Citizen Emperor (82 page)

The first day of the assault was bloody – 9,000 killed and wounded in the Grande Armée to 11,000 Russian losses – but the city held despite the French mortar shells setting many of the city’s wooden houses on fire. It was Barclay, for reasons that are not entirely clear and in the face of vigorous and vociferous opposition from generals and senior officers, who decided to abandon the city to its fate. Here too Napoleon let the Russian army slip out of his grasp by not taking an active enough part in the battle. On 19 August, he retired to Smolensk at five in the evening, thinking he had engaged only the Russian rearguard.

On 18 August, the French entered a town on fire or still smoking. ‘Soldiers who had wanted to escape [the fire] had fallen into the streets, suffocated by the flames, and had been burnt. Many no longer resembled men: they were shapeless masses of grilled and charred flesh, that only the iron of a musket, a sword or a few shreds of clothing found beside them made recognizable as corpses.’
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At around two o’clock that night, when Napoleon was still near his tent near the château of Ivanovskaya, in the company of Berthier, Bessières and Caulaincourt, they were all contemplating the city on fire, which lit up the horizon. ‘An eruption of Vesuvius!’ Napoleon said to Caulaincourt, according to the latter’s
Memoirs
. ‘“Is not that a fine sight . . . !” “Horrible, Sire.” “Bah!”, rejoined the Emperor. “Remember, gentlemen, what one of the Roman emperors said, the corpse of a dead enemy always smells good!”’
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His officers were shocked by the remark, but did no more than look at each other in that meaningful way people do when they share the same thoughts. It was obvious to them then that Napoleon would not remain at Smolensk but that he would push on. Many of those who experienced Smolensk considered it the worst battle they had faced, including Austerlitz, Eylau and Wagram.
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Others began to wonder what it was all for, and openly to question the direction of the campaign, even those generals who had admired Napoleon.
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In fact, Napoleon seems to have been at a loss what to do next. The same choices facing him at Vitebsk now faced him at Smolensk: he could march on to Moscow or St Petersburg, head south into the Ukraine and Kiev, or bring the campaign to a halt and consolidate his gains.
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It would have made sense to halt and consolidate, given the state of discipline and morale among his forces, and the fact that his communication lines were now stretched to about a thousand kilometres. That, however, was not without its own problems. Lithuania and Belorussia would have found it difficult to feed an army of considerable size for any length of time, something that would have been exacerbated by the onset of winter. Uppermost in Napoleon’s mind was that, if he did push on to Moscow, the army would be in a better position to live off the land. He was, after all, only 450 kilometres from Moscow – that is, about two weeks’ march – with a couple of months of good campaign weather ahead in the midst of a harvest season in the region around Moscow that would have enabled him to feed his men and horses, and in the face of an enemy army that did not appear capable of resisting the invasion.

There were other considerations, strategic and political.
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To cease now, in the middle of summer, would give the Russians at least six months to regroup and redeploy troops that were presently tied up in Moldavia, Finland and the Caucasus. A strategic withdrawal would also allow Russia and its allies, Britain and Sweden, to claim a victory, even if it were not one, and thus do damage to Napoleon’s reputation. All of these and other factors had to be weighed. Napoleon may have said shortly after the battle that they would be in Moscow in less than a month and would have peace in six weeks, but in actuality he appears to have been plagued by doubts. According to one witness, on the eve of the battle of Smolensk, he did consider setting up winter headquarters at Vitebsk, to consolidate his gains. ‘We will drive them a little further back, to ensure that we are left undisturbed. I will fortify my positions. We will rest the troops, and from this base we shall organize the country and see how Alexander likes that . . . I will establish my headquarters at Vitebsk. I will raise Poland in arms, and later on I will choose, if necessary, between Petersburg and Moscow.’
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Much of this was just wishful thinking, although many (but not all) in his entourage – Berthier, Duroc, Rapp, Caulaincourt and Narbonne – believed that the conquest of Poland had been achieved and that it was time to call a halt to the campaign.
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If Napoleon sounded them out it was to get an idea of how they were feeling, of how committed they were to the campaign, and of what morale was like.
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The more he was drawn into Russia, however, the more he found himself in a bind. He could not stop where he was for any length of time. He could not retreat; it would be an avowal of defeat. His only choice was to continue to advance. And the more he advanced the more anxious he became about what he was doing. If one day Napoleon considered calling a halt, the next he was thinking about pushing on. This could happen when reports came in of Russian troop movements that led him to believe another battle and another victory were possible. In those moments, the prospect of overtaking the enemy, of pressing ahead quickly so that the enemy could not escape, somehow forced him, obliged him almost against his will, to press on.
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Smolensk certainly gave Napoleon food for thought, especially since there were indications that the Russians themselves might have set the town alight.
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The inevitability of war and campaigning – that is, the pursuit of the enemy until victory – eventually won out over any practical considerations. Peace was the word most uttered in conjunction with Moscow, according to Baron Fain. He believed that reaching that city would ultimately bring the campaign to an end.
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Borodino

After Smolensk, it had become impossible for Alexander to continue to ignore the complaints about the poor state of the army, its profound demoralization and its disorganization. In addition, many Russian generals felt that it was shameful to retreat in the face of the enemy and their ire was directed, irrationally, against Barclay and Bagration as ‘foreigners’ (they were both of German descent). Alexander decided, therefore, to appoint Mikhail Ilarionovich Golenischev-Kutuzov commander-in-chief with both Barclay and Bagration under him. Alexander did not like Kutuzov, especially since the debacle at Austerlitz where, against Kutuzov’s advice, he had given battle, but it would have been difficult now for him to contradict the advice given to him by all of his senior military advisers. Moreover, public opinion in Petersburg at the time was very much in favour of Kutuzov.
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Under the circumstances, with a foreign army now deep in Russian territory, Alexander may very well have thought it dangerous to ignore public opinion.
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While it is an exaggeration to say that he might have faced a palace coup if he did not stand and fight, there is no doubt that grumblings at court were making themselves heard and may have been worrying him.
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Kutuzov was sixty-five years old, overweight, mostly blind and badly disfigured (a musket ball had penetrated one of his temples and passed right through his head, leaving him scarred and blind in one eye). He rode badly (he often preferred to ride in a carriage), and often fell asleep in the middle of meetings. Indolent, slovenly and mistrustful of everyone in his entourage, he was nevertheless considered intelligent and cunning and was loved by his troops. His qualities as a commander, however, are questionable and he was certainly mistrusted by the senior officers under his command. He is supposed to have advised Alexander as early as April, well before the Grande Armée had crossed the Niemen, to draw the war out and to avoid giving battle; Napoleon would be defeated in that way much as Charles XII had been defeated.
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But pressure to give battle made Alexander face the enemy.

That is why a decision was made to stand and defend Moscow, at Borodino.

A fine but cold rain accompanied an autumn wind on the night of 6 September. Add the agitation that habitually accompanies the eve of a great battle, and one can easily understand how tired most of the men must have been, especially after a long day’s march. Napoleon does not appear to have had more than a few hours’ sleep before getting up with his entourage and touring the lines at dawn the next day.
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The morning was fine but cold, with patches of fog here and there that lifted at about ten o’clock. To some, it appeared a repeat of conditions at Austerlitz. That same morning, Napoleon received a portrait of the King of Rome about which he was very excited – ‘an emotion he could hardly contain’
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– and which he was keen to show everyone. On the eve of a battle, even the most intrepid warrior is subject to feelings over which he has little control.
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At six o’clock in the morning, a French cannon shot gave the signal for the commencement of battle. After a short silence, more than a thousand cannon fired at each other so that it sounded like a continual rolling of thunder, ‘producing an artificial earthquake’.
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‘Everything seemed to announce less a battle than a general extermination.’
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The initial plan was sound.
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Napoleon had seen the apparent weakness of Kutuzov’s left wing and intended to exploit it by sending Davout and Ney to attack the right while he sent Poniatowski to turn the Russian left flank. All three generals were then meant to push the Russians north up against the Moskva River and annihilate them. Davout proposed taking 40,000 men and marching overnight in a flanking movement that would come behind the enemy’s left wing, but Napoleon denied the request on the grounds that it would have deprived the army of a large body of men for much of the opening battle, and that marching at night through heavily wooded terrain was ‘too dangerous a manoeuvre’.
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By the time the largest army in the world had reached the banks of the Moskva after more than ten weeks of marching, it had been reduced to between 103,000 and 135,000 men (depending on the sources), perhaps fewer given the tendency of commanders to inflate the numbers under their command. The French were, in fact, outnumbered, at least on paper, facing around 155,000 Russians. However, around 30,000 of those were militia who took no part in the fighting; they were used to carry away the wounded (a task that front-line troops would normally perform, often not to return), as well as forming a cordon behind the lines that prevented deserters, including officers, from fleeing.
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What’s more, the Russian cavalry was made up of 8,600 Cossacks, of no use against regular cavalry in a set battle. The Grande Armée deployed 587 cannon, while the Russians had slightly more at 640, though they had many more twelve-pounders than the French, behind defensive positions that were not, however, as strong as some French descriptions have made them out to be.
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The opposing forces were then roughly equal in strength and quality, although the Russian troops were no doubt more motivated by a desire to defend their homeland. The only thing that could possibly have motivated the multi-national force under Napoleon’s command, a point he made in the order of the day, was that a victory would bring them ‘abundance, good winter quarters and a rapid return’ to their homelands.
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Finally, the Russian troops were probably in slightly better condition than those of the Grande Armée. A supply line from Moscow had been set up to keep the troops fed, while Napoleon’s troops had had to resort to foraging (many had not eaten properly in days); his men were sick, tired, badly clothed (some even went into battle barefoot); and his cavalry was in such an appalling state it was incapable of actually charging.

Napoleon has been criticized for adopting an unimaginative frontal assault rather than attempting an outflanking manoeuvre, the result of a lethargy he seems to have been unable to shake.
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In his defence it has to be said that, as at Smolensk, he was anxious to give battle, and was concerned that if the Russians got whiff of a flanking movement they would decamp. So he decided to slog it out, although he may have come to regret his decision in the course of the day. When, around ten o’clock in the morning, Murat, Ney and Davout finally managed to batter a hole in the Russian centre, effectively splitting the Russian line in two, and sent messages, all three of them, back to Napoleon requesting that he commit the Guard, Napoleon at first decided to do so, then changed his mind. Part of the Guard was actually on the move when he ordered it to halt. As many have pointed out, a younger Napoleon would have been on his horse riding up to see the situation for himself, but now he stayed in the same position, leaving the Shevardino redoubt over a kilometre behind the front only once in the course of the battle, at about three in the afternoon.
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From there, it was impossible to see what was actually going on. It was obvious even to contemporaries that Napoleon lacked the energy and enthusiasm with which he normally conducted a battle, riding to points that were particularly difficult in order to galvanize the troops.
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General Augustin Belliard described him as ‘suffering and dejected, his features sunken, the look bleak’.
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It led Ney to exclaim, ‘If he [Napoleon] is no longer a general . . . then he should go back to the Tuileries and let us be generals for him.’
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