even in such a country the prospect is seldom unimpeded, as small tracts of wood constantly interpose. There is therefore little choice of positions. If a commander, then, wishes to fight without loss of time, as was Kutuzov’s case, it is evident that he must put up with what he can get.36

  What Kutuzov got was a position near the village of Borodino, 124 kilometres from Moscow. For the Russian staff officers who initially viewed this position from the main highway – the so-called New Smolensk Road – first impressions were very good. Troops standing on either side of the highway would have their right flank secured by the river Moskva and their front protected by the steep banks of the river Kolocha. Problems became much greater when one looked carefully at the left flank of this position, south of the main road. Initially the Russian army took up position on a line which ran from Maslovo north of the road, through Borodino on the highroad itself and down to the hill at Shevardino on the left flank. The centre of the position could be strengthened by the mound just to the south-east of Borodino which became the famous Raevsky Redoubt. Meanwhile the left could be anchored at Shevardino, which Bagration began to fortify.

  Closer inspection soon revealed to Bagration that the position on the left assigned to his army was very vulnerable. A ravine in his rear impeded communications. More important, another road – the so-called Old Smolensk Road – cut in sharply behind his line from the west, joining with the main highway to the rear of the Russian position. An enemy pushing down this road could easily roll up Bagration’s flank and block the army’s line of retreat to Moscow. Faced by this danger, Bagration’s army began to withdraw to a new position which abandoned Shevardino and turned sharply southwards from Borodino in a straight line to the village of Utitsa on the Old Smolensk Road. On 5 September Bagration’s troops at Shevardino fought off fierce French attacks in order to cover the redeployment to this new line, losing 5,000–6,000 men and inflicting perhaps slightly fewer casualties on the enemy.37

  The new line was certainly safer because it blocked the Old Smolensk Road. To do this, however, it had been forced to abandon the strong position at Shevardino and instead to stretch across terrain between Borodino and Utitsa which offered no help to the troops that were defending it. In addition, by turning sharply southwards near Borodino and the Raevsky Redoubt the Russian line now became a sort of salient with all the troops between Borodino and the left of Bagration’s line beyond the village of Semenovskoe vulnerable to French artillery crossfire.

  During the battle of Borodino on 7 September the great majority of the Russian army was packed into this small salient. This included five of the seven Russian infantry corps, which alone added up to 70,000 men. In addition, there were more than 10,000 cavalry in the ‘salient’. Even the other two Russian infantry corps – Baggohufvudt’s Second and Tuchkov’s Third – detached half of their men to defend this area. The Russian deployment was not just on a very narrow front but also extremely dense. The infantry divisions were drawn up in three lines. In front were the jaegers. Behind them came two lines of infantry, deployed in so-called ‘Battalion Columns’. These columns had a frontage of one company and a depth of four. Not far to the rear of the infantry divisions stood the cavalry, with the army’s reserve units deployed behind them but still often within range of Napoleon’s heavy artillery, to which the six or even sometimes seven lines of Russian troops offered a fine target.38

  To explain what all this means to an English-language readership it is perhaps useful to make comparisons with the familiar landscape of Waterloo. Napoleon brought 246 guns to Waterloo, some of which had to be deployed even at the very start of the battle on his right against the Prussians. The so-called ‘Grand Battery’ which pounded Wellington’s infantry squares in the afternoon of 18 June 1815 consisted of 80 guns. Napoleon’s artillery was ranged face-to-face with Wellington’s army. Almost all the fighting was confined to a line running roughly 3,500 metres east from the chateau of Hougoumont, into which Wellington packed his 73,000 men. Waterloo was indeed probably the most densely packed of the major battlefields of the Napoleonic Wars – with the exception of Borodino. The British commander partly shielded his men behind a reverse slope, though he was also helped by the fact that mud reduced the number of ricochets and therefore the killing power of Napoleon’s guns.39

  At Borodino Napoleon deployed 587 guns. The grea
t majority of them were targeted against the Russian troops defending the line from just north of the Raevsky Redoubt to the three field fortifications which Bagration’s men constructed beyond Semenovskoe, and which have gone down in history as the Bagration flèches – arrow-shaped earth-works, open to the rear, whose crumbling earthen breastworks offered little cover to defenders. When the flèches fell the Russian line bent southwards still more sharply around Semenovskoe itself. The distance from the Raevsky Redoubt to Semenovskoe is only 1,700 metres. The flèches were a few hundred metres beyond the village. More than 90,000 Russian troops were packed into this area. From Barclay’s report after the battle it is clear that his lines within the salient were not just being subjected to cross-fire. French batteries near Borodino were also sometimes on the flank of Russian lines and able to inflict maximum casualties by shooting right along them.40

  It is true that Wellington was more skilful than either Russian or Prussian generals in using reverse slopes and other natural obstacles to shield his troops. But Barclay did on a number of occasions order his generals to keep their men under cover, only to be told that there was none available. When one walks around the position held by the Russian army on this still unspoiled battlefield it is easy to confirm the generals’ claim. Contrary to tradition, some Russian commanders also told their men to lie down to avoid the bombardment, though not all units obeyed. The Russians can fairly be criticized for bunching their troops too tightly and not keeping at least their reserves and part of their cavalry beyond the range of Napoleon’s guns. On the other hand the bone-hard stony ground did them no favours when it came to ricochets. Russian villages constructed of wood also gave no help to defenders and instead threatened them by bursting into flames. For that reason the Russians destroyed the village of Semenovskoe before the battle began. The contrast with the enormous assistance which the stone buildings at Hougoumont and La Haye Sainte gave to Wellington is obvious.41

  The dense Russian deployment was designed to force Napoleon to fight a battle of attrition. The cramped battlefield would give his units little room to manoeuvre or to exploit tactical successes. It would in the most literal sense cramp Napoleon’s own genius. The price to be paid, as the Russian commanders knew, was very high casualties. In addition, committing oneself to a battle of attrition more or less precluded any chance of a striking Russian victory. With Napoleon present in person and his army considerably outnumbering the Russians as regards trained troops, such a victory was in any case unlikely. In many ways therefore the battle of Borodino was a microcosm of the 1812 campaign as a whole, during which the Russian high command had forced Napoleon to fight the kind of war that suited them but not him.

  History had accustomed Russian troops to fighting on terrain that gave them few natural advantages. By tradition therefore they were more inclined than most European armies to build field fortifications to strengthen a position. This they did at Borodino but with only limited success. The strongest and most professionally constructed fortifications were on the far north of the Russian line, beyond the village of Gorki. No fighting occurred in this area, so the fortifications were largely wasted. The two fortifications which did play a significant role in the battle were the much weaker Bagration flèches and the Raevsky Redoubt. Though the redoubt in particular was a key element in the Russian line of defence, one has to be very cautious in taking French descriptions of these supposedly formidable fortifications at face value.42

  Neither the flèches nor the Raevsky Redoubt were built by engineer officers. All the small cadre of army engineers were assigned on other tasks as were most of the pioneer companies, which in any case even in principle were only 500 strong. The Moscow militiamen who did most of the construction work on the Raevsky Redoubt had no clue about how to build fortifications and were impeded by the stony ground and lack of implements. Matters were not helped by an argument between Toll and Bennigsen about how best to construct fortifications on the mound. Karl Oppermann, the army’s senior and most authoritative engineer, devoted most of his attention to fortresses in 1812 and had not yet rejoined the main army in time for the battle. In addition, however, there were delays in finding spades and pickaxes for the militiamen. Work therefore began in the late afternoon of 6 September and continued through the night. Ensign Dementii Bogdanov and his small command of pioneers only arrived to help with the construction of the redoubt shortly before midnight. It was far from completed when the battle began on the morning of 7 September.43

  As a result, according to the official history of the military engineering corps, there were all sorts of elementary mistakes even in the redoubt, let alone the flèches. The mound on which the Raevsky Redoubt was constructed is in any case small and low. In the end eighteen guns with one battalion of infantry as a covering force was all that could be squashed into the position. When one walks over the mound, it seems remarkable that the Russians managed to pack in even this many men. The slope up to the front of the redoubt was very gentle, the slope in its rear only a little less so. The militiamen had done their best to make up for these weaknesses but with limited success. One problem was that ‘the counter-escarpment was much lower than the escarpment, and the ditch in front of the redoubt was completely inadequate’. Of course, the militiamen had no idea how to use fascines, gabions and other elements of the pioneer’s art. Through lack of time, embrasures were only constructed for ten guns. One result of this was that the artillery within the redoubt could not cover part of the approaches. The area in front of the redoubt was swept by the fire of Russian batteries of First Army to the north and Second Army to the south but almost all these guns were deployed in the open and subjected to devastating enemy counter-battery fire. All of this, together with the massive artillery bombardment which it suffered on 7 September, helps to explain how the redoubt could finally be stormed by cavalry.44

  The officer who initially oversaw the construction of the Raevsky Redoubt was Lieutenant Ivan Liprandi, the senior quartermaster of Dmitrii Dokhturov’s Sixth Corps. That a mere lieutenant should be the second senior staff officer in a corps indicates the shortage of senior staff officers. That he should also be doing a job which belonged properly to a military engineer was due not just to the scarcity of engineer officers but also to the fact that First Army’s engineers had been committed to building the much more formidable fortifications on the army’s right flank north of Gorki. While so much effort went into fortifying the northern flank on 4, 5 and 6 September nothing was done until almost the eve of battle at the Raevsky Redoubt. This says a great deal about the priorities of the Russian high command and where they expected the most important fighting to take place.45

  Even more striking was Kutuzov’s initial deployment of the Russian army. Of the five infantry corps placed in the front line, two – Baggohufvudt’s Second and Ostermann-Tolstoy’s Fourth – were positioned north of Gorki, as was one regular cavalry corps and Platov’s Cossacks. Dokhturov’s Sixth Corps stood opposite Borodino and between the village of Gorki and the Raevsky Redoubt. The entire line south of the redoubt as far as the flèches was manned by the two corps of Bagration’s Second Army: Nikolai Raevsky’s Seventh Corps stood next to the redoubt and Mikhail Borozdin’s Eighth Corps held the left of the line at and beyond the village of Semenovskoe. The two remaining corps of First Army, Nikolai Tuchkov’s Third and the Fifth (Guards) Corps formed the overall reserve. The army’s deployment as well as its fortifications thus reflected Kutuzov’s 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