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Another who was far from happy was Barclay. He wrote to Alexander, saying that he was prepared to serve under the new commander, but begging to be relieved of the post of Minister of War, as this would place him in an anomalous and difficult situation. Within a few days of Kutuzov’s arrival at headquarters he wrote again, this time asking to be relieved of command altogether, without success.
⁸

Kutuzov’s arrival in the Russian camp at Tsarevo-Zaimishche was greeted with an explosion of joy in the ranks. ‘The day was cloudy, but our hearts filled with light,’ noted A.A. Shcherbinin. ‘Everyone who could rushed to meet the venerable commander, looking to him for the salvation of Russia,’ according to Radozhitsky. Kutuzov was idolised by junior officers, on whom he lavished a garrulous charm and an avuncular concern. The rank and file trusted the old man, whom they called their ‘
batiushka
’, their little father. They perked up instantly, carrying out even the most humdrum tasks at the double, as though they were about to go into action, and that evening there was singing around the campfires for the first time in weeks. Old soldiers reminisced about Kutuzov’s feats in the Turkish wars, and assured their younger comrades that henceforth everything would be different.
⁹

Their confidence was not shared by many of the senior officers, who had serious reservations about Kutuzov’s competence and his fitness for the task in hand at his advanced age of sixty-five. This certainly aggravated a natural laziness. ‘For Kutuzov to write ten words was more difficult than for another to cover a hundred pages in writing,’ recorded his duty officer Captain Maievsky. ‘A pronounced gout, age and lack of habit were all enemies of his pen.’ Bagration actually wrote to Rostopchin that replacing Barclay with Kutuzov was like exchanging the frying pan for the fire, or, as he put it, ‘a deacon for a priest’, and referred to the new commander-in-chief as a ‘goose’. But the situation had got so bad that any change was welcome. ‘Many Russians who did not attribute treachery to foreigners, yet believed
that the household gods of their country might be indignant at their employment, and that it was therefore unlucky,’ wrote Clausewitz, adding that ‘the evil genius of the foreigners was exorcised by a true Russian’.
¹⁰

Kutuzov’s distinguishing characteristic was slyness. He had built up an extraordinary reputation, and had managed to convince many that his quirks and eccentricities were marks of genius. One of these quirks was a total disregard for form. He dressed sloppily, preferring a voluminous green frock-coat and round white cap to the uniform of his rank. He addressed generals and subalterns by familiar nicknames, and occasionally struck a populist note by lapsing into foul language. But he always wore all his decorations, and was prone to displays of arrogance. And while writers and film-makers have relentlessly portrayed him as some kind of son of the Russian soil, he was cultivated and refined in his tastes, and gave all his orders in impeccable French.

Unfortunately, his disregard for form extended to the way he gave these. He disdained the proper channels, issuing orders through whoever came to hand. He was secretive and mistrustful, and avoided writing them down if possible. He was not beyond instructing a given unit to carry out some operation without informing the commander of the division or corps of which it formed part, so that generals not infrequently found a section of their command moving off in a different direction as they prepared to go into action. He had an unfortunate habit of assenting to some suggestion without considering its implications for other measures he had taken. He changed his mind often, and did not always inform all the relevant people of the change of plan.

Some of this may have been the result of senility – Clausewitz certainly thought so. But some of the confusion was the result of Bennigsen’s tendency to overstep his prerogatives and of Kutuzov’s entourage, which included his impetuous son-in-law Prince Nikolai Kudashev and the busybody Colonel Kaisarov, who, in Barclay’s words, ‘thought that, being both confidant and pimp, he had no less
right to command the army’. All three issued orders in Kutuzov’s name, sometimes failing to notify him.
¹¹

‘In the army, people were attempting to work out who was the person who was really in command,’ wrote Barclay. ‘For it was evident to all that Prince Kutuzov was only the cypher under which all his associates acted. This state of affairs gave birth to parties, and parties to intrigues.’
¹²
This was particularly galling to Barclay, who had put so much work into laying down correct procedure. But he continued to serve as commander of the First Army, although he found the situation intolerable.

‘The spirit of the army is magnificent, there are plenty of good generals, and I am full of hope,’ Kutuzov wrote to his wife just after his arrival in camp. But to Alexander he wrote that he had found the army disorganised and tired, and complained about the large numbers of deserters. He liked the position Barclay had chosen at Tsarevo-Zaimishche and his first intention was to give battle there. ‘My present objective is to save Moscow itself,’ he wrote to Chichagov.
¹³

But after assessing the state of his army he felt he could not face Napoleon, whose strength he gauged at 165,000. There were 17,000 reinforcements on their way under General Miloradovich, and Kutuzov decided to fall back and incorporate these into his army, hoping to find a good position to give battle somewhere near Mozhaisk. ‘If the Most High blesses our arms with success, then it will be necessary to pursue the enemy,’ he wrote to Rostopchin, asking him to send supplies and to prepare hundreds of wagons to take away the wounded. He also asked Rostopchin to send him the death-wreaking aerostat he had heard about.
¹⁴

Barclay suggested a position outside Gzhatsk, but Bennigsen did not like it, and Kutuzov decided to gain more time for reinforcements to be brought up by falling back further. He sent Toll ahead to find another position. He wanted a strong defensive one, as he knew that the Russian soldier was at his most firm when given a rampart or a ditch to defend, and because he believed himself to be seriously outnumbered by Napoleon.

On 3 September Kutuzov rode out to inspect the positions Toll had selected near the village of Borodino. They met with his approval, and soon militiamen were clearing woods, digging earthworks and dismantling entire villages which impeded the field of fire. That evening he established his headquarters at Tatarinovo, some two kilometres east of Borodino, and stayed up late into the night writing. His exhausted men had been arriving all day long, and as they reached their prescribed positions they stacked their muskets in the regulation pyramids and fell asleep.

Kutuzov spent much of the following day supervising the preparations. His positions lay along a ridge which ran at an angle to the main road, behind a small tributary of the Moskva river, the Kolocha. In the north, his right wing was anchored in the angle made by the Moskva and the Kolocha, and ran along the high ground behind the Kolocha. He fortified this high ground with four batteries protected by earthworks, and ordered the construction of two redans astride the old Moscow road, in which he positioned twelve heavy guns. The centre of the line was also atop high ground behind the Kolocha, and it was dominated by a hillock which commanded a good field of fire. Kutuzov fortified this with a strong earthwork which was to go down in history as the Raevsky redoubt, about two hundred metres long with embrasures for eighteen cannon. Further along the line, the high ground was cut by the course of a stream, the Semeonovka, and fell away, leaving an expanse of flat ground between the centre and the right wing, which ended on a knoll by the village of Shevardino. Kutuzov closed this gap by constructing three V-shaped redans, or
flèches
, and had a pentagonal redoubt built on the Shevardino knoll. As the slight depression formed by the bed of the Kamionka stream did not permit the
flèches
to be built further forward, the Russian positions actually curved backwards at this point, leaving the Shevardino redoubt hanging in a rather exposed position. As a result, nobody was quite sure whether this redoubt was really the tip of the left wing or just an outpost. According to Toll, Kutuzov did not mean it to be part of the line, but only an outpost from which he
could ‘observe the enemy’s strength and dispositions’, but he did not bother to inform anyone of this, except for Toll. ‘Kutuzov kept his real intentions on the left wing secret from General Bennigsen,’ according to Toll.
¹⁵

The lack of clarity probably stemmed from the fact that Kutuzov’s dispositions had to remain fluid. He had taken up a diagonal position athwart the new Smolensk road, which presupposed that the main French thrust would be delivered along that road. ‘I hope that the enemy will attack us in this position, and if he does I have great hopes of victory,’ he wrote to Alexander that evening. ‘But if, finding my position too strong, he starts manoeuvring along other roads leading
towards Moscow, I cannot vouch for what might happen.’ The other road which particularly worried him was the old Smolensk road, running past the southern tip of his positions. If Napoleon turned this, he would be forced to fall back on Mozhaisk, ‘but whatever happens, it is essential that Moscow be defended’, he added.
¹⁶

Early on the morning of 5 September, Murat’s advance guard reached the little monastery at Kolotskoie, from where he could see the Russian army preparing for battle. He immediately notified Napoleon, who appeared at midday. He marched into the monks’ refectory and wished them ‘
Bon appétit!
’ in bad Polish, then rode out to look at the positions the Russian army had taken up.

He could see that to the north of the new Smolensk road they had occupied high ground whose approaches were made difficult by the river running in front of them, while to the south of the road the flatter ground provided an easier approach. As his own right wing, consisting of Poniatowski’s 5th Corps, was anyway advancing along the old Smolensk road, Napoleon was naturally drawn to aim his principal thrust in this area. Approached from this angle, the tip of the Russian position, the Shevardino redoubt, was a salient that impeded the deployment of his troops. He therefore ordered Davout to liquidate it as a preliminary.

At five o’clock in the afternoon, General Compans’ division duly attacked the redoubt, which was held by Neverovsky’s 27th, and took it. But a spirited Russian counterattack, supported by two fresh divisions, threw the French out. The fighting spilled over to the area around the redoubt, which passed from one side to another several times before, at about eleven o’clock that night, the Russians finally gave up trying to recapture it, and fell back, having lost some five thousand men and five guns. But they took with them eight French guns. This allowed Kutuzov to write to Alexander, announcing a first victory over the French.
¹⁷

The next day was spent in preparations. ‘There was something sad and imposing in the spectacle of these two armies preparing to murder each other,’ recorded Raymond de Fezensac, one of Berthier’s
aides-de-camp. ‘All the regiments had received orders to wear full dress as on a holiday. The Imperial Guard in particular seemed to be preparing for a parade rather than for combat. Nothing could be more striking than the
sang-froid
of these old soldiers; there was no trace of either enthusiasm or anxiety on their faces. A new battle was for them no more than another victory, and in order to share in that noble confidence one only had to gaze on them.’
¹⁸

A similar confidence could be felt in the Russian camp. That morning Kutuzov rode out on his white charger to inspect his positions, cheered by the troops, and at one point someone noticed an eagle soaring overhead. News of the assumed omen spread through the camp, filling the men with hope for the morrow. But in stark contrast to the quiet confidence felt by the rank and file, the Russian command was engulfed by argument and recrimination provoked by the fall of the Shevardino redoubt and the pointless loss of so many men. The event also raised questions about the Russian dispositions as a whole.

Whatever his original intentions had been, the fall of the redoubt compelled Kutuzov to bend back his left wing so that his now truncated front could not be outflanked. What seems extraordinary is that as he rode about that day surveying the terrain and the enemy positions, he did not notice that Napoleon was not politely positioning himself symmetrically opposite his front. While Kutuzov had stretched his forces out along a front of some six kilometres diagonally on either side of the Smolensk – Moscow road, Napoleon was coming up in a more compact mass south of that road, and at a different angle, in such a way that he threatened the Russian left wing, which was occupying the weakest positions.