Russia Against Napoleon

by Lieven, Dominic

  The Russians were ultimately forced to abandon Semenovskoe and retreat a few hundred metres to the east but they kept their discipline, continuing to present a firm front to the enemy. The French cavalry attacked the squares but could not break them. When they tried to break out to the rear of the Russian line they found that they had little room to manoeuvre and were counter-attacked by the Russian cuirassiers and by Sievers’s Fourth Cavalry Corps, both of which more than held their own. By mid-afternoon it was clear that Davout’s and Ney’s corps were played out. If Napoleon was to break through the Russian line beyond Semenovskoe he would have to commit fresh troops. All that remained were his Guards. One of the Guards infantry divisions had been left behind at Gzhatsk but the other two were on hand and roughly 10,000 strong. Ney and Davout appealed to Napoleon for their release.

  Ever since September 1812 a debate has raged as to whether the emperor’s refusal to commit his reserve cost him a decisive victory at Borodino and thereby his chances of winning the campaign of 1812. There can be no definite answer to this. The Russians themselves disagreed about the probable result if Napoleon had sent forward his Guards. The best of the nineteenth-century Russian historians, General Bogdanovich, believed that he would have secured a decisive victory and thereby seriously damaged Russian morale. On the other hand, Eugen of Württemberg wrote that the introduction of the Guards would have turned an almost drawn battle into an unequivocal French victory but that Kutuzov’s army would still have got away down the New Smolensk Road and the ultimate strategic outcome of the battle would therefore not have been altered.63

  My own hunch is that Eugen was probably right. On the Russian side, the six battalions of the Preobrazhensky and Semenovsky Guards were still in reserve and had together suffered only 300 casualties from artillery fire. The Second Guards Infantry Brigade had already shown the Guards regiments’ powers of resistance and the First Guards Brigade was not likely to do worse. As at Semenovskoe, other units would have formed around the Guards. Ivan Paskevich’s division, for example, had been sent to the rear to re-form and was quite capable of renewing the struggle in emergency, as were a number of artillery batteries also withdrawn from the front line to rest and restock with ammunition. A combination of Russian stubbornness, the bushes and broken country behind the Russian lines, and the distance to the main highway probably meant that the Russians would be able to delay the French advance for long enough to allow the army to slip away. Given time, Kutuzov could also bring four untouched jaeger regiments and some artillery batteries down from beyond Borodino to form a rearguard. Barclay still believed that his army had a lot of fight left in it and was expecting the battle to be renewed on the next day.64

  The whole debate is of course theoretical since Napoleon refused to risk his Guards. The smoke and dust thrown up by the battle made it impossible to see what was going on behind the Russian lines. The Russians had fought with immense stubbornness, which showed no sign of abating. The commander of the Guards, Marshal Bessières, whom Napoleon sent forward to spy out the land, reported that Russian resistance was still strong. With the possibility of another battle before Moscow and given the insecurity of his position deep in central Russia it is not surprising that Napoleon wished to retain his ultimate strategic reserve. The fact that the Guards were still intact was indeed to prove a major asset during the retreat from Moscow.65

  Given the emperor’s refusal to commit his Guards to the battle at Semenovskoe, his final chance of victory was to be Eugène de Beauharnais’s second assault on the Raevsky Redoubt, which was launched not long after three o’clock. By now the redoubt was a near ruin. It was defended by Petr Likhachev’s 24th Division of Sixth Corps, with Ostermann-Tolstoy’s Fourth Corps in support to the left. The attack was spearheaded by heavy cavalry, which was an unorthodox way to take a field fortification. The hand-to-hand fighting in the confined space of the redoubt was grim. Dead and wounded men piled up in mounds. Likhachev himself was captured but most of the Russian defenders were slaughtered, though some of the guns were withdrawn in time. On this occasion enough of Eugène’s remaining 20,000 infantry came up to consolidate their hold on the redoubt.66

  Barclay de Tolly had been in the thick of the fighting all day, calmly re-forming and redeploying his regiments to meet one emergency after another. Dressed in full uniform and wearing all his decorations, he seemed to be – and indeed was – courting death. Most of his aides were killed or wounded. The example he showed of courage, coolness and competence at moments of extreme stress and danger won him renewed respect. Now once again, but for the last time on 7 September, he rallied his infantry and artillery a kilometre or so to the east in a good defensive position on rising ground and drew on his cavalry to stop the enemy from exploiting their capture of the redoubt. Napoleon’s own cavalry had suffered heavy casualties in storming the Raevsky Redoubt. Their horses were also in a much worse state than those of their Russian opponents. On the other hand, Napoleon’s regular cavalry outnumbered the Russians by a wide margin. Barclay was forced even to commit his ultimate reserve, the Chevaliers Gardes and the Horse Guards, but these elite troops drove back the enemy cavalry and his lines held. When Napoleon once again refused to commit his Guards to exploit the fall of the redoubt the battle of Borodino was over.

  That night Lieutenant Luka Simansky of the Izmailovsky Guards recalled the day’s events in his diary. The Smolensk Icon of the Mother of God was positioned close behind the Izmailovskys’ bivouac and before loading their muskets the regiment had turned to pray to it. In their squares near Semenovskoe the regiment was deluged by round-shot and canister. In comparison the attacks of the enemy cavalry were relaxing. No Russian artillery seemed to be anywhere in sight. All the senior officers of the Izmailovskys fell. A staff captain commanded the battalion and a mere ensign its skirmishers. By some miracle Simansky himself was untouched. When his orderly saw him returning unscathed from the fray he burst into tears of joy. Simansky ended his entry by writing: ‘I thought of my family and of the fact that I had remained calm and not budged one step from my post; of how I had cheered up my men and how I had prayed and given thanks to God as every cannon ball flew past me. The Almighty heard my prayer and spared me. Pray God that in His mercy he will also save dying Russia, which has already been punished for her sins sufficiently.’67

  Kutuzov had spent the day at his command post on the right wing, near the village of Gorki. He had positioned his corps before the battle and played some role on 7 September as regards the release of the reserves. On the whole, however, he left Barclay and Bagration to conduct the fighting. When Bagration was wounded he sent Dmitrii Dokhturov to replace him but himself never budged from the hill at Gorki. This made good sense. Barclay, Bagration and Dokhturov were fully competent to run a defensive battle of this sort in which no grand manoeuvres were attempted by the Russians. They were also much younger and more mobile than Kutuzov. Moreover, he was irreplaceable. Had Kutuzov been killed the army’s morale and cohesion would have collapsed. No other commander could have drawn anything approaching the same degree of trust and obedience. As Ivan Radozhitsky put it, ‘only Field-Marshal Prince Kutuzov, a true son of Russia, nourished at her breast, could have abandoned without a fight the empire’s ancient capital’.68

  In the immediate aftermath of the fighting, abandoning Moscow seems to have been far from Kutuzov’s mind. On the contrary, he told his subordinates that he intended to attack the next day. Only the news that Napoleon had not committed his Guards and that Russian losses were enormous persuaded him to change his mind. In all, the most recent Russian estimates suggest that they lost between 45,000 and 50,000 men at Shevardino and Borodino, as against perhaps 35,000 French casualties. In particular, Bagration’s Second Army had been nearly destroyed. Even some weeks later, after stragglers had returned to the ranks, Second Army was reckoned to have lost more than 16,000 men on 7 September, and this was on top of the 5,000 lost at Shevardino two days before. As serious, casualties among the army’s sen
ior officers had been crippling.69

  Kutuzov therefore ordered a retreat. For almost the only time during the campaign the Russian rearguard performed poorly. This was blamed on its commander, Matvei Platov, and was seen by regular officers as confirmation of their long-held view that Cossack generals were not competent to command infantry and artillery. The basic problem was that Platov’s rearguard did not impose delays on the French or keep them at a sufficiently respectful distance from the main body of the retreating Russian army, as Konovnitsyn had always done with great skill. As a result, the already exhausted troops did not get the rest they needed. The army’s precipitate departure from Mozhaisk meant that thousands of wounded were left behind, in sharp contrast to what had happened previously during the retreat. When Kutuzov reinforced the rearguard and replaced Platov by Mikhail Miloradovich matters improved greatly but the episode fed growing tensions between the regular and Cossack leaders.70

  The basic point, however, was that the Russians were running out of space. Six days after the battle of Borodino, Kutuzov’s army was on the outskirts of Moscow. The great question now was whether or not to fight for the city. Kutuzov would find it harder than Barclay to abandon Moscow. Both generals were patriots who had risked their lives on many battlefields, but the Russia for which they fought was not quite the same. Barclay had great loyalty and admiration for the Russian soldier but he was a Protestant Balt brought up in Petersburg. For him, Russia meant above all else the emperor, the army and the state. For reasons both of sentiment and interest these were very much part of Kutuzov’s Russia too, but not all of it. For any member of the old Russian aristocracy who had not lost his roots there was also another Russia, an Orthodox land which had existed before the Romanovs and before the empire and whose capital was Moscow.

  Kutuzov’s last words to Alexander on leaving Petersburg to assume the supreme command were that he would rather perish than abandon Moscow. Shortly after arriving at headquarters he wrote to Rostopchin, Moscow’s governor-general, that ‘the question remains undecided as to which is more important – to lose the army or to lose Moscow. In my opinion the loss of Moscow entails the loss of Russia itself.’ When the council of war met at Fili on 13 September, however, Kutuzov understood that actually this was no longer the question. If he stood and fought, there was every probability that both the army and the capital would be lost. No doubt the commander-in-chief had already made his decision to abandon the city before the council met at four o’clock that afternoon. But such a momentous step could not be taken without consulting his senior generals. Moreover, Kutuzov was anxious to share some of the responsibility for a decision which was bound to cause huge anger and condemnation.71

  The main protagonists at the council of war were Bennigsen and Barclay. The former had chosen the ground on which the army was preparing to fight outside Moscow. In time-honoured fashion pride alone would have forbidden him to admit that he had made a mistake. From his subsequent correspondence with Alexander it was also clear that he was anxious to thrust responsibility for the city’s loss onto Kutuzov and Barclay. At the council of war Barclay set out the reasons why the Russian army would certainly be defeated if it stood on the defensive in this position. Not only would they be greatly outnumbered but their position was divided up by ravines, which would make it very difficult to coordinate resistance. A lost battle would entail a rushed retreat through Moscow, which could easily result in the army’s disintegration. The only possibility was to attack Napoleon’s army but the huge loss of officers at Borodino made a battle of manoeuvre immensely risky. Toll and Ermolov shared Barclay’s view, though Ermolov lacked the moral courage to speak up and take responsibility in front of his seniors. On the contrary, Barclay showed not just moral courage but also some generosity of spirit by speaking up decisively and thereby sharing the burden of responsibility of a man who had superseded him in command.72

  There remained the difficult task of getting an exhausted and somewhat demoralized army with all its baggage and some of its wounded through the streets of a great city. With the enemy on their heels this could be an extremely dangerous enterprise. Matters were not helped by the fact that the news that Moscow was to be abandoned had broken on the civilian population very late. As the army passed through Moscow on 14 September a mass civilian exodus was still under way. One staff officer described the scene as ‘not the passage of an army but the relocation of whole tribes from one corner of the earth to another’. Barclay did his usual indefatigable best to impose some order on this chaos. Officers were posted at key intersections to direct the troops. Cavalry rode down the sides of the columns to stop desertion and plundering. Barclay himself oversaw arrangements.73

  The true hero of the occasion, however, was Miloradovich, who was now commanding the Russian rearguard. His opposite number in the French advance guard was usually Joachim Murat, and the two men had much in common. Both generals were showmen who loved splendid clothes and the grand gesture. It would be an understatement to say that neither man was an intellectual but Miloradovich was not only honourable and generous but on occasion surprisingly modest and shrewd. He certainly summed up the essence of the present danger and with some bravura sent his aide-de-camp to Murat to suggest a one-day truce so that the Russians could depart, leaving the city intact. In the event that this request was refused, Miloradovich threatened to fight in the streets and turn Moscow into a ruin. Even more than most of the French generals, Murat was longing for comfortable quarters, peace and a return home. Perhaps lulled by Napoleon’s own illusions, he saw the fall of Moscow as a prelude to peace. All this disposed him not just to accept Miloradovich’s offer of a truce but also subsequently to extend it for a further twelve hours. As a result of Miloradovich’s cheeky initiative, the Russian army emerged from Moscow almost unscathed.74

  In principle Kutuzov might have retreated out of Moscow in a number of directions. Had he turned north-west, for instance, he could have blocked the road to Tver and Petersburg, whose population was bound to be in an uproar at the news of Moscow’s fall. In fact he retreated south-eastwards down the road to Riazan. This was in many ways the safest exit from Moscow in the face of an enemy who was entering the city from the west. On 17 September, however, after crossing the river Moskva at Borovsk, Kutuzov turned sharply westwards. Marching rapidly he crossed the roads to Kashira and Tula before turning southwards down the Old Kaluga Road which led out from Moscow to the south-west.

  Meanwhile on 15 September Napoleon entered Moscow and set up his headquarters in the Kremlin. That very day fires started in many parts of the city. Moscow burned for six days. Three-quarters of its buildings were destroyed. In all, during the summer and autumn of 1812, 270 million rubles’ worth of private property was destroyed in the city and province of Moscow, an astronomical sum for that era. The overwhelming majority of the civilian population had already fled but those who remained were driven from their homes, made destitute and sometimes killed. Of the more than 30,000 wounded soldiers who had been in Moscow, all but 6,000 were evacuated in time, thanks above all to the efforts of James Wylie, the efficient head of the army’s medical services. But very many of those who were left behind died in the flames. When the Russians recaptured Moscow they found and burned 12,000 corpses.75

  Even before the fire began the Russians had also been forced to abandon vast stocks of military materials in the city, including more than 70,000 muskets, though admittedly half of these were in need of repair. Moscow had been the rear base for Kutuzov’s army and by the time the news came that the city was to be abandoned it was very difficult to evacuate all military stores. Finding sufficient carts at this last moment was impossible, so most weapons, equipment and other military goods were evacuated on twenty-three barges. The first three escaped but the fourth, overloaded by the artillery department, got stuck in the river Moskva and blocked the passage of the remaining nineteen. These barges carried almost 5 million rubles’ worth of weapons, clothing and equipment, all of which had to be
burned in order to keep it out of Napoleon’s hands.76

  Who or what caused the fire has always been a source of dispute. The one certain point is that neither Alexander nor Napoleon ordered the city to be burned. Rostopchin said before the city’s fall that the French would only conquer its ashes. He evacuated the 2,000 men of Moscow’s fire brigade and all its equipment. Cossack detachments from Kutuzov’s army burned one at least of the city’s quarters, following a scorched-earth policy of destroying all houses which the Russians had pursued ever since Napoleon passed Smolensk and invaded the Russian heartland. Kutuzov also ordered that the many remaining military stores should be set alight. Although French carelessness and plundering may have contributed to the city’s destruction, it was undoubtedly the Russians who were most responsible for what happened. What mattered at the time, however, was the perception that Napoleon was to blame and that the city’s destruction was a huge sacrifice to Russian patriotism and Europe’s liberation.77