Russia Against Napoleon

by Dominic Lieven

  Perhaps the most extraordinary point amidst all this chaos is that the Russians did actually win the battle of Tarutino. Murat was driven off the battlefield with a loss of 3,000 men and many cannon, standards and other booty. This was small consolation for most of the Russian generals, and above all for Bennigsen and Toll who had masterminded the operation. Given Murat’s carelessness and Russian numbers, the surprise attack should have destroyed much of his detachment. Bennigsen saw Kutuzov’s refusal to commit Miloradovich’s troops as deliberate sabotage born of the field-marshal’s envy of any rival who might steal his glory. Though the battle of Tarutino spread the poison at headquarters, its impact on the junior officers and men was the exact opposite. They rejoiced in the fact that for the first time in 1812 the main army had attacked and defeated the enemy. Kutuzov made sure that all the trophies captured on 18 October were laid out for his men to see. He organized a Te Deum to celebrate the victory, which he reported in glowing terms to Alexander. Whatever his limitations as a tactician, Kutuzov was a master when it came to public relations and his troops’ morale.24

  Napoleon heard the news of Murat’s defeat while inspecting troops near the Kremlin. The emperor was always acutely sensitive to anything that reflected on his own prestige and his army’s victorious reputation. Now not merely would he be retreating from Moscow but would be doing so after a defeat. On the next day, 19 October, he left the city with his army’s main body, leaving a substantial rearguard behind to complete the evacuation and blow up the Kremlin. During the month of October he had contemplated a number of possible moves after leaving Moscow. The most conservative would be to retreat the way he had come, down the highway to Smolensk. This was the quickest way to get back to his supply bases at Smolensk, Minsk and Vilna and took him down Russia’s best road, which was a major consideration given the vast and motley baggage train he was dragging along in his wake. But the area along the road had been devastated and his army would find little food or quarters.25

  The obvious alternative was to move on Kaluga, Kutuzov’s main supply base one week’s march to the southwest of Moscow. Napoleon even contemplated then turning towards the great armaments centre at Tula, at least an additional three days’ march to the south-east. Capturing Tula would badly damage the whole Russian war effort. Taking Kaluga might net some supplies for Napoleon and would disrupt any subsequent Russian pursuit of his army. It would also conveniently hide the fact that the French were retreating. From Kaluga, Napoleon could withdraw down the relatively good road which led through Iukhnov to Smolensk and Belorussia.

  With November and winter only two weeks away Napoleon could not afford detours and delays. There were strict limits to how much food he could carry with him from Moscow. As always, the biggest problem was the enormously bulky fodder for the horses. Every day of extra marching brought hunger, winter and disintegration that much closer. To be sure, he could feed and quarter his army more easily along the Kaluga–Smolensk road than on the Moscow–Smolensk highway but the advantages of this should not be exaggerated. To survive, his army would need to forage well away from the road and the overwhelmingly superior Russian light cavalry would make this impossible. The French army was never likely to match the steady discipline of Russian rearguards. In addition, by late October 1812 the state of Napoleon’s horses meant that his rearguards would lack two crucial components: sufficient cavalry and fast-moving artillery. While facing Russian light cavalry and horse artillery in overwhelming numbers, there was no chance of the French maintaining a steady, methodical retreat. Speed was the only option and rapid retreats turned easily into rout.

  The basic point was that by mid-October Napoleon had no safe options. Unless he was very lucky or the Russians blundered terribly his army was going to suffer great losses during its retreat. The key to minimizing these losses would be discipline. If the men abandoned their units and disobeyed their officers, disaster would be inevitable. Every scrap of food in Moscow had to be collected and a system of fair distribution established down the hierarchy of command. Not merely would this ensure that everyone got their share, it was also a vital method of maintaining control and discipline. Superfluous baggage, civilians and plunder had to be reduced to a minimum. Elementary precautions – such as shoeing the horses against winter ice – needed to be taken in time.

  Just to list what needed to be done more or less describes what did not happen. The fire of Moscow had encouraged all the army’s worst plundering instincts but ever since Napoleon’s first great campaign in Italy in 1796–7 his troops had plundered on a grand scale wherever they went. Segur comments that the army leaving Moscow ‘resembled a horde of Tatars after a successful invasion’, but the emperor could not ‘deprive his soldiers of this fruit of so many toils’. While carts bulged with plunder, some food supplies were burned before leaving Moscow. Finding enough to eat quickly became a matter of every man for himself in many units, Fezensac commenting that the system of distribution was uneven and chaotic. Caulaincourt is even more scathing about the near total and entirely avoidable failure to provide winter horseshoes, which in his opinion killed many more horses than even hunger. Sir Robert Wilson’s comment that ‘never was a retreat so wretchedly conducted’ might seem the biased view of an enemy were it not confirmed by Caulaincourt: ‘The habit of victory cost us even dearer in retreat. The glorious habit of always marching forwards made us veritable schoolboys when it came to retreating. Never was a retreat worse organized.’26

  Napoleon marched out of Moscow on 19 October down the Old Kaluga Road which led towards Kutuzov’s headquarters at Tarutino. About halfway to Tarutino he swung to the west down the side roads which brought him out on to the New Kaluga Road near Fominskoe. His goal was to get ahead of Kutuzov on the road to Kaluga. The emperor’s movements were shielded by Murat’s advance guard. The presence of enemy troops near Fominskoe was quickly discovered by the Russians and Kutuzov sent Dmitrii Dokhturov’s Sixth Corps to attack them. Just in time, in the evening of 22 October, Russian partisans warned Dokhturov that the enemy force at Fominskoe was not an isolated detachment but Napoleon’s main army, including the Guards and the emperor himself. Armed with this information Kutuzov was able both to stop what would have been a disastrous attack on overwhelmingly superior enemy forces and to send Dokhturov scurrying southwards to block the New Kaluga Road at the small town of Maloiaroslavets, thereby denying Napoleon the chance to take Kaluga. Kutuzov himself marched cross-country from Tarutino to Maloiaroslavets to support Dokhturov.27

  Napoleon’s advance guard on the New Kaluga Road was the largely Italian corps commanded by his stepson, Eugène de Beauharnais. The first units of this corps crossed the river Luzha in the evening of 23 October and entered Maloiaroslavets, a town with 1,600 inhabitants, from the north. At dawn the next day the first regiments of Dokhturov’s corps arrived from the south and drove the enemy out of most of the town.

  All that day the battle swung back and forth in the streets of Maloiaroslavets as one assault succeeded another. Some 32,000 Russian troops fought 24,000 Italians. If Eugène’s men had not succeeded in barricading themselves behind the stout walls of the Chernoostrov Nicholas monastery in the centre of the town it is possible that the Russians would have driven them out of Maloiaroslavets and back over the river. The Russians had the advantage of attacking downhill towards the river valley. Eugène’s Italians fought with immense courage and pride. So too did the Russian regiments, their ranks filled with new recruits and militiamen. At the forefront of Dokhturov’s attacks was, for instance, the 6th Jaeger Regiment. This was a fine unit whose inspiring colonel-in-chief, Prince Petr Bagration, had led it through Suvorov’s Italian campaign of 1799 and many rearguard actions in 1805. At Maloiaroslavets, however, 60 per cent of its men were new recruits or militia.

  By the end of the day the largely wooden town of Maloiaroslavets had burned to the ground. With it burned hundreds of wounded Russian and Italian soldiers, who had been unable to drag themselves away from the flames.
The narrow streets of the town were an appalling sight, with bodies pulped into sickening mounds of blood and flesh by the infantry and guns which had fought their way up and down the steep sides of the valley. In tactical terms the battle was more or less a draw. Napoleon’s troops held the town itself, while the Russians ended the day deployed in a strong position just south of the town but blocking the road to Kaluga. Casualties were roughly equal too, both sides having lost some 7,000 men.28

  To the fury of most of his generals, Kutuzov decided on the following day to fall back towards Kaluga. He subsequently claimed that he had done so because Prince Poniatowski’s Polish corps was advancing through the small town of Medyn to his left and threatening his communications with Kaluga. Meanwhile, after wavering for two days, Napoleon himself decided to retreat up the road which led through Borovsk to the Moscow–Smolensk highway at Mozhaisk. He took this decision despite the fact that Kutuzov’s retreat meant that he could have marched along the road that led out westwards from Maloiaroslavets through Medyn and thence to Iukhnov and Smolensk. Perhaps he believed that it would be both quicker and safer to march down the highway rather than to entrust his army and its baggage to unknown country roads infested by swarms of Cossacks and with Kutuzov’s army hovering menacingly nearby. Whatever the reasoning behind his move, the attempt to march on Kaluga had proved a disaster. The army had eaten nine days of its food supply and come nine days closer to winter without achieving anything or getting away from the Moscow region and back towards its base at Smolensk.29

  With the French retreat from Maloiaroslavets the second stage of the autumn campaign had begun. Kutuzov was happy to wear down the enemy with his Cossacks, relying on nature and French indiscipline to do its work. Quite rightly, he retained a healthy respect for French courage and élan on the battlefield. Despite pleas even from Konovnitsyn and Toll, his most devoted subordinates, he was unwilling to commit his infantry to pitched battles, at least until the enemy was further weakened.

  Along with the good military reasons for this strategy, politics probably also played a role. Stung by Sir Robert Wilson’s complaints about his retreat after the battle of Maloiaroslavets, Kutuzov retorted:

  I don’t care for your objections. I prefer giving my enemy a ‘pont d’or’ [golden bridge], as you call it, to receiving a ‘coup de collier’ [blow born of desperation]: besides, I will say again, as I have told you before, that I am by no means sure that the total destruction of the Emperor Napoleon and his army would be of such benefit to the world; his succession would not fall to Russia or any other continental power, but to that which commands the sea, and whose domination would then be intolerable.30

  Kutuzov was not personally close to Nikolai Rumiantsev but their views on foreign policy and Russian interests did to some extent overlap, as one might indeed expect of Russian aristocrats brought up in Catherine II’s reign and deeply involved in her expansion southwards against the Ottomans. Like Rumiantsev, he was no lover of England, once commenting to Bennigsen that it would not worry him if the English sank to the bottom of the sea. How much these views influenced Kutuzov’s strategy in the autumn and winter of 1812 it is difficult to say. The field-marshal was a shrewd and slippery politician who seldom exposed his innermost thoughts to anyone. He would certainly be slow to admit to any Russian that his strategy was driven by political motives, since this was to stray into a sphere which belonged to the emperor and not to any military commander. Probably the safest conclusion is that Kutuzov’s political views were an additional reason not to risk his army in an attempt to capture Napoleon or annihilate his army.31

  Alexander was kept aware of Kutuzov’s unwillingness to confront the retreating enemy, not least by Wilson. The emperor had encouraged the Englishman to write to him, employing this foreigner as an additional, ‘unaffiliated’ source of information on his generals, while secretly intercepting and deciphering Wilson’s correspondence with the British government to make sure that his British ‘agent’ was not trying to pull the wool over his eyes. Wilson was one of a number of people who begged the emperor to return to headquarters and take over command himself. Another officer who did so was Colonel Michaud de Beauretour, who came to Petersburg on 27 October with news of the victory over Murat at Tarutino.32

  Alexander responded to Michaud that

  all human beings are ambitious for fame (chestoliubivye) and I admit openly that I am no less ambitious than others. If I listened only to this feeling, then I would get into your carriage and set off for the army. Given the unfavourable position into which we have lured the enemy, our army’s excellent spirit, the empire’s inexhaustible resources, the large reserve forces which I have made ready, and the orders sent by me to the Army of Moldavia [i.e. Chichagov’s army] – I am very confident that we cannot be denied victory and that all that remains to us, as they say, is to put on the laurels. I know that if I was with the army, then I would gather all the glory and that I would take my place in history. But when I think how inexperienced I am in military matters in comparison to our enemy and that, for all my goodwill, I could make a mistake which would cost the precious blood of my children, then despite my ambition for fame I am very ready to sacrifice my glory for the good of the army.33

  To some extent, as usual, this was Alexander striking a pose. Other factors were also important in his decision to stay away from headquarters and leave Kutuzov in command. The field-marshal’s enormous popularity as the reality of victory sank in to Russian consciousness was one such factor. But there is good reason to believe Alexander’s lack of confidence in his own military abilities, a lack of confidence which had haunted this sensitive and proud man since the humiliation of Austerlitz. Though the emperor had more faith in Bennigsen’s ability and shared his views on strategy, he nevertheless allowed Kutuzov to remove the chief of staff from headquarters, recognizing that in present circumstances he had no alternative but to put his faith in his commander-in-chief and had no interest in allowing the army’s high command to be undermined by personal hatreds.34

  Kutuzov’s retreat after Maloiaroslavets had left his main body three days’ march behind the enemy as it headed for Mozhaisk and the Moscow–Smolensk highway. Aleksei Ermolov reported on 28 October that Napoleon was retreating at such speed that it was impossible for Russian regular troops to keep up without exhausting themselves. Other reports confirmed this, while adding that this speed was destroying the French army. Two days later Matvei Platov, in command of the Cossacks swarming around the enemy’s column, wrote that ‘the enemy army is fleeing like no other army has ever retreated in history. It is abandoning its baggage, its sick and its wounded. It leaves behind horrible sights in its wake: at every step one sees the dying or the dead.’ Platov added that the Cossacks were stopping the enemy from foraging and Napoleon’s troops were running very short of food and fodder. Nor could the enemy rearguards hold for any length of time against the light cavalry which moved around their flanks and the concentrated fire of the Russian horse artillery.35

  By 29 October Napoleon’s headquarters were at Gzhatsk, back on the highway and 230 kilometres from Smolensk. After rejoining the Moscow–Smolensk road at Mozhaisk, his army passed the battlefield of Borodino and the Kolotskoe monastery, which had been turned into a hospital. Many hundreds of wounded men remained there, who should have been evacuated well before the army’s arrival. Instead Napoleon now tried to load them onto the carts of his baggage train, many of whose drivers took the first opportunity to tip them off into the ditches beside the road.36

  The battlefield itself was a terrible sight. None of the bodies had been buried. Scores of thousands of corpses lay out in the fields or in great mounds around the Raevsky battery and other points where the fighting had been most fierce.

  For fifty-two days they had lain as victims of the elements and the changing weather. Few still had a human look. Well before the frosts had arrived, maggots and putrefaction had made their mark. Other enemies had also appeared. Packs of wolves had come fro
m every corner of Smolensk province. Birds of prey had flown from the nearby fields. Often the beasts of the forest and those of the air fought over the right to tear apart the corpses. The birds picked out the eyes, the wolves cleaned the bones of their flesh.37

  As Napoleon’s army turned towards Smolensk along the highway, the closest Russian forces remained Matvei Platov’s Cossacks. Their orders were to harass the enemy day and night, allowing him little sleep and no chance to forage. By 1 November Miloradovich’s advance guard of Kutuzov’s army was also approaching. It was made up of two infantry corps and 3,500 regular cavalry. Kutuzov’s main body was still some way to the south, marching along country roads parallel to the highway. This line of march made clear Kutuzov’s intention not to fight a pitched battle with Napoleon. Food supply was also an incentive to keep well away from the highway and march through districts untouched by war.

  Once Kutuzov’s army began to pursue Napoleon, problems of supply were inevitable. The army was moving away from its bases and into an impoverished war zone. Even in Smolensk province, let alone Belorussia and Lithuania, there was every likelihood that food would be impossible to find and that the army would have to feed itself from its own wagons. It required 850 carts to carry a day’s food and forage for an army of 120,000 men and 40,000 horses. To sustain itself for a long period would therefore require many thousands of carts. Even if they could be found, this would not necessarily solve the problem. The horses and drivers of the supply train had to feed themselves as well. In a vicious circle very familiar to pre-modern generals the army’s supply train could end up by eating all the food it was attempting to deliver. The longer it spent on the march, the likelier this was to happen. Moving thousands of carts along side roads in a Russian autumn was bound to be a very slow business, especially if they were travelling in the rear of a huge artillery train. These realities go a long way to explaining Kutuzov’s predicament in the autumn and winter of 1812.38