The Burning of Moscow

by Alexander Mikaberidze

  The French remained bivouacked among the dead and wounded on the battlefield. Although the Imperial Guard was ready for further combat, Davout and Ney’s corps were devastated by losses, while the cavalry had suffered tremendously as well; with over 90,000 artillery rounds and about a million cartridges fired, Napoleon was also anxious to replenish his ammunition supplies before waging another pitched battle. Above all, the Grande Armée was grievously depressed and a gloomy silence reigned at its bivouacs. ‘Few battles won had produced such an extraordinary effect on the winners; they seemed to be stupefied,’ described Georges Chambray. ‘After enduring so much pain, deprivation and fatigue to compel the enemy to accept a battle, and having fought so gallantly, they now perceived the results as a terrible massacre that augmented their miseries and made it more uncertain than ever how long this war would last and how it would end.’11 ‘The soldier’s former gaiety was gone, and a gloomy silence now succeeded the songs and good stories which had hitherto beguiled the tediousness of his march,’ remembered Colonel Philippe-Joseph de Montesquiou-Fezensac. ‘The officers themselves appeared uneasy, and were only anxious to serve from a sense of honour and duty, and this despondency, which would have created no wonder in a defeated army, was the more extraordinary after a decisive victory.’12 Indeed, it was a Pyrrhic victory: unlike Austerlitz, Jena or Friedland, the much more sanguine slaughter at Borodino proved to be in vain – the Russians left the field of carnage and showed no desire to engage in negotiations. Napoleon had to start the pursuit all over again but in worse conditions. By now, he himself had been ill and was worn out, ‘his face visibly showing burn-out, his hair dishevelled and fatigued’.13

  Aware of the widespread fatigue in the army and personally exhausted, the emperor chose to remain idle until noon on 8 September, when Murat’s advanced guard14 moved close to Mozhaisk and fought several minor skirmishes with the Russians. The Imperial Guard, Davout’s I Corps and Ney’s III Corps followed in Murat’s wake, while General Andoche Junot’s VIII Corps was ordered to remain on the battlefield. Viceroy Eugène, reinforced by the 15th Division of General Pino, crossed the Moscow river at Uspenskoye and prepared to proceed towards Ruza in the northeast, while Poniatowski marched to Borisov to the southeast.

  Throughout the afternoon of 8 September Murat’s cavalry made several attacks on the Russian rearguard. Late that evening the French light infantry managed to reach the outskirts of Mozhaisk, where the Russians were stubbornly clinging on; Kutuzov sent Major General Rosen with infantry to reinforce Platov and hold on to the town. As General Count Phillippe de Ségur noted, ‘Murat fancied himself already in possession of it, and sent to inform the emperor that he might sleep there.’ Yet, as Napoleon and his entourage moved forward to Mozhaisk, they were warned that the town was still in Russian hands. The Emperor spent the night at Kukarino, about a mile from Mozhaisk. The very fact that Murat’s advance was checked and Mozhaisk had not been seized that day showed that the Russian army was far from being routed and that Russian spirits remained unbroken. Furthermore, this advanced guard action allowed Kutuzov to claim further success for the Russians. Even so, his army still had to retreat …

  On 9 September the Russian army, in two columns, proceeded to Zemlino, about 12 miles from Zhukovo. The rearguard, reinforced by the 1st Cavalry Corps, slowly retreated from Mozhaisk, which was occupied by the Allied forces in the afternoon. Napoleon moved his headquarters into the town and stayed there for the next three days. Thousands of Allied wounded were gathered and tended to in several hospitals organized on and around the battlefield, the main ones being set up at the Kolotsk Monastery and Mozhaisk. The conditions were appalling and hundreds died over the next few weeks. Louis François Lejeune was stunned to see ‘our troops using horseflesh as food’ in Mozhaisk two days after the battle, while Ségur saw

  the Russians dragging themselves along to places where dead bodies were heaped together, and offered them a horrible retreat. It has been affirmed by several persons, that one of these poor fellows lived for several days in the carcase of a horse, which had been gutted by a shell, and the inside of which he gnawed. Some were seen straightening their broken legs by tying a branch of a tree tightly against it, then supporting themselves with another branch, and walking in this manner to the next village. Not one of them uttered a groan.

  A yet more gruesome picture awaited Alexandre Bellot de Kergorre, a young commissaire des guerres at Mozhaisk, who left a vivid description of the thousands of wounded lying throughout the town and dying of deprivation:

  Our unfortunate wounded were dying of hunger and thirst. They were bandaged with hay for lack of lint and linen, and they groaned dreadfully. For the first few days they lived on the few grains they could find in the straw they lay on, and on the little flour I was able to give them … the absence of candles was a terrible privation. In the early days I had the painful misfortune to lose some men, who, hidden in the straw, were not spotted in the evening when the food was distributed by the light of a flaming pine torch. A shocking thing was the impossibility of removing the dead from among the living. I had neither medical orderlies nor stretchers. Not only was the hospital full of corpses, but so were the streets and a number of houses … Some six hundred wounded Russians had fallen in the gardens and here they lived on cauliflower stalks and human flesh. Of this there was no shortage! In the first week I could give each man no more than half a pound of meat. Many of these wretches died …15

  At Mozhaisk Napoleon was quartered in a house near the main square. His sore throat turned to laryngitis and he could no longer speak or dictate his orders, which forced him to scribble down all his instructions. This brief respite also allowed him to regroup his troops after the bloodletting at Borodino and gather more ammunition and supplies. His advanced guard, meanwhile, pursued the Russian army and gained some success since Cossack Ataman Matvei Platov, alarmed by Murat’s vigorous charges, withdrew his rearguard too soon, allowing the Allied cavalry to close on the main Russian army. Kutuzov, already dissatisfied with Platov’s performance at Borodino, was furious at this latest slip-up and replaced him at once with General Mikhail Miloradovich, whom he reinforced with four infantry and two Jager regiments, and one heavy artillery company.

  On 10 September Kutuzov continued his retreat, crossing the Nara river and reaching the village of Krutitsa, while Miloradovich took up positions about 3 miles away, near the village of Krymskoe. Around 5pm Murat launched an attack on the Russian rearguard, driving back its cavalry screen and reaching its main position near Krymskoe. Miloradovich had carefully selected his ground: his left wing was protected by swamps, while a narrow ravine constrained the Allied cavalry’s actions in the centre, which was well protected by Russian heavy artillery. Therefore, Murat directed his efforts against the Russian right wing, where heated fighting lasted for a couple of hours. By nightfall Murat had to recall his men, who had been unable to break through; losses on both sides amounted to some 2,000 men.

  The French commander’s vigorous attack, however, distressed Kutuzov, who on 11 September chose to accelerate his army’s movement and led it on a 16-mile march to the village of Nikolskoe (Bolshoe Vyazemy), followed by a shorter transit to Mamonovo, about 15 miles from Moscow. Miloradovich was instructed to delay the enemy advance; he slowly moved first to Kubinskoe and then to Maloya Vyazemy. On 13 September the Russian army departed from Mamonovo towards Moscow and bivouacked just a mile from the Dorogomilovskaya barrier into the capital. Special measures had been undertaken to regroup the army following the devastating losses at Borodino. Infantry regiments were reorganized into single-battalion units, since many of them now numbered just 400–500 men. Cavalry regiments were consolidated as well, with the 2nd and 3rd Cavalry Corps merged into one unit under the overall command of Adjutant General Korf. Kutuzov was glad to see some 14,000 recruits of the Moscow opolchenye arriving just in time to reinforce the army. These men were distributed among various regiments; bearing in mind their overall inexperience, they we
re placed in the third ranks and kept separate from the regular troops. ‘The Opolchenye troops must be accepted not as soldiers, who continually maintain this status, but rather as individuals who have temporarily committed themselves to the defence of the Fatherland. Therefore, the Moscow opolchenye troops should not change their clothing and nor should they shave their beards.’16 Publicly, Kutuzov was still considering fighting another battle and instructed General Baron Levin Bennigsen, the Chief of Staff of the Army, to select a new position. In fact Kutuzov was playing to popular sentiments while rationally weighing his options.

  The search for a suitable battlefield finally produced a site near the Poklonnaya Gora.17 It was selected by Bennigsen, accompanied by Colonels Karl Toll, Alexander Michaud and Jean Baptiste de Crossard, on 12 September. The position was located on the western bank of the Moscow river, straddling the heights between the villages of Vorobyevskoye and Fili, and protecting the Dorogomilovskaya suburb of Moscow. It was immediately obvious to the colonels that the position was far from suitable for battle; they voiced their concerns but Bennigsen ignored them and, making the sign of the cross, he proudly declared that ‘he hoped to fight three more times before Moscow’.18 Still, the officers questioned his rationale and debated for some time how to deploy the army in such difficult terrain. Finally, with the Russian army already approaching, the exasperated Colonel Toll, who as quartermaster general was in charge of deployment, forced Bennigsen to make the decision. As the army settled down in its new bivouacs,19 Kutuzov instructed Barclay de Tolly and the corps commanders to acquaint themselves with the terrain, while he rested on a small bench set up on the crest of the Poklonnaya Gora and prepared for a meal. General Dokhturov, who was reluctant to spend the morning running across the ravines and ‘apparently had a touch of the courtier about him’, chose to stay with Kutuzov and proceeded to serve him his food. But the little picnic was quickly interrupted by Barclay de Tolly, who ‘never held in high regard the small comforts of life’ and, upon perceiving that Dokhturov had stayed behind, dispatched his aide-de-camp with the words, ‘As usual! There they all are, dancing attendance on the Prince, and not troubling about what they [the French] may do. Fetch Dokhturov here, even if his mouth is still full.’ Kutuzov apparently rather enjoyed Dokhturov’s disappointment on being thus interrupted. ‘You must not keep General Barclay waiting,’ he remarked. ‘I shall manage very well by myself,’ and therewith proceeded with his meal, while poor Dokhturov was obliged to go.20

  Barclay de Tolly, Dokhturov and their officers studied the position for about an hour and were dismayed by Bennigsen’s poor choice. The western slopes, where enemy attacks would be launched, were gently rolling, while the eastern ones, over which the Russian army would have to retreat in case of need, were rather precipitous. The entire position was criss-crossed by several ravines, which complicated communications between corps. The reserves could not be deployed effectively behind the main position because of precipitous cliffs and the proximity of the Moscow river. ‘It was in such a blighted area,’ commented one officer, ‘that the army was effectively in a hollow, where it had neither space nor communication and where the enemy could easily seize both flanks, take control of the exits and be in charge of Moscow.’21 Barclay de Tolly, worn out by fatigue and a feverish chill, was the first to declare categorically that the position was so bad that ‘in the case of a forced retreat, the entire army would have been annihilated down to the very last man’. He later wrote:

  I was surprised how disadvantageous this position was. The right wing was adjacent to the woods which extended for several miles in the direction of the enemy, who, thus, had an opportunity to send out skirmishers, seize the woods and turn our right flank. Behind the left wing there was a 20–30 metre deep ravine with such steep banks that one could only climb them single file. The reserve of the right wing was so close to the front that any enemy artillery round could target all four of our lines … The cavalry, deprived [by the deep ravines] of any opportunity to participate in this battle would have had to immediately leave the battlefield or remain idle as it was destroyed by the enemy artillery.22

  Another general concurred: ‘the position was dreadful … and unfavourable even for deploying attacking columns if circumstances allowed for launching an attack’.23

  Returning to the Poklonnaya Gora, Barclay found Kutuzov still sitting on a campstool near the main road and surrounded by the usual crowd of officers, who were arguing loudly about the relative merits and weaknesses of the position.24 Count Wintzingerode noted that ‘by noon Kutuzov still hesitated to make a decision, so discussions continued regarding position, attacking and retreating’.25 Barclay first conveyed his critical remarks to Bennigsen, who was so surprised (or pretended to be) to hear them that he declared that he would immediately inspect the position, starting with the left wing. Barclay then conversed with Kutuzov, pointing out the major deficiencies in the position Bennigsen had chosen. Kutuzov appeared genuinely surprised and concerned. Turning to his trusted Colonel Toll, he asked for his opinion on Barclay’s comments. Toll, who was not predisposed to Bennigsen, particularly after the experiences of the previous day, replied that he himself would never have placed the army in such a dangerous position. Kutuzov then turned to General Alexei Yermolov, Barclay’s Chief of Staff, who had regularly expressed hostility towards his superior but had undergone a radical change of heart since Barclay’s heroic performance at Borodino. Yermolov emphatically agreed with Barclay, criticizing the position with such fervour that it prompted Kutuzov to take him by the wrist, check his pulse and inquire if he was feeling all right. But this was all part of Kutuzov’s charade. As Yermolov correctly noted, many officers ‘already understood that Prince Kutuzov had no need for their ideas and simply wanted to show his resolve in defending Moscow when in reality he never even considered it’. And so the farce continued. The Russian commander-in-chief next asked Colonel Jean Baptiste de Crossard, a French émigré officer who had previously served in the Spanish and Austrian armies, for his opinion. Crossard, who had earlier reconnoitred the position, bluntly declared, ‘Never has a position been better suited to destroying one’s own army.’26 Kutuzov, wanting to show that he was doing everything possible to accept battle in the current position, dispatched Yermolov, Crossard and Prince Kudashev on another reconnaissance of the position.27

  It was around 1pm already and Kutuzov still appeared to be vacillating, listening to others while keeping his genuine feelings secret. His stillness, however, was broken by the sound of gunfire as Murat’s advanced guard engaged the Russian rearguard near Setun. With the enemy so close, the urgency of making a final decision became clear to everyone. Prince Eugène of Württemberg approached the aged commander-in-chief, seated on his folding stool, and whispered to him, ‘You must decide, Prince, indecision is the worst thing of all.’ Turning his gaze on the young general, Kutuzov responded in French, ‘In this issue, my head, be it good or bad, must rely solely on itself’ and departed from the crest to his headquarters set up at the village of Fili.28 Having already decided to surrender Moscow, Kutuzov was unwilling to take sole responsibility for the decision. Yermolov recalled:

  It was late afternoon by now and yet there were still no special orders for the army. Barclay de Tolly summoned me and, with marvellous sagacity and insight, he explained the reasons for the necessity of retreat. He then went to Kutuzov, ordering me to follow him. No one knew better than Barclay the varied ways of making war and which of them were most feasible at any moment. In order to win the war, it was imperative for us to gain time, and, to that end, abandon Moscow. Listening attentively, Kutuzov could not conceal his excitement that the idea for retreat would not be attributed to him, and, to further avoid any blame, he summoned the army generals for a council of war.29

  The council of war was supposed to meet at 4pm but it was delayed for over two hours by the late arrival of both Bennigsen, who was reconnoitring the left flank, and General Nikolai Rayevskii, who came up from the reargu
ard; Miloradovich could not attend because he had to remain with the rearguard. The Russian commanders gathered inside a little peasant hut in the village of Fili. Despite the specific requirements instituted by the Committee of the Ministers, the council of war inexplicably failed to maintain an official protocol, so what we know about this meeting comes from memoirs and letters written by participants. There is still disagreement on who precisely attended it; depending on sources, between seven and twelve people were present at the meeting.30 Most sources, however, agree that under glowing candles sat Generals Kutuzov, Barclay de Tolly, Bennigsen, Matvei Platov and Dmitri Dokhturov, Lieutenant Generals Fedor Uvarov, Count Alexander Osterman-Tolstoy, Peter Konovnitsyn and Nikolai Rayevskii, Major General Yermolov and Colonel Karl Toll.31 Some sources32 also name Intendant-Général V. Lanskoi (chief supply officer) and Kutuzov’s duty officer Colonel Paisii Kaissarov as participants in this council. Kutuzov’s orderly Alexander Golitsyn, however, clearly indicates that Lanskoi was not invited to the council but was summoned after the meeting. As for Kaissarov, there is no direct evidence for his participation and his inclusion is usually justified in the light of his position as a duty general at the headquarters.