The Illustrious Dead

by Stephan Talty

  When Napoleon saw his wounded general from the battle being carried back to his headquarters, he cried out, “What is going on up there?” The commander told him of the desperate fight the Russians were putting up and said that the only way to take the flèches was to send in the Young Guard: fresh men to overwhelm the enemy defenses.

  But Napoleon felt the thinness of the forces between him and Paris keenly. He not only needed to win the war with Alexander with what typhus and the other diseases had left him, but he also had to keep control at home and intimidate his many enemies waiting to see the outcome of the Russian campaign. “No!” he told the general. “I will take good care to see that the Guard is not used. I will not have them knocked to bits. I’ll win the battle without them.” It would become a theme of the day: field commanders rushing to the emperor to request the troops standing at Napoleon’s back, to put them over the top in some part of the battlefield, only to be told they were too precious to commit.

  Instead, Napoleon moved units from other parts of the line to the flèches, throwing units from Davout’s corps at the fortifications, along with three divisions of Ney’s troops, Junot’s entire corps, and elements of Murat’s troops. This one feature of the battlefield would eventually absorb 40,000 French troops and 30,000 Russians.

  Had Napoleon committed the Guard, giving the French a onetime boost in manpower and firepower, they would have most likely been able to take the flèches, drive through to the second line of reinforcements that was feeding the constant Russian counterattacks, and neutralize them in one climactic battle. Instead the three fortifications became slow-motion meat grinders, each side committing just enough troops to take the trio of defenses, but not enough to hold them permanently or to end the battle. The flèches were taken and then given up to the enemy seven times on the morning of September 7, costing Napoleon thousands of soldiers.

  Inside the earthworks, the scene was bestial. Troops were packed inside the walls, being raked by canister fire and attacking each other with bayonets, swords, musket butts, and even ramrods. When Murat, arrayed in his battlefield finery, led the First Württemburg Jaeger Battalion and the 72nd French Infantry to the southernmost flèche to retake it, the Russians mounted a fierce counterattack. The marshal was quickly surrounded by cavalry troops. Just as Russian soldiers closed in to capture him, Murat managed to jump over the earthen walls to the flèche’s interior. He was shocked by what he found: many of the men inside had been cut down, and only a few were left “completely out of control and racing wildly around the parapet.” Equal to the moment, Murat grabbed a weapon, took his signature plumed hat off his head, and held it aloft as a sign that he was in charge. He began calling out in broken German for the men to hold. The dapper marshal mangled the unfamiliar language so badly that the Germans merely laughed at his words, but his high-spirited gesture kept the soldiers focused on holding the flèche until Murat could be rescued.

  The marshal was at his finest during Borodino. Standing tall in the saddle and dressed in his customary outrageous colors (dominated by a pale blue jacket crossed by a gold sash), he dashed from sector to sector leading cavalry attacks and rallying exhausted soldiers. “With his thundering artillery and the immense cloud of smoke into which he disappeared entirely …,” wrote his aide-decamp, “he resembled one of those terrible gods of Olympus.” When one of his officers, seeing his men being cut down by grapeshot and shells, ordered a retreat, Murat rode up to him, grabbed him by the collar, and shouted “What are you doing?” over the deafening roar of artillery. Shocked that it even needed explaining, the colonel gestured to the landscape around them covered with his dead and dying, a full half of his contingent. “Surely you can see we can’t hold out here any longer,” the officer shouted back. Murat looked at the carnage and announced that he was staying put. As his men waited for his answer, the colonel stared at Murat bitterly, then turned and shouted to his retreating men, “All right, soldiers, about face! Let’s go get ourselves killed!”

  ALTHOUGH THE SOUTHERN END of the battlefield had erupted in every kind of encounter—cavalry charges, canister barrages, musket fire, and bayonet assaults—most of the soldiers on both sides were, at eight thirty that morning, enthralled observers. Having received no orders to march, they lived in fear of the cannon-balls that were raining down on both lines.

  As the action in each sector escalated or died away, cannon rounds from both sides never let up. “The shells burst in the air as well as on the ground,” wrote one Russian soldier, “while the solid shot came buzzing from every side, ploughing the ground with their ricochets and smashing into pieces every object they encountered in their flight.” The most conservative estimate of the number of French artillery shells of all descriptions fired on the enemy is 60,000, 10,000 more than the Russians, who had the advantage in artillery pieces—a tribute to the efficiency of the French gunners under Napoleon, the ex-artilleryman. The total cartridges fired was about 1.4 million musket shots. That equals about 3 cannon shots and 38 musket rounds per second on a crowded battlefield.

  Leading his troops in the center of the battlefield, the volatile General Bagration was hit by shrapnel, shattering his shinbone. He tried to disguise the wound, but he slumped forward and toppled off his horse. His officers carried the general to a medical tent, where doctors tended to his wound. “Tell General Barclay that the fate and salvation of the army depends on him,” he told an officer, in what must have been a bitter moment. Rumors immediately began circulating that in fact the charismatic general was dead, and the morale of the men plummeted. Barclay, expecting a French attack on his line at any moment, couldn’t send reinforcements or take personal command of the Second Army, as Bagration had requested, but he sent two generals to direct the troops.

  The Russian infantry fought heroically to hold the flèches and, behind it, the town of Semeonovskoie, under assault from the main French thrust in the center. When their muskets were shattered by French shot, they used the stocks as bludgeons, then took out their swords. But it was a lost cause. By noon, the French had taken the fortifications and the shattered town and held them.

  Ney and Murat again called for reinforcements to finish off the left side of the Russian line. They could see the demoralized units of the enemy’s second and final line through the burning huts of Semeonovskoie. But again Napoleon refused to send the Imperial Guard. “And if there is a second battle tomorrow, what shall I fight it with?” he asked.

  It has to be emphasized that Napoleon had never considered the Guard to be untouchable before the devastation of the march to Moscow. At Austerlitz, at a key moment, with his center line in danger of being overwhelmed by oncoming Russian infantry, Napoleon had ordered Murat’s cavalry to rush through the hole, followed by the mounted divisions of the Imperial Guard. The maneuver had saved the day, allowing the infantry units of the center to hold long enough for Davout’s corps to storm in and repel the Russians. But at Austerlitz, he hadn’t lost a third of his army to disease.

  IN THIS NEW, stationary combat involving huge numbers of troops fighting over the same ground that would so accurately foretell the set pieces of the Somme, there were only glimpses of the past, of King Francis and knightly warfare that Napoleon still saw himself as part of. Each side spoke with awe of the sheer relentlessness of the other. The French compared the Russians to “moving fortresses that gave out flashes of steel and flame-bursts.” For his part, Bagration, a Russian nationalist to the core, was sufficiently moved by the French troops forming and re-forming as barrage after barrage of canister fire cut through the ranks that he began applauding and calling out “Bravo! Bravo!” But the sheer numbers of troops engaged in a small area and the heavy use of field artillery ensured that the action more resembled large-scale butchery than it did any romantic ideal of combat.

  There were a few instances of mercy in a savage day. Franz Ludwig August von Meerheimb, a colonel with the Saxon Guard cavalry, was knocked unconscious during hand-to-hand fighting on the battlefiel
d and woke up to find his pockets being rifled by a number of Russian cuirassiers. He might not have survived if it hadn’t been for an older soldier who chased the robbers away, bandaged the saber wound that had punctured a vein beneath von Meerheimb’s jawline, found him a horse, and lifted him into the saddle. Walking his captive back through the Russian rear, the cuirassier passed peasant vigilante groups looking for French soldiers to “escort” (their actual fate, the soldier implied, would have been much darker) and soldiers with beards so thick he could see only their noses and eyes. Von Meerheimb must have felt he had traveled back in time, but the old man soon found a sympathetic Swiss medic, taking with him only his gold-colored helmet, which he might have thought was made of real bullion. The cavalryman was eventually transported to Moscow and received excellent care for his numerous wounds, in all probability better care than he would have received behind French lines.

  AS THE FRENCH FOUGHT to control the northern line, without having the numbers to smash through and annihilate the Russian reserves, the action in the center was intensifying. Prince Eugène had reorganized his units after the attack on the village of Borodino, which he had finally taken after fierce opposition. Now Napoleon ordered him to advance to the earthworks, anchored by the eighteen heavy guns that looked down over the slope.

  Opposing him was the Russian general Raevsky, after whom the central redoubt was named. Wounded in a freak accident (gashing himself badly on a bayonet left carelessly lying on the back of a cart), he was quickly learning that being the last position to be attacked presented its own challenges: requests to send his men as reinforcements to the south were constant. His forces were already spread thinly behind the redoubt and to the plains to the south, and he had lost four regiments sent to hot zones on the battlefield before repelling a single enemy soldier.

  Prince Eugène softened up the position with an artillery barrage beginning around nine thirty. The Russians could only hold their ground and wait. Half an hour later, they saw the first units sweeping up from the ravine at the foot of the rolling slope. They waited until the French had crossed it before opening up with their regimental guns filled with grapeshot. The veteran Captain Charles François of the 30th of the Line jumped into the air with his men to avoid the cannonballs that followed. “Whole files, half-platoons even, went down under the enemy’s fire and left huge gaps,” he recalled. The captain was hit in the leg but, kept upright by will and adrenaline, charged ahead with his men. Russian infantrymen had come from behind the redoubt to form a line; at thirty yards, the French took aim with their muskets and broke through, running toward the earthworks. The wolf pits, hidden by the smoke, caught a number of the soldiers, who tumbled atop Russian jaegers snagged in their own traps.

  When the French reached the redoubt, they poured through the embrasures cut into the structure. The redoubt itself was packed with the enormous cannon and their gunners; the artillery took up so much room that there was no space for infantry. Blackened by the powder and smoke, the gunners had no muskets to defend themselves and were doomed the moment the redoubt was breached. But instead of surrendering, they attacked the onrushing troops with rammers and handspikes. Captain François cut down one after the other with his sword. “I had been through more than one campaign,” he remembered, “but I had never found myself in such a bloody melee with such tenacious soldiers as the Russians.”

  The captain ended up fainting from loss of blood and was carried to one of the few field ambulances as the French finally took the redoubt. But the first push had exhausted the French attack: as in the south, there were no units following the front line to drive through and complete the victory by smashing the Russian reserves. Raevsky, unrecognized, managed to limp out of the fortification on his bad leg and found himself among panicked troops from the 18th, 19th, and 40th jaeger units, who were “putting up no resistance at all.” The Russian general later remarked that had that original charge been backed by a significant force, the center would have collapsed and the battle would have been over by midmorning. But all over the battlefield, the French were finding they had the men to take and retake positions but not to do the one thing that might force Alexander to capitulate: destroy the Russian army.

  If Napoleon was passive and uncertain in the early stages of the battle, he was at least following a tactical plan in his head, even if he refused to reveal it to his aides. In contrast, now that his hope that the French would base their assault on the new Smolensk road clearly hadn’t come true, Kutuzov struggled and failed to come up with a defensive strategy other than patching the holes in his line. Clausewitz, the strategist attached to the imperial staff, was appalled. “He appeared destitute of inward activity,” he wrote, “of any clear view of surrounding occurrences, of any liveliness of perception, or independence of action.” The Russian leader allowed his generals free rein to implement their own tactics, without integrating the maneuvers into an evolving plan of battle. Sketchy reports from the front lines, which implied that the flèches had been stoutly defended and the French repelled— along with a wild rumor that Marshal Murat had been captured— led the general’s staff’s morale “to blaze up like lighted straw.” Kutuzov celebrated the news with a hearty picnic lunch. Clausewitz began to see the Russian not as a general in any traditional sense of the word but as a kind of impresario, a confidence man, who went around proclaiming victory, instilling the Russians with hope after the long retreat by proclaiming one thing: “the bad condition of the French army.”

  General Barclay and Kutuzov’s other generals stepped in to fill the leadership gap as best they could. The pattern of the flèches repeated itself at the redoubt. The chief of staff for the First Army had been rushing past the rear of the central fortification to take the injured Bagration’s men in hand, but he was shocked by how thoroughly the Russian line had been broken at the center. Ignoring Kutuzov’s orders, he rallied a battalion of infantrymen, took the jaegers under his command, and, along with elements from the 12th and 26th divisions, turned to counterattack, marching in line to the beat of a drummer. The French had suffered heavy casualties on the attack, particularly from grape-and canister shot, and couldn’t hold off the Russian attack. Some of them turned and ran, and the only sustained fire the advancing troops experienced was from the regimental gunners. The Russians took the redoubt back in ten minutes. The French had lost 3,850 men in the failed attempt to secure it.

  When the primitive fort was retaken around midday, there was a lull in the French forays against the Russian line. Even with his galvanizing battlefield leadership, Marshal Murat couldn’t push forward in the center without fresh troops, and his position was being raked with fire from the elevations of Semeonovskoie, which was constantly receiving fresh supplies of troops from Kutuzov’s right. Napoleon again agonized over whether to send in the Imperial Guard. He finally gave permission for the Young Guard’s artillery to move forward and begin shelling the village, and even agreed to send the elite troops themselves to join the battle, giving the French a chance to regroup and push toward the Russian reserves. But just as the units began to march toward the action, the emperor suddenly changed his mind, claiming that the existing troops were sufficient to hold the French line at Semeonovskoie. The Young Guard returned to its place behind the emperor.

  In the south, starved of reinforcements, the French slowly began to give way to the bulging Russian line pushing down from the village. Murat sent another emissary to Napoleon, begging for troops. The officer pointed out the clouds of dust on the ridge at Semeonovskoie, under which the Russian cavalry was advancing. But just as the Young Guard prepared to move out, Napoleon reversed himself once more and halted their advance. Perhaps Napoleon was afraid that the Poles on the extreme right would let the Russians past, where they could circle behind Ney and Murat and annihilate those corps. Or perhaps Napoleon thought he could be outflanked on the left. Whatever the reasoning, he threw no more troops into the crucial engagement.

  KUTUZOV DID ATTEMPT one daring fo
ray against the French lines. Alerted that morning by the commander of the Cossacks that his horsemen had managed to ford the Kolocha River north of the French position, the Russian commander had sent a contingent of 8,000 hussars, Cossacks, and dragoons on a flanking maneuver against Napoleon’s left. General Barclay, delighted with the idea of outmaneuvering the French genius, had called the attack a “decisive blow.” But the Cossacks, known for their brilliance in harrying small groups of enemy soldiers, were going up against deployed lines of experienced soldiers, against which they were notoriously useless.

  The mounted soldiers managed to panic the Bavarians holding the flank and cause a pell-mell retreat, news of which quickly made its way to Napoleon. But the attack ended up as more of a feint than a serious attempt to roll back the left flank. Without infantry to support the cavalry charges, the Russians satisfied themselves with scaring off the Bavarian horses and making a few passes at the 13th Infantry Division near Borodino, which formed up in squares and refused to wilt. With riders being dropped right and left by grapeshot and musket fire, the Cossacks and cavalrymen turned and raced back to their lines. The raid reinforced the idea that the Russians were past masters at defense but lacked the confidence or skills (especially the Cossacks) to press home an audacious offensive strike. What Napoleon lacked in men, the Russians lacked in tradition and mind-set.

  The probing startled Napoleon, and clearly contributed to his decision to hold his reserves back. Marooned at the Shevardino Redoubt, he wasn’t convinced he knew what the Russians were up to. “My battle hasn’t begun yet,” he told his aides.

  Most of the Grande Armée was held in suspended animation as Napoleon debated the endgame, alternately pacing and peering through his telescope. During the lull, however, men continued to die. The most outrageous waste came in Murat’s cavalry, which had been moved up around noon to fill the gaping hole in the line that opened up when Prince Eugène turned north to deal with the Cossack feint. The change in position had put these elite horsemen in range of the Russian 12-pounders at the Raevsky Redoubt.