The Battle of Borodino: Napoleon Against Kutuzov

by Alexander Mikaberidze

  The data on Russian casualties is more available but, although it has been long studied, the debate still continues. The roll-calls of the 1st and 2nd Western Armies and reports by regimental, division and corps commanders remain one of the most important sources on this subject. However, they are not without blemishes, often contradicting each other or containing duplications and mistakes. So they must be considered with a critical eye.

  The official roll-calls show that the 1st Western Army suffered the largest casualties (21,727 men) but the 2nd Western Army, with 16,845 killed and wounded, sustained a higher percentage of losses. Their combined casualties total 38,569 men, a figure that is often cited in Soviet studies. However, this number is misleading since it does not account for casualties among officers, Opolchenye and Cossack forces. Yet, another dossier, containing reports on the Russian casualties for the 1812–14 campaigns, includes a report on the actions of 5–7 September showing six generals and 166 officers killed, twenty-three generals and 438 officers wounded while up to 45,000 soldiers were dead and injured.537

  Several attempts were made to correct these figures. Sergei Shvedov, who was among the first to challenge the official Soviet statistics back in the 1980s, has recently argued that the Russian losses were close to 50,000 men. Although some historians accepted his figures, others scholars questioned his methods and revealed considerable flaws in his research. Dmitri Tselorungo’s research showed 39,060 casualties and about 1,000 captured, while Sergei Lvov’s study produced 39,297 casualties, of which 21,756 were in the 1st Army and 17,541 – in the 2nd Army.538 These findings, however, lack statistics on artillery, Cossack and Opolchenye losses. Taking them into account, the Russian casualties of 5–7 September will exceed 40,000 men and might be close to 45,000 men. The recently published Otechestvennaya voina 1812 goda: Entsiklopediya, written by leading Russian scholars, refers to between 45,000 and 50,000 losses.

  As mentioned above, Russian regimental reports are often incomplete, since they list casualties of NCOs and rank-and-file to which those of officers and non-combatants should be added. Nevertheless, these documents reveal vast losses. The Combined Grenadier Division, which counted 4,059 men in its eleven battalions on the eve of the battle, sustained a staggering loss of 62 per cent, losing 526 killed, 1,224 wounded and 750 missing; it tallied only 1,559 men (95 out of 243 NCOs) or 38 per cent of its fighting force by 18 September. The VII Corps lost 5,978 NCOs and rank-and-file, including 1,346 killed, and the VIII Corps – 9,260 men. The II and III Corps lost about 3,718 and 3,799 men respectively, while the V Corps lacked 4,891 men. In the infantry, the 6th Jägers suffered the highest casualties with 910 killed, wounded and missing, followed by the Vilenskii Infantry Regiment (870), the Yeletskii Infantry Regiment (792), the Life Guard Izmailovskii (777) and the Life Guard Litovskii (693). The Life Guard Preobrazhenskii and Semeyonovskii Regiments, despite being held in reserve, still suffered substantial casualties from enemy artillery fire.

  The cavalry fared no better, with 1,184 killed, wounded and missing in the II and III Cavalry Corps and over 320 men in the IV Cavalry Corps. The Astrakhanskii Cuirassiers lost 231 men, including fifty-six killed and seventy-nine wounded; the Mariupolskii Hussars had 163 killed and thirty-five wounded, while the Pskovskii Dragoons, which distinguished themselves in charges around the Grand Redoubt, had 101 killed, fifty-one wounded and thirty-two missing. The Akhtyrskii Hussars lost 160 men, the Sibirskii Dragoons – 156 men, the Glukhovskii Cuirassiers – 150, the Novgorodskii Cuirassiers – 145, the Izumskii Hussars – 137 men, while the Sumskii Hussars and Yekaterinoslavskii Cuirassiers lost 117 men each.

  Casualty Figures for the Battle of Borodino

  The Russian artillery was also hard hit. The 1st Battery Company lost sixty-five men, the 5th Light Company – sixty-six, the 12th Light Company – forty-five, the 2nd Battery Company – thirty-two, the 17th Battery Company – thirty-three and the 33rd Light Company – thirty. The 5th Horse Artillery Company lost 110 men, including thirty-four killed, sixty-one wounded and fifteen missing, while 268 of its horses were dead or injured. The 6th Horse Company was also badly mauled, with fifty-eight men and eighty-three horses killed and wounded.541 In the Guard Horse Artillery, commanders of both companies were killed and another 110 men were killed or injured. In the 2nd Artillery Brigade, the 11th Battery Company lost twenty killed and seventy-two wounded, the 20th Light Company saw seven men killed and twenty-four injured, while the 21st Light Company had eleven dead and thirty wounded. The batteries of the 3rd Reserve Brigade were not spared either; the 31st Battery Company of this brigade had twenty-six men killed, thirty-one wounded and 126 missing. The artillery roll-calls of the 2nd Western Army showed that fourteen NCOs and 103 privates were killed, twenty-seven NCOs and 309 privates wounded and ten NCOs and 168 privates were missing; the artillery also lost 143 horses.542

  Casualities Among Russian Regular Troops (based on roll-calls of the 1st and 2nd Armies)539

  Casualities Among Russian Regular Troops (based on S. Lvov’s 2033 study)540

  Russian Regiments with the Heaviest Losses (1 = NCOs; 2 = Rank-and-File; 3 = Non-Combatants)

  The Battle of Borodino is famous for the high casualty rates in officer corps. Caulaincourt noted that ‘never had a battle cost so many generals and officers’ and many French participants called the battle ‘La Bataille des Généraux’. Information on the officer casualties is relatively thorough, largely due to A. Martinien’s valuable study of French officers killed and wounded between 1805 and 1815. Still, neither Deniée nor Martinien provide total statistics as revealed in the works of Russian scholars researching the Grand Army. Thus Vasiliev asserted 1,792 officer losses, while Zemtsov found 480 killed and 1,448 wounded officers. The French casualty lists include the names of eighty-six aides-de-camp and over thirty staff officers. The battle also claimed thirty-seven colonels, of which nine were killed or mortally wounded. Out of some 316 chefs de battalion/d’escadron, 103 were wounded and another twenty-four killed. Among the majors, six (out of fifty-four) were killed and twenty-nine wounded.543

  Martinien’s study, despite its shortcomings, remains an invaluable source for officer losses. It shows that the 30th Line, which stormed the Grand Redoubt, suffered twenty-one officers killed and thirty wounded, while the 17th Line lost twenty-six killed and twenty-eight wounded. The 106th Line, which rashly charged the Russian positions near Borodino, lost eighteen officers killed and thirty-two wounded. Among the units fighting at the flèches, the 57th Line lost fourteen officers killed and twenty-six wounded, while the 61st Line had six killed and thirteen wounded, the 48th – nine killed and twenty-two wounded, and the 72nd – fifteen killed and fourteen wounded. Light infantry fared no better with twenty-seven officers killed and wounded in the 13th Light and forty men (ten killed) lost in the 15th Light; the latter suffered twenty-two more casualties in the rearguard actions on 9–10 September. In the cavalry, the chasseur regiments sustained the highest losses, with twenty-one killed, ninety-one wounded, followed by the cuirassiers (seventy-nine men, including twelve killed) and hussars (forty-five men). Among the individual regiments, the 12th Chasseurs (seventeen men), 8th Cuirassiers (sixteen men), 25th Chasseurs (fifteen men), 7th Dragoons (fourteen men), and the 9th Chevau-léger lost more officers that others units.

  During the battle, the Allied army lost eight generals, among them two generals of division (Caulaincourt and Montbrun) and six generals of brigade (Compère, Huard, Damas Lanabère, Marion and Plauzonne). Four more generals were mortally wounded and died over the next several weeks: Romeuf, Chief of Staff of the III Corps, died after the battle; Lepel, who was in charge of the Westphalian cuirassiers, ended his life at Mozhaisk on 21 September; he was followed by Tharreau, who commanded the 23rd Division and died on 26 September. The Württemberg Major General von Breuning, serving with the 14th Light Cavalry Brigade of the III Corps, passed away on 30 October. Among the wounded were thirty-nine generals, including Marshal Davout, Generals Grouchy, Nansouty, Latour-M
aubourg, Friant, Rapp, Compans, Dessaix, and others. One general (Bonnamy) was captured by the Russians. In total, as Zemtsov noted, the officer losses (1,928 officers and forty-nine generals) on 5–7 September constitute 20 per cent of all officer losses (158 generals and 9,380 officers) the Grand Army sustained between June 1812 and February 1813.

  The Russian Army also suffered heavy casualties in its officer corps. In total, 211 officers were killed and 1,184 wounded.544 By the end of the battle, thirteen regiments were commanded by junior officers, including three led by lieutenants. In twenty-seven units the commanding officer was replaced once, in thirteen regiments – twice, and in six regiments – three times! Thus, in the Yekaterinoslavskii Cuirassier Regiment, Colonel Volkov was wounded and replaced by Lieutenant Colonel Uvarov III, who was soon replaced by Lieutenant Khomyakov II; after the latter was injured, the regiment was led by Lieutenant Chulkov III. Among eighty-nine Russian generals, five (Kantakuzen, Krasnov, Kutaisov, Palitsyn and Tuchkov IV) were killed and four received mortal wounds (among them Bagration and Tuchkov I). Twenty-three generals were wounded, including Lieutenant Generals Golitsyn I, Gorchakov II, Konovnitsyn, and Osterman-Tolstoy, Major Generals Bakhmetyev I, Bakhmetyev II, Ivelich, Kretov, Karl von Mecklenburg, Neverovsky, Rossi, Vorontsov, Yermolov, and others. One general (Likhachev) was captured.

  Casualties in the Russian Officer Corps (based on D. Tselorungo)

  The combined casualties of the French and Russian armies at Borodino thus vary from 60,000 at their lowest to 110,000 at the highest, though the figure of 75–80,000 seems closer to reality. One must bear in mind, however, that this represents losses for the actions at Shevardino (5 September) and Borodino (7 September). Subtracting some 10,000 casualties for the action at Shevardino gives us about 64–65,000 losses sustained during the ten-hour battle on 7 September. The resulting 6,500 casualties per hour – or 108 men per minute – are truly staggering. Very few other one-day battles can approach such calamitous results. To fully understand the scale of Borodino’s losses, it is illustrative that neither Rivoli (1797), Austerlitz (1805), Jena (1806), nor Eylau (1807), Friedland (1807), Salamanca (1812) or Bautzen (1813) can approach its murderous results. The two-day battles of Aspern–Essling (1809), Wagram (1809) and Dresden (1813) have an average of 22,000 to 40,000 victims per day. The massive three-day ‘Battle of the Nations’ at Leipzig in October 1813 was the largest Napoleonic battle, but its daily casualty rate averages 42,000–45,000. Waterloo (1815), with over 55,000 victims, is probably the second bloodiest one-day battle of the Napoleonic Era. Looking into other eras, the battles of antiquity should be discounted for the lack of precise numbers. One exception, however, can be made for the Battle of Cannae, where the Carthaginian Hannibal routed the Roman Army, with the combined loss of both sides exceeding 70,000 men. Other examples can be found only in modern era, since Medieval and Renaissance wars hardly produced carnage of comparable scale. Thus, the Third Battle of Nanking and the first day of the Somme (1916) certainly eclipsed Borodino in its deadly results. At the same time, the Battles of Stalingrad (165 days in 1942–43) and Verdun (297 days in 1916), the bloodiest battles in human history, claiming up to 2,000,000 and 720,000 casualties respectively, had average daily casualty rates below that of Borodino.

  One last note is needed with respect to casualties. The loss of life did not stop with the end of the battle but rather continued for weeks as hundreds of wounded succumbed to their injuries, starvation or disease. Thus, both French and Russians participants noted that hundreds of Russian wounded died in the raging fires of Moscow in mid-September. Most studies discussing the casualties at Borodino tend to concentrate on army losses and overlook the fact that the battle had a tremendous effect on the local community, which remained devastated for many years. Entire villages were ravaged and, out of 239 homes and estates destroyed on the battlefield and its vicinity, only 104 were rebuilt by 1816. Furthermore, thousands of rotting corpses posed a major health hazard to the population. Stench of decomposing flesh smothered the area for weeks and, as some contemporaries acknowledged, diseases caused by so many unattended decaying bodies led to the death of many locals.

  The work on gathering and burning cadavers was started by Junot’s corps, which was left behind to carry out this grisly task. It is not clear how much work the weakened Westphalian troops did during their one-month stay on the battlefield, but we can assume that hundreds of bodies were disposed of. The Russian authorities became involved after the region was liberated in early November. The province was divided into four sectors (‘distantsia’) and some 10,000 peasants began searching ravines, roads and bushes for any human and animal corpses. As these works progressed, some 17,916 human bodies and over 8,200 horse cadavers were buried or burned by 4 January 1813, an additional 4,045 and 3,215 corpses by mid-January, and a further 6,859 and 9,147 corpses by late January. By early spring, some 52,048 human and over 41,700 horse corpses were removed from the entire Mozhaisk district. Human bodies, notwithstanding their allegiance and ethnic origin, were buried in deep pits (some containing up to 180 bodies) and large mounds with crosses were erected above them. Over time, the location of some of these mounds was forgotten but they were discovered in 1984, when the remains of over 450 men were found in three mounds near the Borodino Saviour Monastery. In August 2006, on the 194th anniversary of the battle, a religious service was held to consecrate large crosses in memory of the fallen.

  Reminiscing on the sacrifice of soldiers of both armies, Eugène of Württemberg probably summed it up the best:

  A friend of mine, whose ashes have long since been consigned to the earth, wrote the following about Borodino: ‘To be honest, Kutuzov had no cause to have Emperor Alexander hold a Te Deum [to celebrate victory] and neither did Napoleon have reason to write a victorious report to his Empress. If we, warriors, could have forgotten the quarrels of the great men and shaken hands over the altar of justice next day, Posterity would have recognized all of us as brothers.’

  To Moscow and Back

  Neither side was willing to concede defeat in this bloody battle. The French considered themselves victors since the Russians retreated from the battlefield. After the battle, Napoleon wrote to his wife Marie Louise, ‘My dear, I write you from the battlefield of Borodino. Yesterday, I beat the Russians, their whole army […] the battle was hot […] and I had many killed and wounded.’ The 18th Bulletin proudly proclaimed the French triumph on the field of Borodino and noted that ‘the victory was never uncertain’. Yet the Russians had a different view.

  As we have seen above, Kutuzov immediately drafted letters with the news of the Russian victory at Borodino. His report reached the Russian capital on the night of 10/11 September, when it was presented to Tsar Alexander and his close advisors. Alexander certainly saw through Kutuzov’s claims of victory, since he ordered the report to be edited and excluded any reference to the Russian withdrawal. As Joseph de Maistre described, the following day, Kutuzov’s courier, with the revised report in hand, ‘triumphantly arrived’ at St Petersburg, which was celebrating the Tsar’s saint’s day.545 The imperial family was attending a mass at the Alexander of Neva Monastery and, after the liturgy, Kutuzov’s report was announced to a joyous public. The edited version was then released for publication in the newspapers.546

  News of the victory was rapturously celebrated throughout St Petersburg, where church bells pealed forth and trumpets blared. The American envoy to Russia, John Quincy Adams, wrote that ‘St Petersburg was illuminated’, while English traveller, Ker Porter, described that ‘with the victory being publicly declared, the Te Deum was chanted, every voice united in the strain which gave glory to the God who had fought, and covered her people with immortal honours.’547 And Mikhailovsky-Danilevsky noted that ‘the Emperor’s saint’s day was never before celebrated with such rapture’.548 The news spread to other towns and provinces and in the process became embellished. Thus Joseph de Maistre informed the Sardinian foreign minister that he had heard from an officer
who fought at Borodino that ‘by the end of the battle the French had completely run out of ammunition and were throwing stones’.

  To commemorate the Russian victory, Tsar Alexander announced that Kutuzov was to be promoted to the rank of field marshal general and awarded a lump sum of 100,000 roubles, while his wife was named a statedame of the court. Every participating soldier received 5 roubles. Officer corps was generously rewarded as well. Bagration was given a lump sum of 50,000 roubles (he died on 24 September 1812), Barclay de Tolly was awarded the Order of St George (2nd class), while Miloradovich and Dokhturov received the diamond signs of the Order of Alexander of Neva. Osterman-Tolstoy and Rayevsky were also awarded the Order of Alexander of Neva but minus the diamond signs. Fourteen generals received the Order of St George (3rd class) and six more were given golden swords with diamonds. Eleven generals received the Order of St Anna (1st class), while seven major generals – Bakhmetyev, Dorokhov, Korf, Mecklenburg, Neverovsky, Stroganov and Vasilchikov – were promoted to lieutenant general.