The Illustrious Dead (13 page)

The night before the battle, Napoleon sat in his tent issuing a stream of orders. He was ill with dysuria, an agonizing infection that causes difficulty while urinating. The pain had become so intense at points during the campaign that the emperor found it impossible to ride and had to step down from his horse. Now a cold and fever flared up, muddling his thoughts at the worst possible time.

A portrait of his young son, an infant already named as king of Rome, had arrived from Paris, and Napoleon delightedly set it up on an easel for the Imperial Guard to admire. Then, changing his mind, he ordered his aides to take it away. “He is too young to look upon a field of battle!” he told them. The emperor alternated between optimistic banter and the dark epigrams that so often came to him on the eve of great battles. “Fortune is a shameless courtesan,” he told one general, “I have often said it, and I am beginning to experience it.” That night, his asides were peppered with these gloomy mutterings.

Night fell. The emperor retired to his tent but got very little sleep. Obsessed with the possibility that the Russians would use the cover of night to slip away once more, he got up repeatedly to check reports from his outposts. The Russians hadn’t moved. The historian-general Ségur would later write that it became clear the Russians were “determined to root themselves to the soil and defend it; in short, there to conquer or die.” It was exactly what the emperor wanted. His army was melting away; every excess ounce of power had been drained away by mismanagement and
Rickettsia.
He had to stun the Russians with an overwhelming defeat whose aftershocks would be felt deeply in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

The men of the Grande Armée were cold, hungry, and wet, but they were ready. They had suffered and bled and starved for the kind of epoch-making battle that was now straight in front of them. One French officer, Eugène Labaume, remembered the night well:

There were many among us, so eager of glory, and so flushed with the hope of the morrow’s success, that they were absolutely incapable of repose…. They gave themselves up to profound meditation. They reflected on the wonderful events of our extraordinary expedition; they mused on the result of a battle which was to decide the fate of two powerful empires; they compared the stillness of the night with the tumult of the morrow; they fancied that death was now hovering over their crowded ranks, but total darkness prevented them from distinguishing who would be the unhappy victims; they then thought of their parents, their country, and the uncertainty of whether they should ever see these beloved objects again plunged them into the deepest melancholy.

As Napoleon fretted and honed his plan of attack, Kutuzov and his staff walked slowly through the camp along with Orthodox priests carrying the Smolensk icon, which had been carted to Borodino on a gun carriage. The procession wove its way from campfire to redoubt to artillery battery as the priests swung their censers, sending out tendrils of bittersweet smoke, and blessed the men with holy water. After sharpening their bayonets and having a full dinner of buckwheat gruel (unlike many of their French counterparts, who went hungry), the men gathered around their campfires wrapped in their long coats against the cold drizzling rain and singing the “monotonous, melancholy, dirge-like yet not unpleasing” national songs that each remembered from home. Other soldiers discussed in low voices the ominous names of the towns and streams that surrounded Borodino: Ognik (“Fire”), Stonets (“Groans”), Voya (“War”), and Kolocha (“Stab”).

O
N
S
EPTEMBER
7, a cold dawn broke. The final Russian positions came clear through the mist. The enemy were arrayed in four ranks: First, the jaegers, or light skirmishers, spread along the Kolocha embankment and throughout the brushwood (as tall as a man in many places) that covered much of the ground. The infantry were behind them, in two rows of battalion columns, followed by the cavalry pinned up close to the infantry’s rear. The modest reserves were also tightly packed in behind the cavalry. It was a powerful formation, allowing for quick reinforcements and for massed strength against attack, but it left the Russians open to artillery barrages that could destroy entire units at a time. It was also a remarkably straightforward alignment; Kutuzov presented the French with the entirety of his army, with no battalions hidden away for surprise counterattacks or flanking maneuvers.

The one attempt at deception was quickly undone. Kutuzov ordered a single corps to conceal themselves in a heavily wooded thicket near General Bagration’s left flank, at the southernmost end of the Russian position. Thinking Napoleon would try to turn the flank and roll it northward, compressing the Russian forces in order to rake them with artillery and destroy them, the Russian commander planned to unleash the corps on the French and smash the flanking maneuver. But General Benningsen, chief of staff to Bagration, responded to the concerns of the jaegers, who had been left without close infantry support, and ordered the corps out of the woods and back onto open ground behind the skirmishers. Benningsen argued that only a tight, deep order of battle could repel Napoleon’s fondness for concentrating huge numbers of troops on perceived points of weakness and breaking through. So the Russians revealed their hand to the French commander before the battle had even begun.

In fact, Marshal Davout had suggested just such a flanking maneuver with a force combining his I Corps and the Polish V Corps under Poniatowski. The night before the battle they would use the darkness to enter the thick woods to the south of General Bagration, steal around the left flank and rear, attack northward in the morning, and put an end to “the Russian army, the battle, and the whole war!”

Ten years before, Napoleon might have suggested the maneuver himself, or perhaps an even more involved and ambitious one. But Borodino, he felt, was different. He couldn’t afford to let the Russians slip away again, and Davout’s sleight of hand could have sent Kutuzov retreating toward Moscow. He could also lose the Polish regiments as a fighting force if the rough, wooded terrain and darkness caused them to lose their way. Some 1,500 miles from Paris, he was a far more cautious general than he had been at any time in his career.

But the deeper truth was that Napoleon no longer had enough troops. The French had about 126,000 men in the field, packed together at 42,000 per mile. But one has to subtract from this the 25,000 men of the Imperial Guard, which Napoleon held in reserve. Taking into consideration the habit of unit commanders to inflate their numbers, Napoleon had only about 100,000 troops to throw into action without risking the Guard. Facing him, Kutuzov had 155,000 men, or about 51,700 men per mile. In the climactic battle of a campaign he had begun just ten weeks before with the largest army ever assembled, an army that outnumbered its enemy three to one, Napoleon was now outmanned by a ratio of three to two.

Battalion strength was down across the board. If the emperor had back the 125,000-plus men that disease had pilfered from his ranks, he could have afforded to let Davout gamble with 40,000 of them and still have enough troops to smash into the Russian line head-on with hopes of breaking it. But
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had produced an army that was much smaller than it should have been for this kind of battle, and many of the remaining men were already sick.

Attacking a partially dug-in enemy on elevated ground with fewer cannon at one’s disposal than the enemy had was accepting inferior odds, but with the troops he had left, Napoleon clearly felt it was his only option. Typhus hadn’t only killed Napoleon’s men outright in the tens of thousands, it had hamstrung him into fighting a very un-Napoleonic battle. General Ségur, in his memoir of the campaign, thought Napoleon was worried about the condition of his remaining men. “Weak and starved as they are,” he wrote, “how could they stand up to a prolonged and violent encounter?”

Kutuzov, too, was violating his most deeply held tactical belief: force preservation. “The voice of the court, of the army, of all Russia forced his hand,” wrote German theorist of war Clausewitz. The Russian commander was propping his entire army in front of the French and inviting them to wade into it, knowing that even in victory his army would be shattered.

The compromises both men made to reality, and the terrain the Russians had chosen to defend, led to a compact battlefield where most of the men were in range of the enemy’s artillery. There were 250,000 men and more than 1,000 artillery pieces crowded into a small area. The Russian line was three miles across, and the main action would take place across only two miles.

It was a formula for mass slaughter.

C  H  A  P  T  E  R     10

Clash

N
APOLEON EMERGED FROM HIS TENT AROUND THREE IN
the morning, worked with his chief of staff Berthier on last-minute details, then rode with some of his staff across the Kolocha and made his way to the Shevardino Redoubt. He had taken the temperature of the ranks and found them “strangely quiet—the kind of silence you associate with a state of great expectation or tension.” He issued a proclamation trimmed toward the pragmatic: “Soldiers! Here is the battle you have so much desired. Now victory depends on you; we need it. Victory will give us abundant supplies, good winter quarters, and a prompt return to our native land. Conduct yourself as you did at Austerlitz, at Fried-land, at Vitebsk, at Smolensk, and may the most distant generations cite your conduct on this day with pride; may it be said of each one of you: ‘He fought in that great battle under the walls of Moscow!’” It was a pedestrian effort, but he knew the men were exhausted by the campaign and each would be fighting for a return to his own hearth and loved ones. The men cheered him as he rode slowly along, and he responded, crying out “March on! We are going to break open the gates of Moscow!”

When the emperor arrived at the redoubt, a chair was brought to him and he turned it around, sat, and placed his arms on the backrest. He took his telescope and checked the Russian lines, still not completely convinced Alexander’s forces would stand and fight. He remarked on the cold and mentioned how the sun resembled the one at Austerlitz. That place had been a constant theme of the past few days; Napoleon dearly hoped for a repeat of his victory there.

Kutuzov rose early as well and issued a proclamation to the men that was wonderfully stark in its simplicity and its sheer Russianness. “Trusting in God, we shall either win or die,” he told his men. “Napoleon is His enemy. He will desecrate His churches. Think of your wives and children, who rely on your protection. Think of your Emperor, who is watching you. Before the sun has set tomorrow, you will have written on this field the record of your faith and patriotism in the blood of your enemy.”

Like Napoleon, Kutuzov sat in a folding chair to observe the battlefield. He appeared more relaxed than his counterpart and chatted easily with his commanders and soldiers. He had at least chosen the best site for a defense of Moscow: when Soviet generals prepared to repel Hitler’s forces in 1941, they built their fortifications in the exact same spot that the old general had chosen one hundred and thirty years earlier. Kutuzov also had an abiding faith in the individual Russian soldier, as neglected and abused and badly led as he often was.

The French plan of battle called for a main thrust led by the Iron Marshal, Davout, against the Russian center, held by Bagration, who would finally get the battle he so desired, behind the three flèches (Napoleon, unable to see the enemy position clearly through his telescope, believed there were only two of them). To Davout’s left, Ney would lead his III Corps, supplemented with Junot’s VIII Corps against the Russians’ northern positions; Napoleon didn’t want to risk letting his erratic general go unsupervised after the debacle at Smolensk. Meanwhile, a drastically modified flanking maneuver by Poniatowski against the left flank would hope to turn the southern end of the Russian line and begin pushing those troops into the center, where Davout and Ney could finish them off. The maneuver would have to be done in daylight, without enough soldiers for a shock victory, but the 5,000 Poles were eager for battle and Napoleon hoped they could make up for the lost troops with their ardor.

On the left side of the French position, Napoleon’s stepson, Prince Eugène, would smash through the Russian line, occupy the town of Borodino, then proceed to neutralize the Raevsky Redoubt. Taking it would eliminate a hefty portion of Russian firepower and break the enemy line in the center. If one diagrammed the attack, it would consist of the arrows along the French line pointing almost directly east, with Prince Eugène’s forces at the top tilted slightly southward. A head-on charge, with no niceties.

“Here we touched bottom,” wrote Ségur. “Here was the end, here everything would be decided.”

T
HE THREE
F
RENCH BATTERIES
opened up at six in the morning, followed immediately by the Russian guns. The staccato reports built to a crescendo in which individual cannons couldn’t be distinguished, merging into one deep-throated roar and accompanied by billows of black smoke that “darkened the sun, which seemed to veil itself in a blood-red shroud.” Men likened the sound to hundreds of drums beating rapidly, to the cliché of constant thunder, or to nautical broadsides at close distance. Not only could the sound be heard over a mile away, it was, even at that distance, enough to temporarily deafen the soldiers.

Although Napoleon had massed most of his troops on the center and right, it was the left that made first contact. One division of Prince Eugène’s IV Corps drove straight at the village of Borodino, marching “with unbelievable speed” and catching the Russians off-guard. The jaegers who held the thinly manned line fell back, retreating across a bridge over the Kolocha River. Their ranks were so compressed that the French sharpshooters began rapidly picking them off, with two more divisions supporting them from behind. Within fifteen minutes, the jaeger regiment had lost half its men and thirty of its officers. The Russians counter attacked and drove the French back over the river, then returned to their main line, burning the bridge behind them. When they were done, bodies were layered at the smoldering pilings of the structure three and four deep.

In the south, Davout marched forward with two divisions, aiming directly at the flèches. The Russians waited until the French were in range and then opened up with their regimental guns, spewing canister shot that sliced through the enemy ranks, ripping off arms and legs and disemboweling the onrushing troops. The French came on relentlessly and finally stormed one of the wooden fortifications, diving over the log walls as nearby Russian skirmishers poured fire on the French from the cover of nearby juniper brush.

At one of the flèches, the 61st Line Regiment advanced and threw the Russians back. As the enemy line retreated, one corporal named Dumont, wounded in the arm, was looking for an ambulance when he caught sight of the Spanish girl who traveled with the supply wagon. She was frantically looking for her friends in the regiment.

When she caught sight of all the drums of the regiment strewn on the ground she became like a madwoman. “Here, my friend, here!” she screamed. “They’re here!” And so they were, lying with broken limbs, their bodies torn with grapeshot. Mad with grief, she went from one to the other, speaking softly to them. But none of them heard.

Among the dead and wounded, the pair found the Spaniard’s father, but before she could help him, a musket round struck the crouching girl, knocking her unconscious.

Lieutenant Roth von Schreckenstein surged forward with the 4th Cavalry, fighting in a mixed unit of Saxons, Poles, and Westphalians. Pursuing mounted Russian troops, he was stunned when his horse suddenly went down after a barrage of case shot from his left, throwing him to the ground.

Von Schreckenstein found himself in no-man’s-land: Russian infantrymen were firing on the enemy cavalry as they shot past, and his own unit, intoxicated by the success of their charge, quickly left him behind. The lieutenant watched the enemy troops move closer; there was no sign of the four cuirassier regiments that were supposed to follow in the cavalry’s wake. As panic rose in his throat, the German officer felt his grasp on what was a linear battlefield— the French to the west, the Russians to the east—slip. “Owing either to an illusion stemming from fear, or else because they were really there, I could see enemies on all sides,” he remembered. He scanned the field for another horse to get him out of danger and found a Russian mount standing untended. Von Schreckenstein jumped in the saddle and whipped the reins around, but the horse refused to move. The German dug his spurs into the animal’s flanks; still, it stood as still as a monument, clearly terrified by the noise of gunfire. The officer jumped down and unholstered his pistol, thinking he would have to navigate his way off the battlefield on foot. But with Russians seemingly approaching from every direction, he no longer knew in which direction the French lines lay. The artillery barrages and musket fire from both sides filled his ears with a constant roar of unintelligible noise.

There are few things as frightening for a soldier as feeling lost in enemy territory without a clear route to safety, especially after one has heard stories of stomach-turning enemy atrocities for weeks. “The thought of being captured and ill-treated overwhelmed me,” von Shreckenstein wrote, “and I gripped my pistol in much the same way as a person who is drowning clutches at the nearest straw.” Even as basic a battlefield as Borodino, with two huge armies ramming straight at each other in straight lines, could quickly descend into blurred chaos.

Just then a regiment of the Grande Armée’s mounted troops came flashing by, their white jerkins and white leather breeches and billowing white wool cloaks a shock against the dun-colored landscape and the billows of smoke and dust. Among their outsize black and brown horses the lieutenant spotted a riderless mount. He ran after it and managed to catch the horse before the regiment sailed past. Running alongside, he gripped its bridle and with a deep breath vaulted into the saddle in midstride. He rode with the Lifeguards toward the Russian lines, safe for the moment.

As the day wore on, the lines of battle became increasingly confused. The troops’ rushing forward and falling back through the curtains of smoke inevitably led to the kind of disorientation von Schreckenstein experienced. When French troops crossing behind the attacks on the flèches saw other units rushing out at them from the pall of smoke, they mistook them for Russians and fired, reloaded, and fired again.

As the early morning went on, Napoleon was waiting anxiously to hear the reports of gunfire from Poniatowski’s Polish unit to the south, which had found the terrain more difficult than they had imagined and didn’t encounter the Russian lines until eight in the morning. A fierce battle ensued, with the Poles driving the first line of Russian grenadiers back and taking the town of Utitsa, which marked the southernmost extreme of the battlefield. Napoleon sent units from General Junot’s forces to firm up the line, where fierce Russian charges had brought the two armies within arm’s length, battling hand to hand, stabbing with their bayonets and sabers. At the flèches, the French drove their way inside, but the Russians quickly brought up reinforcements and launched a counterattack.

The Poles were rewarding Napoleon’s confidence in them. If they forced their way through the second Russian line, they could then turn north and begin rolling up the enemy flank, forcing their opponents to fight on two compact fronts simultaneously. Kutuzov, finally realizing that the main brunt of the French attack would be in the south, ordered units guarding the Kolocha River at the northernmost end of his line to turn and march toward the musket fire. When their commander asked an officer from the besieged jaeger units how the battle was proceeding, he was told, “We are finished if you don’t hurry up.” The units sneaked behind the Russian line and rushed toward the sound of battle.

N
APOLEON WATCHED THE BATTLE
unfold from his chair, uncharacteristically silent and still. His aides stared at him with amazement and growing anger. The emperor was usually in constant motion during battle, riding on his horse to see engagements more clearly, looking for the weak spot in a line where a breakthrough might change the momentum, rallying or abusing his troops—Napoleon’s paint-peeling tirades against a commander or unit he felt wasn’t performing up to expectations could motivate as well as any call to glory. In effect, the emperor sought to understand the kinetic battlefield so that he might master it at the right time.

But now he sat, “sluggish, apathetic, and inactive.” Officers would ride in, dismount, and run to report to him the latest change on the ground, and Napoleon would listen to them impassively and then dismiss them without a word. He studied the battlefield through his telescope, although the smoke and dust kicked up by horses and troops obscured the most important parts of the terrain; stood up to pace for a few moments; and then sat again. He was clearly ill, but the officers resented his passivity when many of his men in the field were sick, hungry, or already wounded.