Authors: Adam Zamoyski
The surgeons continued to work through the night by the light of
flickering candles. It was extremely hard work, and emotionally draining, even for such an experienced medic as Dr La Flise. ‘It is impossible to imagine what a wounded man feels when the surgeon has to inform him that he will certainly die unless one or two limbs are removed,’ he wrote. ‘He has to come to terms with his lot and prepare himself for terrible suffering. I cannot describe the howls and the grinding of teeth produced by a man whose limb has been shattered by a cannonball, the screams of pain as the surgeon cuts through the skin, slices through the muscles, then the nerves, saws right through the bone, severing arteries from which blood spatters the surgeon himself.’
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As the surgeons could not attend to them immediately, many of the wounded were taken straight to ‘hospitals’ improvised in the Kolotskoie monastery and whatever houses had remained intact in the village of Borodino. But since the cavalry had consumed all the straw for miles around, they lay on the bare ground. Some of them did not have their wounds dressed for days. ‘Eight or ten days after the battle three-quarters of these unfortunates were dead, from lack of attention and food,’ wrote Captain François, who was dumped along with 10,000 others in the Kolotskoie monastery, where he only survived because his servant cleaned his wound and brought him food and water.
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The more fortunate Russian wounded were evacuated to Moscow, but most never made it further than Mozhaisk, where they were packed into any available building and abandoned. When the French marched in two days later they found half of them dead from hunger or lack of water. The streets of the little town were full of corpses and heaps of amputated limbs, some of them still clad with gloves or boots.
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Ironically, spirits on the evening after the battle were higher on the Russian side than on the French. The fact that they had actually stood up to Napoleon and not fled before him gave the soldiers a sense of triumph. ‘Everyone was still in such a rapturous state of mind, they
were all such recent witnesses of the bravery of our troops, that the thought of failure, or even only partial failure, would not enter our minds,’ recalled Prince Piotr Viazemsky, adding that nobody felt they had been vanquished. They knew the French had won, but they did not feel they had been beaten.
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Although the Russian front line had been withdrawn that evening some two kilometres back from its positions of the morning, the French did not follow it, and as soon as night fell cossacks, singly or in groups, ranged over the battlefield in search of booty (one party managed to kill two Russian officers who were having a conversation in French). The French did not post forward pickets or fortify their line, as, having beaten and pushed back the Russians, they felt no need to do so. They just camped where they were. For obvious reasons, nobody bedded down in the charnel house of the Raevsky redoubt, and this permitted a small party of Russian troops to ‘reoccupy’ it briefly.
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Ever aware of the power of propaganda, Kutuzov determined to claim victory for himself. When Colonel Ludwig von Wolzogen, one of Barclay’s staff officers, delivered his report on the situation on the front line at the cease of fighting, from which it was evident that the Russians had been forced to abandon all their positions and had suffered crippling losses, Kutuzov rounded on him. ‘Where did you invent such nonsense?’ he spluttered. ‘You must have spent all day getting drunk with some filthy bitch of a suttler-woman! I know better than you do how the battle went! The enemy attacks have been repulsed at every point, and tomorrow I shall place myself at the head of the army and we shall chase him off the holy soil of Russia.’
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He ordered preparations to be made for a general attack in the morning. ‘From all the movements of the enemy I can see that he has been weakened no less than us during this battle, and that is why, having started with him, I have decided this night to draw up the army in order, to supply the artillery with fresh ammunition, and in the morning to renew the battle with the enemy,’ he wrote to Barclay. The news that the battle was to continue on the morrow was received
with joy by the rank and file, and the men settled down to rest in an orderly fashion.
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Meanwhile, Toll and Kutuzov’s aide-de-camp Aleksandr Borisovich Galitzine carried out a tour of inspection of the whole army, and came back to inform the commander that he would only be able to muster a maximum of 45,000 men for battle in the morning. ‘Kutuzov knew all this, but he waited for this report, and it was only after listening to it that he gave the order to retreat,’ according to Galitzine, who was convinced that the commander had never intended to give battle on the following day, and only said he would ‘for political reasons’.
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This is highly likely. On the one hand, it would help present the battle as a victory to the outside world, which Kutuzov immediately set about doing. He wrote a long letter to Alexander describing the course of the action, stressing the bravery and tenacity of the Russian troops, declaring that he had inflicted heavy losses on the French and not given an inch of ground. But, he continued, as the position at Borodino was too extended for the number of men at his disposal, and since he was more interested in destroying the French army than merely winning battles, he was going to pull back six versts to Mozhaisk. He wrote a similar letter to Rostopchin, assuring him that he would make a stand there. He also issued a public bulletin describing the battle, saying all French attacks had been unsuccessful. ‘Repulsed at all points, the enemy fell back at nightfall, and we remained masters of the battlefield. On the following day General Platov was sent out in pursuit and chased his rearguard to a distance of eleven versts from Borodino.’ ‘I won a battle against Bonaparte,’ he wrote, more succinctly, to his wife.
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The announcement about fighting the following day might also have been a ploy designed to forestall a rout. It would prevent anyone from anticipating a retreat, and therefore keep the units together. Also, as none of the officers and men knew the overall position, such news would lead them to assume that the army was in better shape than it actually was. Kutuzov’s bluster and confidence certainly had
their effect, and, as Clausewitz pointed out, ‘this mountebankism of the old fox was more useful at this moment than Barclay’s honesty’.
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Had the Russians known the full extent of their losses, they might well have given way to despair.
It had been the greatest massacre in recorded history, not to be surpassed until the first day of the Somme in 1916. One does not have to look far to see why. Two huge armies had been massed in a very small area. According to one source, the French artillery fired off 91,000 rounds. According to another they fired only 60,000, while the infantry and cavalry discharged 1,400,000 musket-shots, but even that averages out at a hundred cannon shots and 2300 rounds of musketry per minute.
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The Russians had drawn up their troops in depth, so that a hundred paces or so behind each line there was another line. This undoubtedly saved the day for them, as every time the French broke through they would come up against a fresh wall of troops and therefore fail to achieve a decisive breakthrough. But it did mean that the entire Russian army, including the units being held in reserve, was within range of the French guns throughout the day. Prince Eugene of Württemberg, for instance, recorded that one of his brigades lost 289 men, or nearly 10 per cent of its effectives, in half an hour while standing at ease in reserve.
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For no such good reason, Napoleon also stationed many of his reserves, and almost all of his cavalry, within range of the enemy guns. Captain Hubert Biot’s 11th Chasseurs à Cheval stood under fire for hours, and lost one-third of its men and horses without taking part in any fighting. One regiment of Württemberg cavalry lost twenty-eight officers and 290 men out of 762, over 40 per cent of its complement.
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Calculations of Russian casualties vary from 38,500 to 58,000, but most recent estimates put the figure at around 45,000, including twenty-nine generals, six of them killed, among them Bagration, who died of his leg wound, Tuchkov and Kutaisov. But if Kutuzov’s assertion that he would only be able to muster 45,000 for battle the next
day is true, then the losses must have been much higher. French casualties came to 28,000, including forty-eight generals, eleven of whom died. In the spring of 1813, the Russian authorities clearing the field would bury 35,478 horse carcases.
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The Russian losses were crippling. The army had not only lost a vast number of men, it had actually lost half of its fighting effectives – the dead and wounded were overwhelmingly from the frontline regiments, not militia or cossacks. A very high proportion of the dead were senior officers. The result was that entire units had been rendered inoperational. The 1300-strong Shirvansk regiment was down to ninety-six men and three junior officers by three o’clock. Of Vorontsov’s division of four thousand men and eighteen senior officers, only three hundred men and three officers answered roll call that evening. Neverovsky’s entire division could muster no more than seven hundred men. Its 50th Jaeger Regiment was down to forty men, in the Odessa Regiment the senior officer left alive was a lieutenant, in the Tarnopol Regiment a sergeant major. ‘My division has all but ceased to exist,’ Neverovsky wrote to his wife the next day.
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The French losses were lighter by comparison, with most units losing no more than 10 to 20 per cent of their strength, and while a number of fine generals and senior officers had perished, the system of promotion meant that there would be no difficulty in replacing them. There were fresh troops on their way from Paris, so there would be no major problem in filling the gaps in the ranks. Yet the French army’s losses were far more important strategically than those of the Russians, for Napoleon had all but destroyed his cavalry.
Kutuzov’s army was in no condition to give battle on any positions, however strong. Unless it was given several weeks’ rest and massive reinforcement it would cease to exist altogether. As it could not possibly hope to defend Moscow, whatever Kutuzov may have written, the logical thing for him to do would have been to veer southward and withdraw towards Kaluga. Such a move would have brought him close to his supply base and forced the French to follow him, thus
luring them away from Moscow. But if he did this, he would have to fight again or keep retreating, and in either case the remains of his army would disintegrate. More than anything else, he needed to get Napoleon off his tail, and he could only do that by distracting him with something else. In the only brilliant decision he made during the whole campaign, Kutuzov resolved to sacrifice Moscow in order to save his army. ‘Napoleon is like a torrent which we are still too weak to stem,’ he explained to Toll. ‘Moscow is the sponge which will suck him in.’
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He therefore fell back on Moscow, announcing that he would fight at Mozhaisk, and then at a point closer to the city. Although the retreat was disorderly, the numb resignation which had settled on the troops after the exaltation of battle kept them from dispersing or deserting in large numbers. One of the horses in Nikolai Mitarevsky’s gun team had had its lower jaw shot off by a shell fragment, so the gunners took it out of the traces and let it go, but the animal, which had been with the battery for ten years, merely followed it. Similar instincts inspired many a soldier. On the afternoon of 9 September the retreating units began taking up defensive positions on some heights just outside Moscow. They spent the next day digging in and preparing for battle, and Kutuzov wrote to Rostopchin, affirming that his army was in good shape and ready to repulse the French.
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Rostopchin had prepared Moscow for any eventuality, as he explained in a letter to Balashov on 10 September. He and tens of thousands of the inhabitants were ready to reinforce the army in a stand outside the city walls. ‘The people of Moscow and its environs will fight with desperation in the event of our army drawing near,’ he wrote to Balashov. Following assurances from Kutuzov, he had just declared that the city would be defended ‘to the last drop of blood’. In one of his proclamations to the citizens he assured them that they could use pitchforks on the French, who were so puny that they weighed less than a bale of hay. To all who doubted his determination, he would declare his readiness to defeat the French with a hail of stones if necessary.
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On 13 September, Kutuzov set up headquarters in the village of Fili and gave all the appearances of intending to defend the position he had selected. He asked Yermolov, in front of several generals, what he thought of the position, and when Yermolov replied that he felt it was not very good, enacted a charade of taking his pulse and asking if he was quite well. But Rostopchin, who had driven out from Moscow at Kutuzov’s request, was struck by the atmosphere of uncertainty he found at headquarters. He reported that he had evacuated the city, which could, if necessary, be abandoned to the enemy and then fired, but everyone seemed outraged at the idea of not defending Moscow. It was as though nobody dared admit the unpalatable truth. The only exception was Barclay, who was convinced that a battle fought at the gates of the city would destroy what was left of the army. ‘If they carry out the foolishness of fighting on this spot,’ he told Rostopchin, ‘all I can hope for is that I shall be killed.’
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Rostopchin was by now convinced that there would be no attempt to defend Moscow. But Kutuzov assured him of the contrary, in the course of what Rostopchin termed ‘a curious conversation which reveals all the baseness, the incompetence and the poltroonery of the commander of our armies’. Kutuzov asked him to return on the following morning, with the Metropolitan Archbishop, two miraculous icons of the Virgin, and enough monks and deacons to stage a procession through the Russian camp before the battle.
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