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Morale had reached a nadir. ‘Every part of the army is in a state of terrible disorder,’ noted Dmitry Volkonsky, ‘and not only has there been a general weakening of obedience, but even the sense of courage has weakened since the loss of Moscow.’ Tens of thousands had fallen
behind or deserted in the retreat from Borodino and the march through Moscow. Some formed bands of marauders. ‘The saddest thing of all is that our soldiers spare nothing,’ wrote Lieutenant Uxküll of the Imperial Chevaliergardes. ‘They burn, pillage, loot, and devastate everything that comes to hand.’ There were even instances of them looting churches.
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Those that were left were hardly a force to be reckoned with. ‘The soldiers seemed to have taken fright,’ according to the female cavalry officer N.A. Durova. ‘From time to time they would come out with a few words, to say that it would have been better to be dead than to have given up Moscow.’ As they marched round the south of Moscow, the troops could see the city in flames. ‘Mother Moscow is burning,’ they murmured incredulously to each other. ‘The superstitious ones, unable to comprehend what was happening before their eyes, already decided, with the fall of Moscow, that they had witnessed the fall of Russia, the triumph of the Antichrist, soon to be followed by the Final Judgement and the end of the world,’ in the words of Lieutenant Radozhitsky.
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Bennigsen and others were expecting Kutuzov to attack the French advance guard under Murat, which had ventured out on its own, but Kutuzov once more ordered a retreat. This provoked a confrontation with Bennigsen that went beyond their previous disagreements. Bennigsen was convinced that he had saved the day at Borodino. He was horrified by the abandonment of Moscow, and had come to the conclusion that the Field Marshal was an incompetent old fool. He was supported in this view by Wilson and a few others, and accusations of ‘cowardice’ began to be made against Kutuzov.

The Russian army withdrew in a south-south-westerly direction to Tarutino, where Kutuzov set up a fortified camp. Bennigsen began to argue that the position was no good and his tactics were inappropriate, but Kutuzov put him in his place. ‘Your position at Friedland was good enough for you,’ he snapped. ‘Well, I’m quite happy with this one, and this is where we will stay, because it is I who am in command here and I who am responsible for everything.’
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It was a good position. It was far enough from Moscow not to be vulnerable to an attack by Napoleon, it was a good jumping-off point for operations against his lines of communication, and it commanded the approaches to Kaluga and Tula. These were the centres of Russian military production, and they were also the gateways to the fertile south. Once the benefits of this move had been recognised, several of the other commanders ascribed to themselves the merit of having chosen it. In fact, as Clausewitz pointed out, it had been dictated by a logical imperative rather than by any flash of genius.
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What Kutuzov needed was time, and he later described every day spent at Tarutino as ‘golden’, since it helped to restore the strength of the army. Supplies of food and equipment began to flow in from Kaluga and Tula. Local peasants brought eggs, milk, bread and pies,
while merchants rolled up in their wagons with all manner of goods, so that the troops could buy whatever they needed. Kutuzov ordered winter uniforms, with thick trousers, sheepskin coats, fur-lined boots and gloves for the whole army. The soldiers dug pits and constructed ‘
banyas
’, Russian steam-baths, so they could clean up and relax.

‘We spend our time very pleasantly,’ noted Nikolai Dmitrievich Durnovo, an officer on Bennigsen’s staff. ‘All day long we feed, eat and drink.’ ‘We cooked beef stew and often sour soup with cabbage, beetroot and other vegetables,’ recalled Lieutenant Nikolai Mitarevsky with relish. ‘We had fry-ups of beef and even poultry; we cooked buckwheat with butter and potatoes.’ They sat around playing cards and chatting, and in the evenings they smoked their pipes listening to the soldiers singing around the campfires. Every evening there would be prayers before the Virgin of Smolensk accompanied by religious songs, often attended by Kutuzov.
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The Field Marshal had set up quarters in a cottage at the edge of the village of Letashevka. It had one room, in which he worked, with a bed in the corner screened off by a curtain. Bennigsen occupied a somewhat larger cottage opposite, and other officers of the staff crammed themselves into nearby huts as best they could.

Using the field press provided by Alexander, Kutuzov issued a stream of propaganda in regular bulletins,
Izvestia iz Armii
, which reported every skirmish, magnifying its significance and inflating figures of captured French soldiers and guns. More importantly, the bulletins represented the Russian soldiers as happy, brave and keen to fight, with well-fed horses. The wounded were apparently being lovingly cared for by wives and mothers, and every peasant was a true son of the fatherland ready to support the army in its struggle. The French were represented as hungry, sad and isolated. It was clever psychology, as it gave comfort and emotional support to soldiers who had just suffered not only defeat but also the shock of seeing their revered capital invaded and burnt.

The units were reinforced and the new levies given elementary training. But there was none of the parade-ground discipline that
made the Russian army such hell. Nobody bothered to pipeclay their crossbelts. Men wore those elements of their uniform that suited them, and supplemented them with overcoats or cloaks that kept them warm and comfortable. Shakos were jettisoned in favour of soft forage caps. The junior officers developed a swashbuckling swagger. ‘There was no sparkle, no gold or silver; epaulettes and sashes were rare; the only things that gleamed were muskets, bayonets and artillery pieces,’ recalled Mitarevsky. ‘There were no rich or fashionable uniforms, only felt cloaks, thick capes, dirty, torn greatcoats, crumpled forage caps …’
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Many of these young officers had known nothing of soldiering, nothing of the common soldier and nothing of the peasants. Prince Piotr Andreevich Viazemsky, a Moscow aristocrat, had volunteered after Alexander’s visit. ‘I was a middling rider, and had never taken a gun in my hand,’ he wrote. ‘At school I had learned to fence, but my acquaintance with the rapier had grown distant. In a word, there was nothing warlike about me.’ At a dinner he met General Miloradovich, who took him on as an aide-de-camp. He felt confused and out of place as he followed his General about the battlefield of Borodino. But that suddenly changed. ‘When my horse was wounded under me, an inexplicable feeling, of joy, of pride, welled up inside and enveloped me.’
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A large number of young men such as him found themselves for the first time connecting, through the solidarity of war, with each other and with the mass of the Russian people as represented by the common soldier. In the heat of battle and the rigours of the bivouac they were able to see their serf-soldiers as human beings. Their shared experience over the next two years was to give rise to a kinship and a new vision of Russia, one that would perish on the gallows and in the exile that followed the failed Decembrist rising of 1825, but would live on through its enormous influence on Russia’s cultural life.

The shock of Borodino and the destruction of Moscow, followed by the boyish idyll of Tarutino, had produced an extraordinary effect. ‘We were in a state of bliss!’ recalled Dushenkievich, a fifteen-year-old
Lieutenant in the Simbirsk Infantry regiment. ‘What had happened to the sorrow, from where did we get the sense of security and self-assurance which now flooded over us, while we grieved over Moscow and the Fatherland?’
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‘I
spent the evening with the Emperor yesterday,’ Prince Eugène wrote to his wife on 21 September. ‘We played
vingt-et-un
to pass the time; I foresee that we will find the evenings very long, as there is not the slightest distraction, not even a billiard table.’ The prospect of staying in Moscow did not fill Napoleon’s entourage with enthusiasm. ‘Napoleon was never more than a man of genius, and it was not in his nature to know how to amuse himself,’ remarked
Commissaire
Henri Beyle, alias the novelist Stendhal, adding that his court was a dreary zone.
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The Emperor had once again taken up residence in the Kremlin, where he occupied the same apartment overlooking the river Moskva and part of the city as Alexander had a few weeks before. It consisted of one vast hall with great chandeliers, three spacious salons and a large bedroom, which doubled as his study. It was here that he hung Gérard’s portrait of the King of Rome. He slept on the iron camp bed he always used on campaign. His campaign desk had been set up in one corner and his small travelling library laid out on shelves – but his copy of Voltaire’s history of Charles XII was always within reach, on either his desk or his bedside table. He instructed his valet to place two burning candles at his window every night, so that passing soldiers would see that he was watching and working on their behalf.

Napoleon had hoped to set up a Russian civil administration, but there was a dearth of Russian citizens of any calibre, and most of those available did everything to wriggle out of collaborating with the French. He therefore fell back on the expedient of appointing Jean-Baptiste de Lesseps, a former French Consul in St Petersburg, who gathered together all those Russian inhabitants prepared to serve in a provisional administration. Aside from restoring order in most parts of the city, this body made housing available to those Muscovites who had lost their homes in the fire, and tried to encourage peasants from the surrounding countryside to come and sell their produce in the city. But those who did come forward were mostly beaten up and robbed by the soldiery.

A semblance of normality was established in other respects. People travelled ‘as easily between Paris and Moscow as between Paris and Marseille’, according to Caulaincourt, although it took a little longer. The post, carrying thousands of letters from the men to their families and sweethearts, took up to forty days. But the Emperor did not have to wait that long. Every day an
estafette
would arrive from Paris, having covered the distance in only fourteen days. This was the high point of Napoleon’s day, and he would grow restless if, as happened on one or two occasions, it arrived a couple of days late.
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News from Paris was always welcome, particularly if it caressed Napoleon’s vanity. He read with pleasure that his birthday, which he had spent before Smolensk, had been celebrated in his capital by the laying of foundation stones for the Palais de l’Université, a new Palais des Beaux-Arts and a monumental building to house the national archives. He was informed that ‘the enthusiasm of the Parisians, on hearing of the Emperor’s entry into Moscow is tempered only by their fear of seeing him march out of it in triumph on a conquest of India’. News that Wellington had taken Madrid was less welcome.

If he felt any anxiety about his position he kept it well hidden, and attended to affairs of state as well as those of his army with a punctiliousness that probably helped him avoid facing up to the realities of his situation. He badgered Maret, pressing him to put pressure on the
American Minister, the poet Joel Barlow, who had just arrived in Vilna, to forge a closer alliance with the United States against Britain. He gave instructions for 14,000 horses to be sent from France and Germany. He ordered the purchase of large quantities of rice in Trieste which was to be shipped across Europe to Moscow. He also held frequent parades on the great Krasnaia Square before the Kremlin, at which he awarded crosses of the Légion d’Honneur and promotions earned at Borodino.
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But he was not looking forward to a winter away from home. ‘If I cannot return to Paris this winter,’ he wrote to Marie-Louise, ‘I will have you come and see me in Poland. As you know, I am no less eager than you to see you again and to tell you of all the feelings which you arouse in me.’
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His soldiers felt much the same. ‘Another winter will go by without the happiness of being able to press you in my arms, for it is said that we are going to take winter quarters, though where exactly has not yet been decided,’ Captain Frédéric Charles List wrote to his wife on 22 September. ‘I am very tired of this campaign and I do not know when God will give us peace,’ the simple ranker Marchal wrote to the
curé
of his village. General Junot was no less depressed. ‘Enough said about the war, I now want to tell you, my darling L—e, that I love you more every day, that I am bored to death, that I desire nothing in the whole world as much as to see you again, that I am stuck in the most unworthy country in the world, and that I will die of sorrow if I do not see you soon and die of hunger if I remain here much longer,’ he wrote to his mistress from Mozhaisk. A
commissaire
who had come out on campaign at the age of fifty because he found his desk job dull and thought he might make his fortune, poured out his regret and disgust to his wife, adding, somewhat insensitively, that there were not even any pretty girls in Russia. Marie-François Schaken, a nineteen-year-old surgeon in Davout’s corps, complained to his sister that he was eating poorly, while his horses were gnawing at their manger, but affirmed his unbounded faith in Napoleon, who would undoubtedly lead them home safely. ‘Find me a pretty little mistress for my return,
for there are none here,’ he begged her. ‘Tell her I will love her very much.’
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