The Illustrious Dead (12 page)

N
APOLEON LEARNED OF
Kutuzov’s appointment from a captured Cossack officer, and he was thrilled with the news. Not only did he know his nemesis from Austerlitz, he felt that the general was overrated: Kutuzov had led the “finest army the Russians had ever had on the Danube” but had failed to force a treaty from the Turks. Now, in Napoleon’s eyes, Kutuzov led a much less able and less motivated body of troops, completely discounting the almost fanatical Russian nationalism that stoked the common soldier. But the emperor was even more encouraged by the change at the top because he knew the firing of General Barclay was a sign that Alexander knew he had to turn and fight. Napoleon would get his all-out battle, and soon.

Kutuzov had learned war at the knee of Peter Alexander Rumyantsev, a brilliant commander in the 1768 Russo-Turkish War (and rumored to be a bastard son of Peter the Great) who had advanced all the way to Bucharest and occupied it, becoming the foremost war hero of his time. He wrote three books of military strategy, which deeply influenced Russian martial thought in the decades to come, and shaped Kutuzov as a battlefield thinker. What Rumyantsev preached was force preservation: never fight a battle unless the odds of victory were high, never sacrifice troops for territory, and keep the army intact. “The objective,” he wrote, “isn’t the occupation of a geographical position but the destruction of enemy forces.” It was a military maxim suited to an immense country, but it was rapidly being made politically untenable by Napoleon’s march through the heart of the nation.

On taking command, Kutuzov immediately began assessing potential sites for battle. Tsarevo-Zaimishche was favorable, but he felt that the army didn’t yet have enough men to face Napoleon, especially as deserters had left many regiments understrength. They would have to move closer to Moscow and await reinforcements that were said to be en route. Bagration’s chief of staff, General Benningsen, sent Colonel Toll out again to search for a defensive position, a tall order in a flat landscape without hills or valleys that would offer a natural redoubt.

The best of a bad assortment of positions was just outside the village of Borodino, only seventy miles west of Moscow. There was a crescent of high ground here that in the north ran along the banks of the Kolocha River and was topped with small thickets of pine and birch, with the ground rolling slowly down to a plain that was clearly visible from the elevations where Kutuzov could spread his regiments. The location’s appeal was enhanced by the fact that the new Smolensk road led straight toward it. If Napoleon took the bait, the broad avenue would feed French troops directly into the heart of the Russian defenses.

Kutuzov ratified the choice on September 3 and began placing the bulk of his defenses: four corps, or half his men, were arrayed around the new Smolensk road, on the northern half of the line. “I hope that the enemy will attack us in this position,” Kutuzov wrote Alexander, “and if he does I have great hopes of victory.” But the topography on the southern half of the line was less favorable: a flat area dotted with hazelnut and juniper bushes that lacked any natural defensive terrain. Kutuzov would give up slightly higher ground to the French, who could use the old Smolensk road, which ran straight past the Russian left flank, to bring up forces. He acknowledged to Alexander that if Napoleon chose this route of attack, all bets were off. But there was very little else between here and Moscow with even these modest topographical features, and Kutuzov resolved to plan for battle at Borodino.

The Russian army went to work, chopping down trees, digging massive earthworks, and building two fortifications, the first in the middle of the line, known as the Raevsky Redoubt, two straight walls on each side with a half circle in the middle. Thousands of troops worked furiously to build a trench twenty-five feet wide by five feet deep to delay any attack on the bulwark and give the soldiers targets to hit. A hundred paces forward of the redoubt they also dug “wolf pits” to snap the legs of horses on a cavalry charge. A battery of 8-and 12-pound artillery guns was wheeled in and earthworks were dug, reinforced with thick logs, to protect them, while two sets of wooden palisades covered the rear of the redoubt. At 420 feet long, the bulwark was the heavy anchor in the Russian center.

Farther south the Russians built the octagonal Shevardino Redoubt far out in advance of the left side of Kutuzov’s line. In addition, three flèches were built in front of III Corps under Bagration on the banks of a small stream, to firm up the defenses and allow the troops some protection from cavalry and infantry charges. (A flèche is a thick wooden wall, or redan, in the shape of a shallow V pointed at the enemy and open at the back, a less formidable structure than the massive redoubts.) On the right side of the line, four batteries of artillery were dug in behind earthworks. The entire defensive line stretched 11,000 yards.

Artillery would play a central part in the drama to come, as it did in most Napoleonic battles. The guns were very similar to the replicas that tourists pose atop at forts in America and Europe: blackened brass barrels supported by wooden carriages with two wooden wheels at the side and maneuvered from the rear by a wooden tail. The various models were identified by the ball they shot: a 4-pounder lofted a 4-pound cast-iron ball; the formidable 12-pounders used a 12-pound ball. The ball was for long-distance work, arcing over one’s own ranks and the neutral ground into the body of the enemy. There it acted like a gigantic circular bullet, clipping off heads or legs as it shot through the ranks, often wounding or killing multiple victims. The alternative short-range option was the canister round: a cylinder of thin metal packed with musket balls. When fired, the cylinder would split open and release its deadly charge in a V-shaped fusillade that could stop a cavalry charge or shred a company of onrushing troops.

At Borodino, the Russians held the upper hand in terms of firepower. They could array 640 artillery pieces against Napoleon’s 584. In addition, the Russians were stronger in the battalion pieces—8-and 12-pounders, which could do far more damage at longer ranges than the 4-or 6-pounders, which traveled with their assigned units and were used for short-range cannonades during infantry charges. Many of the French battalion pieces lay rusting all the way back to Poland, abandoned by the side of the road when the carriage horses died or the mud roads proved impassable.

As he waited for the French, Kutuzov assumed he would face a force of 165,000 men. The estimate was high. Napoleon was now down to 134,000 men, having lost more than 200,000 men in just ten weeks. His stepson, Prince Eugène, had 18,000 from an original 52,000. The forces under the “Bravest,” Ney, had gone from 35,000 to 10,000. The cavalry under the beau ideal Murat had been cut in half, to 20,000.

Still, the Russians scrambled for every man and artillery piece they could borrow or commandeer. On August 30-31, 15,600 reinforcements arrived after only the most rudimentary training, and on September 3, 16,000 more marched into Kutuzov’s camps. These recruits were even greener than most, ex-serfs dressed in peasant blouses and leather belts, with crosses sewn into the caps that covered their newly shaved heads, the mark of the Russian recruit. They looked more like farmers on a pilgrimage than capable soldiers, but Kutuzov put them to work constructing the entrenchments and wooden bulwarks.

The Russian commander even requested a secret weapon that was to have been deployed early in the war: a gigantic balloon designed to float over the approaching French and detonate, vaporizing the enemy in one blinding flash. (Another report that reached Napoleon stated that the balloon was going to be used to assassinate him in “a rain of fire and steel.”) Rostopchin, the military governor of Moscow, was an enthusiastic supporter of the death zeppelin and met with its inventor, a German named Franz Leppich. “This invention will render the military arts obsolete,” he wrote Alexander. “Free mankind of its internal destroyer, make you the arbiter of kings and empires and the benefactor of mankind.” The device, however, had trouble getting into the air, as its wings kept breaking off during tests, plunging the balloon to the ground. It never saw action in the campaign.

Despite the other positions that the Russians had taken, only to quickly abandon, Napoleon believed that Kutuzov would have to fight. Bloodshed was necessary in order to silence the nobility, which was clamoring for a battle—not necessarily a victory, but a
battle.
“In a fortnight,” the former Russian ambassador Caulain-court wrote, relating the emperor’s thinking, “the Tsar would have neither a capital nor an army.” Napoleon had come to believe that annihilating the Russian First and Second armies and taking Moscow was the only way to force Alexander into a treaty; his plans had subtly taken on the rhetoric of total war. The emperor even floated the suggestion that Alexander was engineering a battle he couldn’t win, so that he could claim he defended Moscow with honor, and then quickly make peace without being reproached by his various constituencies. The analysis completely misread the depth of Alexander’s anger and his commitment to the war.

The French hurried forward, with Napoleon so anxious to catch up to the Russians that he ordered the destruction of any vehicles that were slowing the artillery train. When he spotted several officers’ carriages, he ordered his bodyguards to chase them down and burn the leading vehicle. The owner objected, saying that it could ferry any officers who lost a leg in the coming battle. Napoleon snorted. “It will lose me a lot more than that if I have no artillery,” he shot back, and ordered straw and wood to get the fire going. After seeing the blaze was lit, he sped off.

T
HE ADVANCE GUARD
of the Grande Armée under Murat arrived in front of the Russian positions on the morning of September 5. The marshal set up temporary headquarters at a monastery at Kolotskoie and called Napoleon to inspect the enemy fortifications. Humming an “insignificant tune,” the emperor arrived and began scouring the topography in front of him with his telescope, like a master jeweler examining a diamond with his loupe. The flaw was soon clear: the southern line.

As a preliminary to an all-out attack, the “Iron Marshal” Davout was ordered to smash the 18,000 troops from the 27th Infantry Division clustered around the Shevardino Redoubt, left out in advance of the main line—mostly cavalry and light-infantry jaegers valued for their marksmanship at close range. Davout sent the Polish V Corps in a sweeping movement through the lightly forested terrain to the south of the Russian line and sent a division to attack the redoubt head-on. As at Smolensk, the two armies looked on as the first act of the drama unfolded. The French marched forward in battalion columns under a setting sun and then waded into the fight, pushing the Russian infantry back with salvos of musket fire and barrages of chain shot from their 4-and 6-pound guns. The Russians held, then relented, but Kutuzov wasn’t ready to concede the poorly sited fortification. Reinforcements rushed up to the battle and, firing their guns at point-blank range, managed to evict Davout’s regiments from the battery.

As day turned to night, the momentum shifted back and forth, with soldiers in the blackness judging the strength of approaching cavalry by their hoofbeats, a terrifying way to face the onrushing enemy. The Russians, as always, proved to be formidable with a fortification at their backs, but soon the Polish corps had cut through their flanks and were advancing. A retreat was called. The soldiers of the 61st Line Regiment reentered the wooden walls of the redoubt and found that “gunners, horses, every living thing had been destroyed by the fire of our
voltigeurs
[light infantry].” The French began stripping the Russian corpses of their flasks. Inside was peppered brandy.

Finally, around eleven o’clock, the redoubt was secured. The Russians had lost 5,000 badly needed men in a pointless engagement. The French had lost 2,000 troops. When Napoleon rode up to the bulwark after it had been cleared of the enemy, he asked the location of the Third Battalion, who had led the initial charge. “In the redoubt,” he was told. None had emerged alive.

The encounter pointed out the weakness in Kutuzov’s strategy. The Russian commander had weighted his northern position heavily along the banks of the Kolocha and left his southern line and left flank lightly manned. It was an exercise in wishful thinking: Kutuzov planned for an attack ideally suited to his own strategy, which would have been dangerous against any general, let alone Napoleon, who was renowned for searching defects in defensive tactics, exploiting them to break his opponent’s forces into their component parts, then isolating and annihilating them. Kutuzov seems to have fallen victim to the kind of reckless optimism that had plagued Napoleon’s entire Russian expedition. One artillery officer, after surveying the two armies, made a bleak prediction. “Mark my words,” he said, indicating the southern line. “Napoleon will throw all his forces on this flank and drive us into the Moskva River.” Even a mildly competent junior officer could have devised a devastating battle plan for the positions Kutuzov had taken, which were no secret to the French. The “innumerable” campfires that the Russian troops lit on the night of September 5 gave Napoleon a white-on-black map of troop allotments in different areas.

Now Napoleon knew he would have his battle. And the strain was clear. His doctor reported that he was “eminently nervous” on the eve of battle, “tormented” and subject to psychosomatic twitches and spasms. Perhaps his body sensed what so far his mind had refused to admit: that he needed a complete victory or his army and his reign would be in mortal danger.

O
N
S
EPTEMBER
6
, the preliminaries over, the two armies finally stood face-to-face. As the Russians dug the last pits in front of their flèches and soldiers of both armies cleaned their guns, they could observe each other closely. Napoleon had ordered his troops into full dress. The resplendent colors of the regiments were spread across the rolling hills like layers of fabric laid out in a store window. “Our outposts were barely a pistol-shot distant from the enemy’s,” wrote Colonel Louis-François Lejeune, an aide-de-camp to Berthier. Napoleon ordered five bridges built over the Kolocha north of Borodino and sited the artillery batteries, then had his to pographical experts prepare a final map of the battle field, with the French and Russian units marked with red-and black-headed pins. The emperor stretched out full-length on the huge maps to study a streambed or a battery more closely, sometimes bumping heads with one of his experts. The day passed in a flurry of adjustments and last-minute directives.