Russia Against Napoleon

The Advance from Moscow

Even as Kutuzov was preparing to fight Napoleon at Borodino, Alexander I was concocting a plan for a counter-offensive which would drive the French out of Russia and destroy the Grande Armée. Kutuzov’s initial report to the emperor on the battle of Borodino had stated that ‘despite their superior forces, nowhere had the enemy gained a single yard of land’. Immediately after receiving this report, Alexander dispatched Aleksandr Chernyshev to the field-marshal’s headquarters with detailed plans for a coordinated counter-offensive by all the Russian armies. Alexander wrote to Kutuzov that he hoped that the field-marshal’s skill and his troops’ courage at Borodino had now put a final stop to the French advance into Russia. He also encouraged Kutuzov to discuss all details about the operation with Chernyshev, who was fully informed about Alexander’s aims and in whom he had full confidence. The emperor was careful to state that it was up to the commander-in-chief whether to accept the plan or to make alternative proposals of his own but no Russian general was likely openly to flout the monarch’s wishes.¹

The gist of Alexander’s plan was that the Russian armies in the north (Wittgenstein and Steinhel) and the south (Chichagov) should simultaneously advance deep into Napoleon’s rear in Belorussia. They must defeat and drive off the enemy forces guarding Napoleon’s communications. In Chichagov’s case this meant Prince’s Schwarzenberg’s Austrians and General Reynier’s Saxon corps, which were to be thrust back into the Duchy of Warsaw. Alexander wrote to Kutuzov that ‘as you will see from this plan, it is proposed that the main operations will be carried out by Admiral Chichagov’s army’, which would be reinforced both by Tormasov’s Third Army and by a small corps commanded by Lieutenant-General Friedrich Oertel, currently guarding the supply base at Mozyr.

Nevertheless, Peter Wittgenstein’s role was also crucial. Aided by Count Steinhel, he was to advance southwards, take Polotsk, and drive the defeated corps of Oudinot and Saint-Cyr north-westwards into Lithuania and away from Napoleon’s line of retreat across Belorussia. As a result, the combined forces of Chichagov and Wittgenstein would control the whole area through which Napoleon’s main army would have to retreat, with Kutuzov’s forces in close pursuit. The enemy was already ‘exhausted’, having been drawn deep into Russia and having suffered heavy losses. It now faced still heavier losses and a very difficult retreat. If the plan was properly executed, ‘not even the smallest part of the main enemy army…can escape over our borders without defeat and ultimately total annihilation’.²

The key figure behind the plan was Alexander himself, though no doubt he discussed it with young Colonel Chernyshev and other more senior military figures in his entourage, including Petr Mikhailovich Volkonsky. To some extent this new plan inherited aspects of pre-war thinking about military operations. Drawn forward deep into Russia and then blocked by the main Russian army, Napoleon was to be defeated by other Russian armies thrusting far into his flanks and rear. In broad outline Alexander’s plan made sense and was the best way to deploy Russian forces in this theatre of operations and exploit Napoleon’s mistakes.

The emperor’s plan was, however, very ambitious. A number of armies initially hundreds of kilometres apart were expected to coordinate their operations and arrive simultaneously in central Belorussia. Communications between these armies would be difficult. To the mud, snow and cold which impeded all movements in a Russian autumn and winter one needed to add the fact that Wittgenstein and Chichagov were separated by a swath of land in which no less than five full enemy corps and a number of smaller detachments were operating. At the very moment when Alexander was sending Chernyshev to Kutuzov, an additional 36,000 French reinforcements under Marshal Victor were entering Belorussia from the west. They reached Minsk on 15 September and Smolensk twelve days later.

Alexander’s plan assumed that his armies would defeat all these enemy forces and drive them out of Belorussia, though at the time he was concocting his plan the Russians were not yet numerically superior to their foes. Advancing into Belorussia in the middle of winter the Russian columns would certainly suffer heavy losses from sickness and exhaustion. Alexander instructed Wittgenstein and Chichagov to fortify the defiles and obstacles through which Napoleon’s army would have to retreat, but would they have the time or the manpower to do this? As the emperor himself acknowledged, the enemy could head for Minsk or Vilna and had the choice of at least three highways down which to make his escape. In the event, Alexander’s plan about two-thirds succeeded, which was more than one might have expected in the circumstances. In the second half of November, however, as Napoleon approached the river Berezina it appeared briefly as if the plan might succeed completely and might result in the total destruction of the French army and even in the capture of Napoleon himself. Because this did not happen, Russian accounts of the autumn campaign have always tended to combine triumph at the French debacle with regret that it was not even more complete.

Chernyshev himself had to do a big detour to the east of Moscow before finally reaching Kutuzov’s headquarters south of the city on 20 September. There he had discussions with Kutuzov and Bennigsen which showed his intimate knowledge of Alexander’s thinking and filled in many of the gaps in the emperor’s written proposals. On 22 September Chernyshev reported to Alexander that he had shown the necessary tact in urging the emperor’s ideas on the commander-in-chief and that both Kutuzov and Bennigsen had warmly endorsed the plan. He added that the fall of Moscow had not fundamentally changed ‘the enemy’s poor situation’ and that Napoleon would not be able to sustain himself in the Moscow region for long. There was every chance of destroying him ‘so long as the people here don’t again make serious mistakes before our armies have united in his rear’.³

Immediately afterwards Chernyshev set off for Chichagov’s headquarters in north-west Ukraine in order to inform the admiral of Alexander’s plan. In the autumn and winter of 1812 the dashing young colonel was to add to the laurels he had won in Paris and fully to justify Alexander’s confidence. In mid-October he led a large partisan raiding party of seven regular light cavalry squadrons, three Cossack regiments and one Kalmyk unit deep into the Duchy of Warsaw, destroying magazines, disrupting conscription and forcing Schwarzenberg to divert much of the Austrian cavalry back to the Duchy in order to track him down. Subsequently, Chernyshev took a Cossack regiment right through the French rear and linked up with Wittgenstein, bringing the latter his first clear sense of Chichagov’s movements and intentions. By happy accident, during this journey Chernyshev liberated Ferdinand Winzengerode and his aide-de-camp, Captain Lev Naryshkin, who had been captured in Moscow and were en route back to France. Since Winzengerode was one of Alexander’s favourite generals and Naryshkin was the son of the emperor’s mistress this was a great coup for Chernyshev. Wittgenstein praised Chernyshev’s achievements in glowing terms and Alexander promoted his 26-year-old aide-de-camp to the rank of major-general.⁴

While Chernyshev was carrying Alexander’s plans for a counter-offensive first to Kutuzov and then to Chichagov, a vicious ‘people’s war’, reminiscent of events in Spain, had spread across the Moscow region. Eugen of Württemberg wrote that the Russian peasants, usually so friendly, hospitable and patient, had been turned into ‘veritable tigers’ by the depredations of French foraging parties and marauders. Sir Robert Wilson recalls that enemy soldiers who fell into the peasants’ hands suffered ‘every imaginable previous mode of torture’. The narratives of torture, mutilation and burial alive might be put down to foreign prejudice, were they not confirmed by many Russian sources too. In military terms the main significance of this ‘people’s war’ was that it made it even more difficult for the French to forage. Any large and static army had trouble feeding its horses in this era. Napoleon’s cavalry had suffered badly at Borodino, but it was the weeks spent in Moscow with ever-diminishing supplies of forage that destroyed most of his mounted regiments and devastated his artillery horses. Foraging expeditions had to travel ever greater distances with larger and larger escorts. Even so they often returned empty-handed, having lost men to ambushes and exhausted their horses without reward.⁵

In the classic style of guerrilla war, the peasants and the army’s partisan units helped each other. The partisan commanders often distributed arms to the peasantry and came to their assistance when large enemy requisition parties were spotted. The peasants in turn provided the intelligence, local guides and extra manpower which enabled the cavalry to track down and ambush enemy detachments and to evade capture by superior forces. Partisan units operated along all the roads leading out from Moscow. Already by mid-October they were willing to take on quite large enemy detachments. On 20 October, for example, Denis Davydov’s partisans attacked an enemy transport column near Viazma which was escorted by no less than three regiments, capturing most of the wagons and five hundred men. During the weeks that Napoleon spent in Moscow his communications with Smolensk and Paris were harried but never cut. Had he chosen to spend the winter in the city, however, it would have been a very different matter.⁶

Denis Davydov was one of the first partisans, having persuaded a doubtful Kutuzov on the eve of Borodino to detach him with a small band of cavalry and Cossacks to raid enemy communications. Davydov’s success in the following weeks won him reinforcements and helped to legitimize the whole idea of partisan warfare, which was new to Russian generals. Karl von Toll in particular urged this new form of war on Kutuzov and the commander-in-chief quickly grasped its potential. Davydov captured or destroyed enemy supply columns, routed detachments sent to gather food, liberated many hundreds of Russian prisoners of war and gathered useful intelligence. He also punished traitors and collaborators, whom he describes as a very small minority. Davydov’s weapons were speed, surprise, daring and excellent local sources of information. His bands struck out of nowhere, dispersed and then regrouped secretly for further attacks.

Davydov was not only one of the most successful of the partisans but also the most famous and romantic. A well-known poet, he was immortalized by his friend Aleksandr Pushkin thus: ‘Hussar-poet, you’ve sung of bivouacs / Of the licence of devil-may-care carousals / Of the fearful charm of battle / And of the curls of your moustache.’ Well after his death, Davydov became more famous than ever as the figure on whom Tolstoy based his character Denisov, the charming and generous hussar who loses his heart to Natasha Rostov and in whose band of partisans her brother Petia loses his life in the autumn of 1812.⁷

The most notorious partisan commander was Captain Alexander Figner, who commanded an artillery battery at the battle of Borodino. The fall of Moscow left Figner lost in gloom and determined to revenge himself on the French for his country’s humiliation. The battery’s second-in-command described him as ‘good-looking, of medium height: he was a true son of the North, muscular, round-faced, pale and with light-brown hair. His big, bright eyes were full of liveliness and he had a powerful voice. Figner was eloquent, full of common sense, tireless in all his enterprises and with a fiery imagination. He despised danger, never lost his head and was totally fearless.’ Speaking German, French, Italian and a number of other foreign languages fluently, Figner was also an excellent actor. On a number of occasions he went into enemy camps in and around Moscow to gather intelligence, easily passing himself off as an officer of Napoleon’s multi-national army.⁸

Like many guerrilla commanders in history, however, there was a dark side to the brilliant, cunning and ruthless Figner. In September and October 1812 even Davydov was sometimes disinclined to take prisoners, since these put an intolerable strain on small and fast-moving partisan bands.⁹ Alexander Figner, however, twisted even this practice. One fellow-officer recalls that ‘his favourite and most frequent amusement was first to inspire captured officers’ trust and cheerfulness by his reassuring conversation, and then suddenly to shoot them with his pistol and watch their agonies before they died. He did this well away from the army, which only heard dark rumours which it either disbelieved or forgot amidst the pressures of military operations.’ In the midst of the awful cruelties and extreme emotions of autumn 1812 senior officers were sometimes willing to turn a blind eye to the nastier side of partisan warfare. By 1813, however, with the war no longer on Russian soil, few officers still harboured any great hatred for their enemy. When Figner drowned in the river Elbe trying to escape from the French few of his fellow-officers shed any tears.¹⁰

The many partisan units operating around Moscow overlapped with larger detachments watching the main roads leading out of the city. Some of these detachments also waged partisan war. Their main role, however, was to defend the provinces around Moscow from enemy raiding parties and to provide early warning should Napoleon make any major move out of the city. Of these detachments, the most important was commanded by Major-General Baron Ferdinand von Winzengerode, whose task it was to watch the highroad leading to Tver and thence to Petersburg. Most of Winzengerode’s troops were Cossacks and militia but some regular cavalry were cut off from Kutuzov’s army during the retreat through Moscow and escaped out of the city to the north, joining Winzengerode’s men. Of these reinforcements, the best were the excellent soldiers of the Cossack Life Guard Regiment.

Ferdinand von Winzengerode could best be described as a full-time anti-Bonapartist. His father had been aide-de-camp to the Duke of Brunswick, of all the German dynasties the one most noted for its unwavering hatred of Napoleon. Winzengerode himself transferred on a number of occasions between the Russian and Austrian armies, depending on which service offered the better opportunity to fight the French. Logically enough, having fought with the Austrians in 1809, he moved back to the Russian army early in 1812. In 1812 he was one of a number of political refugees whom hatred of Napoleon had washed up on Russia’s shores. Had circumstances turned out just a little differently, he could easily have been serving alongside many of his compatriots in the King’s German Legion in Spain, under Wellington’s command.

The peppery, pipe-smoking, impetuous Winzengerode was a loyal friend and patron. His excellent French cook and his penchant for whist were much appreciated by his staff. So too were his decency and fairness. In the autumn of 1812, for example, he was outraged when the steward on one of the estates of Aleksandr Balashev, the minister of police, tried to use his master’s position to evade requisitioning for the army’s needs. Winzengerode promptly slapped a double requisition on Balashev and ignored the complaints of Aleksei Arakcheev, who was up to similar tricks as regards his own estates in Novgorod. The problem, however, was that Winzengerode was a decent man but a poor general. When the French were on the point of evacuating Moscow, Winzengerode bungled an attempt to parley with them and was captured. Napoleon was initially intent on shooting him as a traitor but was dissuaded by his horrified generals. Kutuzov rightly called Winzengerode’s capture an act of barely credible carelessness. Though Alexander was overjoyed by Chernyshev’s rescue of Winzengerode, the Russian war effort would actually have benefited had Winzengerode been sitting quietly in French captivity in 1813–14 rather than commanding Russian armies.¹¹

The most competent of Winzengerode’s subordinates was the 31-year-old Colonel Alexander von Benckendorff. In 1812–14 Benckendorff had a ‘good war’ and this was to be the foundation for a brilliant subsequent career. The young Benckendorff started life with many advantages. His mother was the close friend of the Empress Marie, whom she accompanied to Russia as lady-in-waiting after the young Württemberg princess married the Grand Duke Paul. Juliana Benckendorff died in Marie Feodorovna’s arms in 1797, bequeathing to the empress the care of her young children. Alexander thereby became a core member of Marie’s circle. His sister Dorothea married Christoph Lieven, who was a key protégé of Empress Marie but also close to Alexander I and a source of patronage in his own right.

The Empress Marie sent Alexander von Benckendorff to an excellent school but for a time it seemed that her investment had been in vain. The handsome, charming and pleasure-loving young man proved neither a good scholar nor a particularly virtuous officer. Like Chernyshev and Nesselrode, he served in the Russian mission in Paris in the years after Tilsit. His main achievement in Paris, however, was to fall for a famous French actress and femme fatale, a former mistress of Napoleon, whom he smuggled back to Russia with him after quitting diplomatic life under a cloud. He subsequently redeemed himself by abandoning his actress and volunteering to fight against the Turks, after which Marie paid off his debts. But it was the courage and skill he showed in 1812 which really brought him back into favour.¹²

As one of Alexander I’s aides-de-camp, Benckendorff started the war by carrying out a number of important and dangerous missions to Bagration’s headquarters. Serving under Winzengerode in the autumn of 1812, he was responsible for protecting a key road and its surrounding territory from French incursions and for launching raids against the main enemy line of communications down the highway from Moscow to Smolensk. In his memoirs, Benckendorff recalls that one of his most difficult tasks was to rescue French prisoners from the clutches of the peasants, in which he did not always succeed. Some of the cruelties perpetrated against the wretched prisoners of war made him think he was living ‘in the midst of a desolation which seemed to witness the abandonment of God and the rule on earth of the devil’. He adds, however, both that the peasants had every reason to be enraged by French behaviour and that the people showed great loyalty to their religion, their country and their emperor. In this context the orders he at one point received from a nervous Petersburg to disarm peasants and punish disorder were nonsensical, as he reported to Alexander I. Benckendorff told the emperor that he could hardly disarm men to whom he himself had given weapons. Nor could he allow to be called traitors a people ‘who were sacrificing their lives for the defence of their churches, their independence, and of their wives and their homes. Rather the word traitor fitted those who at such a sacred moment for Russia dared to tell false tales about the country’s purest and most zealous defenders.’¹³

Napoleon had entered Moscow on 15 September, and left the city on 19 October. During that period the relative strength of the rival armies changed in ways that had a decisive impact on the autumn campaign. While in Moscow Napoleon was reinforced by substantial numbers of infantry, which brought his overall numbers back over 100,000 and filled most of the gaps left by Borodino. Some of these infantry units were of good quality. They included, for example, the First Guards division, which had not been present at Borodino. By definition, infantry which had marched all the way from central and western Europe to Moscow was relatively tough. The core of Napoleon’s army was his Guards. Very few of these excellent troops had seen any action since the beginning of the campaign, as Kutuzov knew.

The Russian infantry was weaker than Napoleon’s in both numbers and quality. On 5 October Kutuzov had 63,000 officers and men in the ranks of his infantry regiments. Of these men, 15,000 were Moscow militiamen and 7,500 were new recruits. In addition, almost 11,000 men from Lobanov-Rostovsky’s new units were with Kutuzov’s army but had not yet been assigned to his regiments. These men were much better armed and trained than militia but none of them had ever been in action. The Russian commander-in-chief had good reason to avoid pitched battles with Napoleon, in which infantry always played the key role. In particular, he was right to worry about his regiments’ ability to carry out complicated manoeuvres. If he had to fight Napoleon, it would be wise to do so in a strong defensive position. The Russian army traditionally fought with a higher ratio of artillery to infantry than was the case elsewhere in Europe. Given his infantry’s rawness, Kutuzov was unlikely to break with this tradition. His army therefore set off on the autumn campaign with a vast train of 620 guns, which soon far outnumbered Napoleon’s artillery and had inevitable consequences as regards its speed, manoeuvrability and supply.¹⁴

The situation as regards cavalry was totally reversed. Napoleon had too few horsemen and, much more importantly, far too few viable horses. Even before he left Moscow some of his cavalry were dismounted. During these six weeks Kutuzov’s regular cavalry had received just 150 recruits and no reinforcements from the militia. This made good sense since useful cavalrymen could not be trained in a hurry. But many new horses had arrived for his 10,000 regular cavalrymen, often donated by the nobility of the neighbouring provinces.¹⁵

Above all, Kutuzov’s army was reinforced by twenty-six regiments of Don Cossacks, a total of 15,000 new irregular cavalry. The total mobilization of the Don Cossack reserves was a great success, for which the Cossack ataman, Matvei Platov, was made a count. Sometimes these new Cossack regiments are described as militia but this is misleading. Ordinary Russian militiamen in 1812 had no previous military experience. All able-bodied Cossacks had served in the army, however, and were expected to bring their own weapons as and when they were recalled to service. The twenty-six new Cossack regiments were therefore well armed, and packed with veterans. In normal circumstances such an enormous number of irregular cavalry might have been excessive but in the conditions of the autumn and winter campaign of 1812 their impact was to be devastating. Back in April 1812 Colonel Chuikevich’s memorandum had stressed the damage that Russian cavalry would do to a retreating enemy. Kutuzov was a shrewd and experienced campaigner. He knew that his cavalry would confine the enemy to the road on which they were retreating, force them to march at great speed, and deny them any chance of foraging away from their column. It took little imagination to realize what this would imply for an army marching into the Russian winter. Kutuzov therefore allowed his Cossacks, hunger, the weather and French indiscipline to do his work for him. Quite rightly, he was in no hurry to commit his infantry to battle.¹⁶

Obviously Napoleon made a fatal mistake in dwelling almost six weeks in Moscow while his cavalry withered, reinforcements poured in to Kutuzov and winter approached. Had he rested his troops in Moscow even for a fortnight, he could still have made it safely back to Smolensk long before the first snows or the arrival of Kutuzov’s Cossack regiments from the Don. Instead he hung on, awaiting Alexander’s response to his hints about peace. Perhaps the only thing one can say in Napoleon’s defence is that most European statesmen and much of the Russian elite shared some of his doubts about Alexander’s strength of will. Inevitably, however, Napoleon’s peace feelers themselves fed Russian confidence and gave them every opportunity to encourage him to stay in Moscow while awaiting some response from Alexander. The basic point, however, was that Napoleon had failed to destroy the Russian army and had completely miscalculated the effect of Moscow’s fall on both Alexander and the Russian elites. Having made this mistake he was too stubborn to listen to wise advice, to cut his losses, and to retreat in time.

Subsequently Kutuzov was to have a revealing discussion with a captured senior official of the French commissariat, the Viscount de Puybusque. Puybusque wrote that the Russian commander had asked him ‘through what form of blindness had he [Napoleon] failed to spot a trap which was visible to the whole world? In particular, the field-marshal was astonished at the ease with which all the ruses employed to keep him in Moscow had succeeded and at his absurd cheek (prétention) in offering peace when he no longer possessed the means to make war.’ The Russians had been only too happy to encourage the hopes of Napoleon’s envoy, General Lauriston, that Alexander would respond to Napoleon’s advances or the even sillier faith placed in the possible disloyalty of the Cossacks. ‘Of course,’ added Kutuzov, ‘we did everything possible to drag out the conversations. In politics if someone offers you an advantage, you don’t reject it.’¹⁷

By mid-October even Napoleon acknowledged that Alexander had duped him and that he must retreat. His departure from Moscow was hastened, however, by an attack by Kutuzov’s army on Marshal Murat’s detachment, which was watching the Russian camp at Tarutino. Left to his own devices, Kutuzov is unlikely to have ordered the attack. He was happy for Napoleon to stay in Moscow for as long as possible. In addition, as he told Miloradovich, ‘we are not yet up to complicated movements and manoeuvres’. But the commander-in-chief was under pressure from Alexander to take the offensive and liberate Moscow. Kutuzov’s generals were also raring for action, with Bennigsen stressing the need to inflict a heavy blow on Napoleon before the arrival of Marshal Victor’s reinforcements from Smolensk. Above all, Russian reconnaissance showed that Marshal Murat’s corps was vulnerable. Murat was heavily outnumbered and might be crushed long before reinforcements could arrive. Especially on its eastern flank, his camp could easily be stormed by a surprise attack from the nearby forest. French outposts and patrols were slack, which made the idea of a surprise attack all the more enticing.¹⁸

The initial plan was to attack early in the morning of 17 October. Kutuzov’s orders had to be passed to the troops through Aleksei Ermolov, as chief of staff of the now combined First and Second armies. On the evening of 16 October, however, Ermolov had gone to a fellow-general’s headquarters for dinner and was not to be found, so the attack had to be postponed. Ermolov’s memoirs are silent on this subject and this is by no means the only occasion where they have to be read with a critical eye. Conceivably Ermolov proved non-cooperative because he believed that the attack was Bennigsen’s brainchild and would not bring him any personal credit, but perhaps this is too harsh. Kutuzov was more angry about the bungling on 16 October than at any other time during the campaign.¹⁹

The mess which occurred on the evening of 16 October reflected the confusion in the army’s structure of command. Kutuzov by now deeply distrusted his chief of staff, Levin von Bennigsen, but he could not yet get rid of him. Instead he brought Petr Konovnitsyn into his headquarters, officially as duty-general but in reality as a substitute for Bennigsen. Inevitably this caused still further enmity between Kutuzov and his chief of staff. Moreover, for all his virtues as a front-line commander, Konovnitsyn had neither the training nor the aptitude for staff work.

By mid-October Kutuzov and Bennigsen had between them succeeded in humiliating Barclay de Tolly sufficiently to make him resign.²⁰ Logically at this point the whole headquarters of combined First and Second armies should have been dismantled and orders passed straight down from Kutuzov to the corps commanders. Since the army’s overall structure had been decreed by the emperor, however, only he could authorize such a change. Meanwhile Ermolov resented both the fact that Konovnitsyn had been inserted into the chain of command and that his inefficiency created additional bother for himself. The army’s high command was therefore a maze of overlapping jurisdictions poisoned by personal rivalries among its senior officers. Nikolai Raevsky, the commander of Sixth Corps, wrote at the time that he kept as far as possible from headquarters since it was a viper’s nest of intrigue, envy, egoism and calumny.²¹

Postponed for one day, the attack went ahead early in the morning of 18 October. The plan was for Count Vasili Orlov-Denisov’s cavalry to attack out of the forests on the right of the Russian line, crush Murat’s left flank and storm into his rear. On Orlov-Denisov’s left he would be supported by a column of two corps, commanded by General Baggohufvudt. Next to Baggohufvudt would advance another column, made up of Aleksandr Ostermann-Tolstoy’s Fourth Corps. Once these columns had attacked, the two corps commanded by Mikhail Miloradovich would move up to their support from the western (i.e. left) end of the Russian line. Behind Miloradovich stood the Guards and cuirassiers in reserve. The main problem with this plan was that it entailed all these columns marching through the forests at night in order to take up their positions for a dawn attack. In addition, in order to achieve surprise, the columns must make no noise and strike at first light. Overall responsibility for planning and executing the army’s movements lay with Karl von Toll and the quartermaster-general’s staff.²²

Orlov-Denisov’s column made its way successfully through the forests to its jumping-off point in the east. Since most of his men were Cossacks their ability to find their way was to be expected. The infantry columns of Baggohufvudt and Ostermann-Tolstoy were less successful. When dawn came Ostermann’s column was nowhere to be seen and only part of Baggohufvudt’s men were in place. When Karl von Toll arrived on the scene and found the columns in confusion he exploded into one of his rages, with Baggohufvudt and the nearest divisional commander, Eugen of Württemberg, as his targets. Karl Baggohufvudt was so infuriated by the insults being rained down not just on him but also on the emperor’s first cousin that he resigned his command and took himself off to the Fourth Jaegers, of which he was colonel-in-chief, vowing to die at their head.

Although the neighbouring columns were not yet in place, Orlov-Denisov could not delay his attack for fear of being spotted once daylight had arrived and the French had finally woken up. He therefore launched his Cossacks against the enemy’s eastern flank, which disintegrated and fled in all directions. To Orlov-Denisov’s left matters went less well for the Russians. Storming out of the forest with the only two jaeger regiments on the spot, Baggohufvudt was immediately killed by a cannon ball. Although the French were initially thrown into confusion by the attack, Murat rallied them and they showed their usual courage and fighting spirit on the battlefield. Eugen of Württemberg and Toll rearranged their troops for a renewed and more coordinated assault, which in the end pushed back the enemy. Further back in the forest was Bennigsen, to whom Kutuzov had devolved overall command of the operation. He too was doing his best to impose order and coordination on the advancing infantry brigades, but his efforts cut across Eugen’s. Meanwhile the confusion confirmed Kutuzov’s doubts about his army’s ability to manoeuvre. He refused to allow even Miloradovich’s corps, let alone the Guards, to attack, despite the fact that the French were badly outnumbered and would almost certainly have been routed.²³

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 south-west 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 from 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

When the campaign began the men carried three days’ rations, and seven more days of ‘biscuit’ – in other words the dried black bread which was the staple of Russian regiments on the march – were in the regimental carts. This was what the regulations required and Kutuzov insisted that they were fully complied with. Large extra supplies were in the army’s wagon train to the rear of the marching columns. On 17 October the army’s chief victualling officer reported that he had sufficient biscuit to feed 120,000 men for twenty days – in other words until 6 November – and 20,000 quarters of oats for the horses.³⁹

Well before the start of the autumn campaign Kutuzov had attempted to create a large mobile magazine to support the army’s advance. On 27 September orders had gone out to twelve provincial governors to form mobile magazines and send them to the army immediately, stressing that ‘extreme speed’ was crucial. Each magazine was to consist of 408 two-horse carts packed in equal measure with biscuit and groats for the soldiers and oats for their horses. The provincial nobility was to provide most of the food and the carts, as well as the ‘inspectors’ who were to organize and lead the magazines. The governors went through the inevitable process of summoning the noble marshals. As one of them reported to headquarters, ‘without the full cooperation of the marshals of the nobility nothing effective can be done’.⁴⁰

With few exceptions the marshals did everything possible and the nobles volunteered the food and transport needed but the enemy was time and distance. Napoleon would have had to stay in Moscow for an extra month at least for mobile magazines from far-off Penza, Simbirsk and Saratov to arrive in time for the autumn campaign. In fact, however, the autumn campaign started even before the mobile magazines from less distant provinces could arrive. The first half of the Riazan mobile magazine, for instance, set off on 29 October, the first echelon of the Tambov mobile magazine on 7 November. Even these mobile magazines had a considerable journey to the army. Moreover they soon found themselves marching in its wake, behind its vast artillery train and through areas eaten out by the men and horses which had already passed. Soon the supply train began to eat its own food in order to stop men and horses from starving. Stuck in the rear with the supply train was also much of the winter clothing which Kutuzov had ordered the governors of nearby provinces to requisition for the army.⁴¹

In principle the mobile magazines should have been directed along march-routes which would intersect the advance of Kutuzov’s columns. Kutuzov did actually order the intendant-general of the combined First and Second armies, Vasili Lanskoy, to send all supplies from Tula towards the army’s line of march through the southern districts of Smolensk province. Just possibly if Barclay de Tolly and Georg Kankrin had been masterminding supply operations rather than Kutuzov, Konovnitsyn and Lanskoy the arrangements might have been more efficient but the task was difficult. Until the last week of October no one could know along which route Napoleon would retreat or Kutuzov would pursue him. Mobile magazines wrongly directed could fall into enemy hands. Once the campaign had begun the armies never stopped moving. Together with the distances involved, the pre-modern communications and the total inexperience of the noble inspectors who led the mobile magazines, this made coordination of army and supply column movements very hard.⁴²

By 5 November Kutuzov acknowledged that ‘the rapid movement of the army in pursuit of the fleeing enemy means that the transport with food for the troops is falling behind and therefore the army is beginning to suffer a shortage of victuals’. As a result he issued detailed orders on where and how much to requisition from the local population, threatening anyone failing to cooperate with field courts martial. The problem, however, was that as the army approached Smolensk in mid-November it was entering an area ravaged by war and previously occupied by the enemy, where part of the population had fled to the forests, very many farms had been destroyed and there was no friendly local administration to help levy supplies. When they reached the area around the city of Smolensk many of Kutuzov’s troops began to go hungry for the first time in the campaign.⁴³

The only major clash between regular Russian troops and Napoleon’s retreating army occurred at Viazma on 3 November. The various corps of Napoleon’s army retreating down the Smolensk highway were strung out over 50 kilometres. Miloradovich therefore attempted to cut off the French rearguard, commanded by Marshal Davout. The attempt failed, above all because Miloradovich was tightly constrained by Kutuzov’s cautious orders and the field-marshal refused to move up in his support with the army’s main body. The corps of Eugène de Beauharnais, Poniatowski and Ney were still close enough to help Davout, and together they well outnumbered Miloradovich’s force. Most of Davout’s corps therefore escaped but since the day ended with the Russians storming into Viazma and driving the enemy off the battlefield the Russian soldiers saw themselves as clear victors, which was good for their morale.

The battle of Viazma showed that there was still plenty of fight left in many of Napoleon’s troops but it also revealed his army’s growing weakness. For the first time in 1812, a clash between Kutuzov and Napoleon’s infantry resulted in much heavier French than Russian losses. Lieutenant Ivan Radozhitsky’s battery was part of Miloradovich’s force and fought at Viazma. He wrote that ‘our superiority was clear: the enemy had almost no cavalry and in contrast to previous occasions his artillery was weak and ineffective…we rejoiced in our glorious victory, and in addition saw our superiority over the terrible enemy’. Eugen of Württemberg wrote that at any time after the battle of Viazma a determined attack by the whole Russian army would have destroyed Napoleon’s force. But Kutuzov preferred to leave the job to the winter, which put in its first appearance three days after the battle.⁴⁴

Subsequently Napoleon himself and some of his admirers were much inclined to blame the unusually cold winter for the destruction of his army. This is mostly nonsense. Only in December, after most of the French army had already perished, did the winter become unusually and ferociously cold. October had been exceptionally warm, maybe lulling Napoleon into a false sense of security. As sometimes happens in Russia, winter then came suddenly. By 6 November Napoleon’s men were marching through heavy snow. All the Russian sources say, however, that November 1812 was cold but seldom exceptionally so for this time of year. The main ‘trick’ played on Napoleon in this month by the weather was in fact the milder spell in the second half of November, which thawed the ice on the river Berezina and thereby created a major obstacle to his retreat. The basic point, however, is that Russian Novembers are cold, especially for exhausted men who sleep in the open, without even a tent, with very inadequate clothing, and with little food.⁴⁵

Ivan Radozhitsky’s battery pursued the enemy down the Smolensk highway from Viazma to Dorogobuzh. He wrote that a mass of prisoners were taken and led away under Cossack escort but they still included very few officers. Dead and dying men littered the road in large numbers. For the Russian troops the sight of French soldiers eating often semi-raw horsemeat was deeply disgusting. Radozhitsky recalls one particularly awful scene of a French soldier frozen in death at the very moment he was trying to rip the liver out of a fallen horse. The Russian soldiers had no love for their enemy but even so pity often became the dominant feeling amidst such dreadful scenes. Things were not easy for the Russians themselves, however, let alone for their horses. Radozhitsky writes that there was no hay, his battery had exhausted its supply of oats and the exhausted animals were surviving on whatever scraps of straw could be scrounged. His soldiers did at least have fur jackets and felt boots, which had been distributed to his battery at the camp in Tarutino before the campaign began, but they had nothing to eat save biscuit and a very thin gruel. A growing number of sick and exhausted men dropped out of the ranks and by the time it turned off the highway and joined Kutuzov’s main body on 11 November very few infantry companies had more than eighty men. Nevertheless, buoyed by victory, their morale was excellent.⁴⁶

Napoleon himself arrived in Smolensk on 9 November and left five days later. For the soldiers retreating down the highway the city offered the hope of warmth, food and security. In different circumstances it might have been just that. Its stores contained plentiful food and until recently the fresh corps of Marshal Victor, 30,000 strong, had been located in Smolensk. The advance of Peter Wittgenstein had forced Victor to march to the support of Saint-Cyr and Oudinot, however, leaving the city with a feeble garrison, far too weak to protect the food-stores or impose order on the arriving horde of desperate soldiers from Moscow. Even the day before the main body of the Grande Armée arrived a senior commissariat officer in Smolensk was predicting disaster. Marauders were already trying to storm the magazines and he had almost no troops to stop them. Subsequently he wrote that the ‘regiments’ entering the city looked like convicts or lunatics and had lost all traces of discipline. The Guards took far more than their share, whereas those corps which arrived last received a pittance. Amidst the chaos, food which could have lasted a week was devoured in a day. Stores of food and spirits were stormed and looted, with his own men overwhelmed and often deserting in droves.⁴⁷ Napoleon’s advance guard left Smolensk on 12 November and began the retreat westwards. His army’s immediate goal was to cross the river Dnieper at Orsha.

The emperor’s lack of cavalry made reconnaissance impossible and meant that he did not know Kutuzov’s whereabouts. In fact Napoleon’s delay in Smolensk, however essential, had enabled the main Russian enemy to catch up and move around the city to the south. By 12 November it was within Kutuzov’s power to place his whole army across the road to Orsha and force Napoleon to fight his way back to the Dnieper. Most Russian generals longed for Kutuzov to do this. They included Karl von Toll, who later said that if Kutuzov had acted in this way the great majority of the enemy army would have been destroyed, though no doubt Napoleon himself and a picked escort would have sneaked away.⁴⁸

Kutuzov, however, remained true to his system of offering Napoleon a ‘golden bridge’. He refused to commit the bulk of his army to battle, and certainly not until he was sure that Napoleon and his Guards were safely out of the way. The last thing he wanted was to wreck the core of the Russian army in the life-and-death struggle that the French Guards would undoubtedly wage to save their emperor and themselves. Kutuzov’s caution inevitably affected his subordinates. Vladimir Löwenstern recalls how Baron Korff, the commander of much of the main army’s cavalry, cited Kutuzov’s words about a ‘golden bridge’ as a reason not to allow his corps to become too closely engaged with the French. Miloradovich was more direct. His subordinate, Eugen of Württemberg, was furious at being ordered to let the enemy pass, as he had also been told to do once before at Viazma. Miloradovich responded that ‘the field-marshal has forbidden us to get involved in a battle’. He added: ‘The old man’s view is this: if we incite the enemy to desperation, that will cost us useless blood: but if we let him run and give him a decent escort he will destroy himself in the course of a few days. You know: people cannot live on air, snow doesn’t make a very homely bivouac and without horses he cannot move his food, munitions or guns.’⁴⁹

Kutuzov’s strategy is the key to understanding what happened in the so-called battle at Krasnyi between 15 and 18 November. In reality this was less a battle than an uncoordinated succession of clashes as Napoleon’s corps passed one after the other around the Russians on the same ground where Neverovsky’s detachment had held off Murat three months before. Napoleon sent his corps out of Smolensk at one-day intervals, which could have had serious consequences if Kutuzov had made a serious effort to intercept the retreat. Instead the Russian commander-in-chief watched happily as the French Guards and the remnants of the Polish and Westphalian corps brushed past him down the road from Smolensk to Orsha. By the evening of 15 November they had reached the village of Krasnyi. They were followed by the corps of Beauharnais and Davout: any thought Kutuzov might have had of intervening to block their retreat ended when Napoleon threatened to move back with part of his Guard to their rescue. Eugène and Davout therefore both escaped though only after losing hordes of men and almost all their remaining baggage and guns as they struggled down the highroad and cross country under fire from Miloradovich’s infantry and guns, and harassed by his cavalry. Most of the senior officers and staffs survived but as fighting units the corps of Eugène and Davout no longer existed after Krasnyi.

There remained only Michel Ney’s rearguard, which Napoleon was forced to abandon to its fate. Ney evacuated Smolensk on 17 November with roughly 15,000 men, of whom almost half were still in the ranks and ready for battle. By now Miloradovich’s corps was deployed across the road westward. After a number of desperate efforts to break through the Russian lines on 18 November failed, Ney’s corps disintegrated, with the overwhelming majority of its men killed or captured. Thanks to Ney’s courageous and inspiring leadership a hard core of 800 men evaded the Russians by taking to the woods, crossing the river Dnieper and rejoining Napoleon at Orsha on 20 November.⁵⁰

Once Napoleon’s army had passed Kutuzov and crossed the river Dnieper at Orsha the Russian main army ceased to play an active fighting role in the 1812 campaign. Even had Kutuzov wished to catch up with Napoleon, there was no way that he could match the speed of the French retreat without wrecking his army. The old field-marshal was very happy with this situation. He regarded the ‘battle’ of Krasnyi as a triumph and as a vindication of his strategy. Well over 20,000 prisoners and 200 guns had fallen into Russian hands, and a further 10,000 enemy troops had been killed, at a minimal cost in his own soldiers’ lives. Captain Pushchin of the Semenovskys recalled that when Kutuzov visited the regiment to tell them the results of the battle ‘his face shone with happiness’. Pushchin added that after hearing Kutuzov’s account of guns, flags and prisoners taken, ‘the universal joy was immeasurable and we even cried a bit from happiness. A huge cheer thundered out which moved our old general.’⁵¹

Many Russian commanders on the other hand were deeply dissatisfied with the results of the battle, among them Prince Eugen of Württemberg.

He recalled that he met Kutuzov for the first time since the camp at Tarutino in a little village between Krasnyi and Orsha. The commander-in-chief knew of Eugen’s unhappiness and tried to justify his strategy, saying: ‘You don’t realize that circumstances will in and of themselves achieve more than our troops. And we ourselves must not arrive on our borders as emaciated tramps.’⁵²

Kutuzov’s concern for his troops was well justified. Although in the first half of the campaign the main body suffered less than Miloradovich’s advance guard, by mid-November it too was under great strain. Forced to move themselves, their baggage and artillery down country roads in deep snow, the men were becoming exhausted. Many of them did not have adequate winter clothing, since some provinces’ wagons with fur coats and felt boots only arrived when the army reached Vilna. Food supplies were facing an emergency, with mobile magazines well in the rear and requisitioning becoming more and more difficult as they advanced through Smolensk province. Their next destination, Belorussia, fought over and plundered for six months, was unlikely to prove easier in this respect. Worst of all were medical services, which had almost collapsed under the strain of constant movement and enormous numbers of sick and wounded. The army’s medical officials and doctors were scattered along the army’s line of march, attempting desperately to set up temporary hospitals and procure medicines in a desert where no civilian authorities existed to help them and most buildings suitable as hospitals had been ruined.⁵³

It may well be, however, that when Kutuzov spoke to Eugen he was thinking of more than just his army’s immediate material needs. He did not believe that Russian interests could simply be reduced to the defeat of the French Empire. Britain and Austria were at least as ‘natural’ rivals as France. Moreover, even if the Russians captured Napoleon himself, which was possible though unlikely, this was no guarantee of peace and stability in Europe. It took no foresight to realize that if French dominion collapsed, the other European states would be in sharp competition to inherit the spoils. Nor was it easy to predict what kind of regime might replace Napoleon in France. From French prisoners Kutuzov had heard of the attempted coup by General Malet, aimed at replacing the Bonapartes by a republic. If the 1790s were anything to go by, a French republic might be anything but pacific or stable. In a very uncertain world, the one clear point was that the defence of Russian interests rested with its army, for whose survival Kutuzov was responsible.⁵⁴

By early November another factor was also becoming important for Kutuzov. He had always known that, in accordance with Alexander’s plan, Admiral Chichagov’s army was supposed to be heading for Minsk and the river Berezina to block Napoleon’s retreat. An old soldier like Kutuzov also knew, however, that grandiose plans which looked brilliant on paper had a way of going wrong when faced with war’s reality. This was what Clausewitz meant when in his great work on war he wrote of ‘friction’, and never was there more of it than in the winter of 1812. Throughout October and in the first days of November Kutuzov had no clear idea of Chichagov’s movements but was frustrated by their seeming slowness. On the very day that Napoleon left Smolensk, however, the commander-in-chief received a letter from Chichagov written in Pruzhany twelve days before. This letter detailed how successful Chichagov’s recent advance had been and stated that the admiral expected to be in Minsk by 19 November. One key point about Minsk was that it was Napoleon’s main food magazine in Belorussia. Another was that it was only 75 kilometres from Borisov and the vital bridge over which Napoleon’s army would try to cross the river Berezina.⁵⁵

Kutuzov responded that ‘I received your report of 20 October [1 November NS] with immense satisfaction. From it I see that you hope to be in Minsk around 7 November [19 November NS]. This advance by you will have decisive consequences in present circumstances.’ Kutuzov wrote to Wittgenstein that by 19 November Chichagov should be only 75 kilometres from the Berezina with 45,000 troops. Subsequently he wrote to Chichagov that even ‘if General Wittgenstein is pinned down by Victor and Saint-Cyr and won’t be able to help you to defeat the enemy, you should be strong enough together with the forces of Lieutenant-General Oertel and Major-General Lüders to destroy the fleeing enemy army, which has almost no artillery or cavalry, and is being pressed from behind by me’. To Aleksei Ermolov, whom Kutuzov appointed to command his advance guard, Kutuzov was – so it is reported – more blunt. ‘Look, brother Aleksei Petrovich, don’t get too carried away and take care of our Guards regiments. We have done our bit and now it’s Chichagov’s turn.’⁵⁶

At one level Kutuzov’s attitude is a perfect example of the selfishness and lack of collective loyalty which dogged the Russian high command. The commander-in-chief knew that Chichagov stood much higher in Alexander’s esteem than he did himself and he resented the fact that the admiral had been sent to replace him as commander-in-chief of the Army of the Danube. On the other hand, some allowance should be made for the exhaustion of both the old and by now distinctly decrepit Kutuzov and his army. Clausewitz comments that

we must consider the scale of operations. In November and December, in the ice and snow of Russia, after an arduous campaign, either by side roads little beaten, or on the main road utterly devastated, under great difficulties of subsistence…Let us reflect on the winter in all its inhospitality, on shattered powers, physical and moral, an army led from bivouac to bivouac, suffering from privation, decimated by sickness, its path strewn with dead, dying, and exhausted bodies, – [the reader] will comprehend with what difficulty each motion was accomplished, and how nothing but the strongest impulses could overcome the inertia of the mass.⁵⁷

None of this was of much consolation to Pavel Chichagov, onto whom Kutuzov had offloaded the emperor’s high expectations of destroying the French army and even capturing Napoleon. The admiral’s campaign had got off to a good start. Though he had needed to leave substantial garrisons behind to watch the Ottomans, the men who marched northwards with him were the veterans of many campaigns and were fine troops. On 19 September they joined Tormasov’s army on the river Styr.

Tormasov’s regiments contained fewer veterans than Chichagov’s but they had gained experience in 1812 while suffering far fewer casualties than the armies of Bagration and Barclay. There were no new recruits, let alone militia, in either army by September 1812. On 29 September Aleksandr Chernyshev arrived at their headquarters with orders for Chichagov to take over command of both armies and for Tormasov to join Kutuzov. He also brought Alexander’s plan, which required Chichagov to push the Austrian and Saxon corps westwards into the Duchy of Warsaw and himself then advance to Minsk and the river Berezina in order to block Napoleon’s retreat.

After uniting with Tormasov, Chichagov initially had 60,000 men available for the campaign, though if Alexander’s plan was properly executed he would be joined in Belorussia by General Oertel’s 15,000 troops, currently in Mozyr, and by 3,500 men under Major-General Lüders, who had fought the Ottomans in Serbia during the recent war. When Chichagov advanced in late September, the Austrian and Saxon corps retreated westwards into the Duchy of Warsaw. With his headquarters in Brest, Chichagov then spent two weeks gathering supplies for his advance towards Minsk and the Berezina. Since he would be marching 500 kilometres into a devastated war zone this made good sense, though his delay caused some grumbling. But the delay meant that Chichagov could only arrive on the Berezina just before Napoleon. He would have no time to get to know the unfamiliar terrain he was supposed to defend. It would not be possible to carry out Alexander’s instructions to fortify the key choke-points and defiles through which Napoleon’s army might pass.

In the last week of October Chichagov set off for Belorussia, leaving almost half his army – 27,000 men under Fabian von der Osten-Sacken – to hold off Schwarzenberg and Reynier. Since together the Austrians and Saxons numbered 38,000 men and were expecting reinforcements this was to ask a great deal of Sacken. In fact, however, the Russian general fulfilled his mission to perfection, though he complained – in this case correctly – that his army’s achievements were forgotten since he could not hope for brilliant victories against so superior an enemy and in any case all Russian eyes were turned on the fate of Napoleon and his army.

When Schwarzenberg set off in pursuit of Chichagov in accordance with Napoleon’s instructions, Sacken’s surprise attack on Reynier’s Saxons forced him to turn back to their rescue. Subsequently, Sacken succeeded in slipping away from Schwarzenberg’s attempts to catch him, and in pinning down the Austrian and Saxon corps for the rest of the campaign. Sacken preserved his own little army amidst a flurry of manoeuvres and rearguard actions, and it provided some of the best and freshest regiments for the 1813 campaign. Above all, by drawing both Schwarzenberg and Reynier well away from Minsk and the Berezina he made it possible for Chichagov to advance into central Belorussia and threaten the survival of Napoleon and his army.⁵⁸

Chichagov moved swiftly. His advance guard was commanded by yet another French émigré, Count Charles de Lambert, who had joined the Russian army in 1793. Lambert’s force comprised some 8,000 men, mostly cavalry, its four jaeger regiments being commanded by Prince Vasili Viazemsky, whose diary as we have seen breathed such distrust for the foreigners and parvenus who were wrecking Russia. The main uncertainty for the Russian commanders was the whereabouts of Marshal Victor’s corps. Vasili Viazemsky, one of nature’s pessimists, was convinced that the Russian advance could not succeed since the enemy had at least as many men in central Belorussia as Chichagov. In fact Napoleon had ordered Victor to send one of his divisions to reinforce the garrison of Minsk but by the time the order arrived Victor’s whole corps had already moved northwards to stop Wittgenstein. With Victor deflected northwards and the Austrians and Saxons far off to the west, the defence of the southern approaches to Belorussia was left to General Jan Dombrowski and no more than 6,000 combat-worthy soldiers.

Dombrowski could not have stopped Lambert but he might well have slowed him down. Instead he and his fellow Polish generals made a number of crucial mistakes. The force sent to guard the key crossing over the river Neman allowed itself to be surrounded and captured south of the river, leaving the bridge to fall intact into Lambert’s hands. So too did the immense stores of food and fodder in Minsk, which had been designed to sustain the Grande Armée for a month. From Minsk, Lambert raced for Borisov and the vital bridge over the river Berezina. In what was probably the outstanding achievement of Russian light infantry in 1812, Viazemsky’s four jaeger regiments covered the last 55 kilometres to Borisov in twenty-four hours, and then stormed the fortifications protecting the bridge at dawn on 21 November before the 5,500 enemy troops in the neighbourhood of Borisov could concentrate to defend the river crossing. At least half of Lambert’s 3,200 jaegers were killed or wounded, including Vasili Viazemsky. After the war a gallery was constructed in the Winter Palace in which were hung the portraits of all Russia’s generals in 1812–14. Viazemsky was one of the few names missing. No doubt he would have considered this the final trick played by the Petersburg courtiers in death as in life on a general from Chichagov’s ‘Forgotten Army’ who had no ‘protectors’.⁵⁹

Lambert’s capture of the bridge at Borisov was for the Russians the high point of the winter 1812 campaign. Hopes soared and Alexander’s dream of capturing Napoleon at the Berezina looked as if it might become reality. In a move he was later to regret, Chichagov issued the following proclamation to his troops:

Napoleon’s army is in flight. The person who is the cause of all Europe’s miseries is in its ranks. We are across his line of retreat. It may easily be that it will please the Almighty to end his punishment of the human race by delivering him to us. For that reason I want this man’s features to be known to everyone: he is small in height, stocky, pale, with a short and fat neck, a big head and black hair. To avoid any uncertainty, catch and deliver to me all undersized prisoners. I say nothing about rewards for this particular prisoner. The well-known generosity of our monarch guarantees them.⁶⁰

At just the moment that Russian hopes were at their highest, Chichagov’s prospects began to unravel. Kutuzov’s estimate was that the admiral could bring 45,000 troops to the Berezina, but this depended on Lieutenant-General Oertel, who commanded the garrison at Mozyr, obeying his orders to march his 15,000 men to Borisov. Oertel, however, was a tidy and meticulous administrator, much of whose career had been spent as head of first the Moscow and then the Petersburg police. Training the recruits who formed part of the Mozyr garrison and securing the neighbourhood against Polish insurgents was well within his competence but his imagination quailed at the thought of abandoning his local responsibilities and marching against Napoleon. Oertel found every possible excuse for delay, citing broken bridges, the dangers of local rebellion if he departed, the need to protect his magazines and even cattle plague. By the time Chichagov could replace him it was too late to get his troops to the Berezina. As the admiral reported to Alexander, this left him with just 32,000 men. Half of these soldiers were cavalry, who would be of little use in the defence of a river crossing or in fighting in the woods and swamps on the west bank of the Berezina.⁶¹

If Chichagov was to stop Napoleon, therefore, he would need help, and its likeliest source was Peter Wittgenstein. Before the autumn campaign Wittgenstein’s corps had been reinforced up to a strength of 40,000 men, though 9,000 of these were militia. Marching southwards to join Wittgenstein from Riga were also 10,000 regulars under Count Steinhel. Together on 16–18 October Wittgenstein and Steinhel defeated Marshal Saint-Cyr and recaptured the town of Polotsk and its bridge over the river Dvina. The victory owed much more to superior numbers and the courage of the Russian soldiers than to skilful leadership. Steinhel and Wittgenstein were advancing on opposite sides of the Dvina and coordination was poor. If Wittgenstein had possessed a pontoon train he could have crossed the Dvina beyond Saint-Cyr’s right flank and driven him off to the west, in other words away from Napoleon’s line of retreat. This was the goal set out in Alexander’s plan for the autumn campaign. Instead, however, the Russian commander was forced into a more pedestrian and costly direct assault on Polotsk.

Even so, victory at Polotsk brought important results. General Wrede, who commanded Saint-Cyr’s Bavarian troops, did retreat due west towards Lithuania and effectively removed his men from any further participation in the war, though Wittgenstein could never be quite sure that Wrede would not re-emerge at some point to endanger his right flank. In his report to Alexander on the battle, Wittgenstein claimed correctly that he had weakened the corps of both Oudinot and Saint-Cyr to such an extent that they were no longer capable of serious resistance unless reinforced. Marshal Victor had therefore been forced to abandon Smolensk and march his entire corps to their assistance at top speed. Wittgenstein had every reason to take pride in this achievement. Three French corps, each of them initially as strong as his own, had by now been drawn away from the crucial theatre of operation in central Belorussia thanks to his efforts.⁶²

Wittgenstein advanced south from Polotsk and defeated marshals Saint-Cyr and Victor at the battle of Chashniki on the river Ulla on 31 October. According to Saint-Cyr, the Russians owed their victory to their superior artillery and to Marshal Victor’s failure to concentrate much of his corps on the battlefield. As usual, in Napoleon’s absence his marshals fought each other and Oudinot’s return from convalescence did nothing to improve coordinated leadership in the small army facing Wittgenstein. An angry Napoleon then gave Victor categorical orders to attack Wittgenstein and drive him right back over the river Dvina and away from the Grande Armée’s line of retreat, to which he was becoming dangerously close. Victor attacked towards Smoliany further east on the Ulla on 13–14 November but failed to dislodge Wittgenstein’s men from their position, despite bitter fighting.⁶³

For the first three weeks of November 1812 Wittgenstein was content to hold the line of the river Ulla and beat off any French attacks. Prince Petr Shakhovskoy, the governor of Pskov, mobilized thousands of carts and formed six mobile magazines to provide supplies for Wittgenstein’s men. Thanks to him, the Russians were far better fed than their enemies. They were also much warmer, since Wittgenstein’s corps had been sent 30,000 fur jackets in September from the provinces in his rear. With every day they stood still, the relative strength of the two armies shifted in Wittgenstein’s favour. Though only one and a half day’s march from the main Orsha–Borisov highway, Wittgenstein made no attempt to advance any further across Napoleon’s lines of communication. His caution was justified. In the first half of November he had no information about either the position of the other Russian forces or the state of Napoleon’s army. Not only Wittgenstein but also the emperor and Kutuzov feared for the safety of his corps if it found itself under attack from both Napoleon and Victor, with neither Chichagov’s nor Kutuzov’s army in the neighbourhood to help. Only when Victor retreated on 22 November did Wittgenstein move forward in his wake. He would therefore be in a position to interfere with the French crossing of the Berezina, but unlike Chichagov he would not be directly in their path.⁶⁴

He would nevertheless be much closer than Kutuzov’s main army. After the ‘battle’ of Krasnyi Kutuzov’s main concern was to rest and feed his troops. For that reason he marched south-west from Krasnyi to the small town of Kopys, the next crossing over the river Dnieper south of Orsha. There he rested his main body and succeeded in requisitioning a significant amount of food from the neighbouring districts to his south. He also parked many of his batteries, since it was obviously no longer necessary to drag along all these guns. Kutuzov did send forward an advance guard of two infantry and one cavalry corps under Miloradovich but unless Chichagov could block Napoleon on the Berezina for four days or more there was no chance of Miloradovich’s men arriving in time to dispute the crossing. As they struggled across the Dnieper and into Belorussia Miloradovich’s troops suffered badly. The historian of the 5th Jaeger Regiment wrote that ‘from Kopys on we found no civilians anywhere: the villages were empty, there weren’t even the proverbial cats or dogs. The barns and stores were also empty: there was no grain, no groats and not even a scrap of straw.’⁶⁵

Ahead of Miloradovich were Platov’s Cossacks and Aleksei Ermolov’s so-called ‘flying column’, made up of two cuirassier and three infantry regiments of the line, some Cossacks, and the two light infantry regiments of the Guards, in other words the Guards Jaegers and the Finland Guards. The flying column set off for Orsha on 19 November but was delayed for a day and a half because Napoleon had burned the bridge over the Dnieper. Ermolov’s Cossacks swam the river but his heavy cavalry horses had to be tied down on rafts to make the crossing. Only the exhaustion of the regular light cavalry could explain using Russian cuirassiers in such a role. All the baggage had to be left behind on the east bank of the Dnieper. Kutuzov ordered Ermolov not to exhaust his men and to wait for Miloradovich at Tolochin before pressing on in pursuit of Napoleon. But Ermolov knew that speed was of the essence if Napoleon was to be stopped on the Berezina, and he ignored both orders.⁶⁶

By dint of heroic efforts Ermolov arrived at Borisov on 27 November, the very day that Napoleon and his Guards had crossed the Berezina 18 kilometres to the north near the village of Studenka. The Russian troops paid a high price for this speed. The Cossacks could usually forage off the road and turn up something to eat and the artillery carried some emergency rations in their caissons but life for the infantry was very hard. The Guards Jaegers had slept with a roof over their heads for one night in the last month. In their week-long march from the Dnieper to the Berezina they only twice received any biscuit. At every bivouac the men rootled for potatoes. Even they were hard to find and amidst the rush and exhaustion were often eaten raw.⁶⁷

As for the Finland Guards, they did still have a little groats in their knapsacks but their kettles were with the regimental baggage and raw groats were inedible. The men survived by cutting the bark off the trees and turning it into impromptu cooking vessels. After stuffing the groats into the bark and heating this concoction up over a spluttering fire coaxed from damp wood, the Guardsmen wolfed down the whole ‘meal’, bark and all. Their reward for all these efforts was to arrive at the Berezina one day too late. The next morning the two Guards regiments crossed the river and were deployed in reserve behind Chichagov’s army, which was fighting Napoleon in the forests near the village of Brili. They spent the next two days up to their knees in snow and with no food at all. Not surprisingly, men fell ill in droves. Nevertheless the troops’ morale remained high. These Guardsmen were fine soldiers. Their spirits were buoyed by the fact that they were advancing and were clearly winning the war. Ermolov himself was an inspiring leader on the battlefield, just the man to get the last ounce of effort from Russian soldiers in an emergency.⁶⁸

When he first arrived near Borisov on 22 November Chichagov had moved his headquarters and all his baggage across the river and into the town, which was on the east bank of the Berezina. Count Lambert had been wounded in the capture of the bridge, so Chichagov appointed Count Paul von der Pahlen to replace him. The next day Pahlen was sent forward down the main road. With Napoleon’s main body now linking up with Oudinot and Victor, and heading for Borisov, this was a dangerous move. Neither Chichagov nor Pahlen showed proper caution. Pahlen’s men were overwhelmed by Napoleon’s advance guard and fled back into Borisov. Chichagov and his staff decamped at speed back over the Berezina, leaving much of the army’s baggage behind. Subsequently this debacle was used by Chichagov’s enemies as a stick to beat him, but it was not actually very significant. Though much of Pahlen’s advance guard was cut off, almost all of it succeeded in making its way back across the Berezina by finding fords. Four days later Borisov and most of Chichagov’s baggage was recaptured by Wittgenstein. Above all, the Russians succeeded in burning the crucial bridge at Borisov so the river was still an obstacle for Napoleon.

Back on the west bank of the Berezina, Chichagov faced a difficult dilemma. It was impossible to coordinate operations even with Wittgenstein on the other side of the river, let alone with Kutuzov, who was still far away near the Dnieper. The defence of the Berezina line therefore rested in the admiral’s hands alone. Chichagov had, at most, 32,000 men, of whom only half were infantry. If he could be sure that Napoleon was heading north-west for Vilna, all Chichagov needed to cover was the 20 kilometres between Borisov and the ford at Veselovo, opposite the village of Zembin. The problem was that Napoleon might cross the river south of Borisov and head westwards for Minsk, or even march via Igumen for Bobruisk, well to the south. These possibilities hugely extended the river front which Chichagov had to cover, up to 100 kilometres or more. Napoleon pretended to be making preparations to head for Minsk by building a bridge at Ukholoda, 12 kilometres south of Borisov. In fact, however, he crossed at Studenka, 18 kilometres north of Borisov, and headed for Vilna.⁶⁹

As often happens in war, amidst all the strains and the conflicting intelligence Chichagov believed the evidence that best fitted his own assumptions and fears. The admiral’s greatest worry was that Napoleon was heading for Minsk to recapture the huge store there on which Chichagov’s own army now depended. At Minsk he could link up with Schwarzenberg, whom Chichagov believed to be advancing towards the Berezina into the rear of the Russian forces. To do Chichagov justice, most of the other senior Russian commanders believed both that Napoleon would head for Minsk or Bobruisk, and that this would be the most dangerous move from the Russian perspective. On 22 November, for instance, Kutuzov had written to Chichagov warning him that if Napoleon could not cross the Berezina he might well head south. Clausewitz, now at Wittgenstein’s headquarters, recalls that ‘every man was possessed with the idea, that the enemy would take the direction of Bobruisk’.⁷⁰

Perhaps the most striking evidence comes from Ermolov’s memoirs. When he finally reached Chichagov’s headquarters on 29 November, the admiral was still trying to send Platov’s Cossacks around Napoleon’s flank and into his rear in order to destroy the bridges and causeways that crossed the swamps at Zembin and opened the way to Vilna. Ermolov responded that this was unwise: ‘If Napoleon found it impossible to pass through Zembin, his only possibility was to seize the road to Minsk, where he would find abundant stores of every kind (which supplied our own army and other forces) and be able to rest his army, having drawn reinforcements from Lithuania and restored order there.’ If the highly intelligent Ermolov, who had been an eyewitness to the disintegration of Napoleon’s army for the last month, thought this way, then it is hardly surprising that Wittgenstein and Chichagov did so too.⁷¹

Hoodwinked by Napoleon, Chichagov took most of his army southwards on 25 November to Shabashevichi to cover the road to Minsk. He left Count Langeron with one weak infantry division in Borisov, but ordered Major-General Chaplitz to abandon his position opposite Studenka and bring his detachment to join Langeron. By the time he received these orders Chaplitz’s scouts had already provided him with clear indications that Napoleon was preparing bridges for a crossing at Studenka. Nevertheless in the face of categorical orders from both Chichagov and Langeron he marched south, to the joy of French observers on the opposite side of the river. He also failed to destroy the bridges and causeways through the swamps near Zembin. The narrow defile at Zembin was in fact the best defensive position available to any Russian force which was trying to stop Napoleon breaking out to Vilna. If the bridges and causeways had been destroyed, a single division at Zembin might have held up the whole French army. Even if Chaplitz had destroyed the causeway and bridges and then departed, rebuilding them would have delayed Napoleon’s escape for at least a day.⁷²

On the morning of 26 November French cavalry swam across the Berezina at Studenka and 400 light infantry crossed on rafts. The building of the two bridges began. On the opposite shore Napoleon was faced by a puny force of two jaeger regiments, a smattering of cavalry and one horse artillery battery positioned near the village of Brili. The battery’s commander was Captain Ivan Arnoldi, one of the best young artillery officers in the Russian army, who already had a fine war record in 1806– 7 and was to retire as a full general. In his memoirs Arnoldi states that even if the Russian forces opposite Studenka had been much stronger, they still could not have stopped Napoleon crossing the river. The east bank was higher than the west and it was possible to deploy all Napoleon’s batteries in a commanding position. The west bank, on the contrary, was low-lying, very swampy and forested: it was impossible to deploy more than a very few guns there within range of the river and the bridges.⁷³

On the other hand, if thousands of Russian infantry had been present they might have been able to keep Napoleon pinned in the bridgehead and away from the road from Borisov to Zembin, and they certainly could have blocked the defile at Zembin. The tiny Russian force present on 26 November had no chance of doing either of these things. Commanded by Marshal Oudinot, the French forced their way out of the bridgehead and then turned south down the road towards the village of Stakhovo. By the time Chaplitz had returned with his whole detachment he was outnumbered. Chichagov and the core of his army did not reach the area until the evening of 27 November and only went into action the next day. By then, however, all but Napoleon’s rearguard had already crossed the Berezina. Though there was fierce fighting near Stakhovo from 26 to 28 November there was never any likelihood that the Russian forces would break through the enemy line and regain control of the road to Zembin. Napoleon had more infantry than the Russians on the west bank, the terrain favoured the defensive and his troops fought with the desperate courage that their perilous situation required.⁷⁴

Meanwhile there was also fierce fighting on the east bank of the Berezina as Peter Wittgenstein’s corps came into action against Marshal Victor’s rearguard. Wittgenstein showed little initiative during these crucial days, though his troops were much less exhausted than Kutuzov’s men. It was hard to recognize the daring general of the summer months. Perhaps Wittgenstein was unenthusiastic about coming under Chichagov’s command, or was made cautious by the fact that Napoleon was present in person. He followed Victor down the road to Borisov, claiming – perhaps correctly – that the country paths leading directly into Napoleon’s rear at Studenka were impassable. Having reached Borisov on 27 November, Wittgenstein did then turn to the north towards Studenka to interrupt Napoleon’s crossing of the Berezina. More by luck than good design, this move cut off General Partouneaux, whose division was forced to surrender. Seven thousand men went into captivity, though of these half were by now stragglers rather than fighting soldiers. During the whole of 28 November Wittgenstein fought the rest of Victor’s corps which was forming a rearguard around the bridgehead at Studenka, but he got only 14,000 of his men into action. Though the Russian artillery did dreadful damage to the hordes of people trying to cross the river, the Russians could not break through the outnumbered but courageous enemy rearguard, which held them at bay all day and then made its escape safely over the bridges.⁷⁵

They left behind a vision of desolation. Ermolov recalled the scene on the east bank of the Berezina after the end of the battle:

Near the bridges, which were partially destroyed, guns and transport wagons had fallen into the river. Crowds of people, including many women, children and infants, had moved down to the ice-covered river. Nobody could escape from the terrible frost. No one could ever witness a more terrible sight. The people who ended their miseries there and then by dying were the lucky ones. Those who remained alive envied them. Much less fortunate, they had preserved their lives only subsequently to die of the cruel cold, amidst terrible suffering…The river was covered with ice which was as transparent as glass: there were many dead bodies visible beneath it across the whole width of the river. The enemy had abandoned huge numbers of guns and wagons. The treasures of ransacked Moscow had also not succeeded in getting across the river.⁷⁶

At one level the crossing of the Berezina was a disaster for Napoleon. He had lost somewhere between 25,000 and 40,000 men, and almost all his artillery and baggage. Even his Old Guard was now down to 2,000 men. His last viable corps, commanded by marshals Victor and Oudinot, were now barely capable of further action. Had Napoleon held the bridge at Borisov or had the Berezina been firmly frozen the great majority of these casualties would have been avoided.

Nevertheless he had every reason for satisfaction on 29 November. Outnumbered, surrounded and faced with the threat of total destruction, he had escaped. Above all, this was thanks to the splendid courage of his remaining troops and the resolution of their commanders. It is also true that even at the Berezina Napoleon possessed some advantages. His forces were concentrated, they were in the middle of the Russians and they were directed by a single will. Nature as well as human failures made coordination between the Russian armies difficult. When one looks at the perceptions and actions of the individual Russian commanders, it is almost always possible to see some logic to their behaviour and to sympathize with their dilemmas. Nevertheless, taken as a whole, the miscalculations, lack of resolution and the selfishness of the Russian senior generals had allowed more of Napoleon’s army to escape than should have been the case.

For many Russians, and above all for Alexander, the chief cause of discontent was that Napoleon himself had escaped. This feeling, though natural, was misplaced. It was always in Napoleon’s power to ride up the east bank of the Berezina and then cut across country towards Vilna. At Studenka he still had more than sufficient well-horsed cavalry to provide him with a strong escort. On his route to Vilna he would have had to be very unlucky to encounter a Cossack detachment sufficiently large and determined to challenge such an escort.

Much less probable and more annoying was the escape of many thousands of Napoleon’s troops. At first blush this might not seem a serious matter. More than half the men who escaped over the Berezina died or were taken prisoner amidst the fearful cold of the next three weeks. Fewer than 20,000 men survived to serve again in Napoleon’s armies. But 2,500 officers just from the Guards and the corps of Davout, Ney and Eugène escaped back over the Russian frontier. They included most of the senior commanders and many of their staff officers. Had they been captured at the Berezina it would have been very difficult for Napoleon to rebuild a new Grande Armée in time to defend Germany in the spring of 1813. The huge Russian sacrifices of the next year’s campaign might thereby have been avoided. Moreover, had Napoleon’s army been captured at the Berezina, the Russians could have gone into winter quarters, without the heavy losses incurred in the pursuit of the enemy across Lithuania in December 1812.⁷⁷

After the drama on the Berezina, the last weeks of the 1812 campaign are an anticlimax, though this is a poor word to describe seventeen days of immense suffering. Everything that French apologists say about the weather in December 1812 is true. Even by the standards of a Russian December, it was exceptionally cold. This caused the final disintegration of most French units. On 5 December Napoleon himself left the army and headed for Paris, leaving Murat in charge. By then nothing and no one could have rallied the French army east of the Russian border and Napoleon was right to depart. On 11 December Vilna fell to the Russians. Three days later Matvei Platov’s Cossacks captured Kovno, Michel Ney led his indomitable rearguard back across the river Neman and the 1812 campaign was over.

During these weeks the Russian army also suffered grievously. On 19 December Kutuzov reported to Alexander that the army’s losses had been so enormous that he was obliged to hide them not just from the enemy but even from his own officers. Of the 97,000 men whom Kutuzov had commanded at Tarutino before the beginning of the campaign, 48,000 – in other words almost half – were in hospital. Only 42,000 soldiers were still in the ranks. The position of Chichagov and Wittgenstein’s armies was better but not good. The admiral had 17,000 men in the ranks, plus 7,000 more who had finally arrived from Oertel’s corps. Peter Wittgenstein still commanded 35,000 men, which reflected the fact that his men had been better fed and clothed than the rest of the army and had also marched less far. But most Russian regiments by now were hungry and exhausted, with their uniforms in tatters and dressed in any clothes they could find to keep out the cold. One young staff officer described himself as wearing a soldier’s overcoat, with sleeves badly charred by bivouac fires, boots whose soles were coming off, headgear which combined a soldier’s forage cap and a woollen civilian hood, and a tunic with no buttons but held together by a French sword-belt.⁷⁸

As they advanced into freezing, barren and devastated Lithuania cold and hunger hit Kutuzov’s troops hard. So too did another enemy: typhus. The disease was rampant among the prisoners of war whom the Russians were capturing in droves and it spread quickly. ‘Its distinguishing features were: exhaustion, loss of appetite, nausea, total weakening of the muscular system, dry heat of the skin and an unbearable thirst.’ Against the disease the regimental doctors used quinine, camphor and emetics so long as their medicines lasted. As the intendant-general, Georg Kankrin, subsequently admitted, however, of all the backup services provided by the Russian commissariat medical help was the weakest. That owed something to the new and confused administration of hospitals, and more to the shortage of trained doctors and hospital administrators. So long as the army was operating in the Great Russian provinces it could hand over care of its sick and wounded to the governors, but once it moved into Belorussian and Lithuanian districts formerly occupied by Napoleon no civilian institutions existed. Many Russian doctors and officials themselves fell ill. The rest were scattered along the army’s line of advance, desperately trying to establish hospitals in a wilderness.⁷⁹

Kankrin wrote that his officials,

themselves barely alive, were forced almost every other day to establish hospitals in ruined areas, in the midst of extreme cold and deprived of almost any help. There was a complete shortage of experienced officials. We took anyone who fell into our hands, grateful for being able to find any officials for this job. The man chosen was given the regulations, some money, open orders to the local administration requiring them to assist him, and a small staff. This was all the help one got in setting up a hospital, together whenever possible with some biscuit and groats, a few beef-cattle and some spirits.

Nevertheless, wrote Kankrin, the majority of the men in hospital did recover and rejoin the army, ‘which on the one hand shows the toughness of Russian soldiers but also shows that they were given some care’.⁸⁰

On 13 December Kutuzov reported to Alexander that unless his army got a rest it might disappear entirely and have to be rebuilt from scratch. Any commander would dread such a possibility, but a Russian general had more reason than most to protect the professional and veteran cadre around which the army was built. Men with the education and willingness to serve as officers were not that plentiful. Highly skilled cadres who could serve in the engineers, artillery or staffs were much rarer still. Above all, the emperor’s army was not the nation in arms. Its strength lay in the great loyalty of its veterans to their comrades and regiments. Destroy these men and these loyalties, and the army would become worse than a mere militia. The inner force which made this army so formidable and resilient would be undermined. In the winter of 1812 this came too close to happening for Kutuzov’s comfort. In fact the army’s core survived, large numbers of veterans subsequently returned from hospital, and around this cadre a fine new army was rebuilt in 1813. But it was not really until the summer of 1813 that it recovered from the awful strains of the 1812 campaign and regained its full potential.⁸¹