Napoleon the Great

by Andrew Roberts

  The simple fact that Napoleon had missed was also the most obvious one: its vast size made Russia impossible to invade much beyond Vilnius in a single campaign. His military administration was incapable of dealing with the enormous strain that he was putting on it. Each day, in his desperation for a decisive battle, he had fallen further into Barclay’s trap.

  On September 5 Napoleon took the Shevardino Redoubt on the south-western edge of the Borodino battlefield, too distant from the main Russian position to be properly defended. Some 6,000 Russians were killed, wounded or captured to 4,000 Frenchmen. He then braced his army for the clash that he had been longing for ever since crossing the Niemen ten weeks earlier. In the intervening time 110,000 men had fallen victim to typhus, though not all had died, and many others had been picked off or fallen away.85 The army Napoleon could deploy for the great battle was therefore down to 103,000 men and 587 guns, against Kutuzov’s 120,800 men and 640 guns. The Russians had used the previous three days to dig formidable redoubts and arrowhead-shaped defensive earthworks called flèches, deepen ravines and clear artillery fields of fire on the battlefield. Several of the redoubts and flèches, rebuilt to their 1812 dimensions, can be seen there today.

  The day before the battle, Baron de Bausset arrived at headquarters with François Gérard’s portrait of the King of Rome strapped to the roof of his carriage. Napoleon received the painting, wrote Fain, ‘with an emotion that he could hardly contain’, and set it up on a chair outside his tent so that his men could admire their future Emperor.86 ‘Gentlemen,’ he told officers arriving for a briefing, ‘if my son were fifteen, believe me he would be here in place of that painting.’87 The next day he said, ‘Take it away; keep it safe; he’s too young to see a battlefield.’ (He was indeed only eighteen months old. The painting was lost in the retreat, but Gérard had made copies.)

  Bausset found Napoleon ‘quite well … not in the slightest degree inconvenienced by the fatigues of so rapid and complicated an invasion’, which contradicts those historians who have variously diagnosed the Emperor with cystitis, fever, influenza, an irregular pulse, difficulty in breathing, a bad cold and inflammation of the bladder that day.88 He told Marie Louise that he was ‘very tired’ the day before the battle but the day after it (as in so many of his letters) he pronounced his health to be ‘very good’. On the day of the battle itself he rose at 3 a.m. after a broken night’s sleep, and stayed up until past 9 p.m. Count Soltyk attested to his having a bad cold during the battle, but Ségur wrote of Napoleon being afflicted by ‘a burning fever and above all by a fatal return of that painful malady which every violent movement and high emotion excited in him’. (This might have been a reference to a return of the haemorrhoids which had been cured with leeches more than five years before.89) During the battle he stayed fairly sedentary at the Shevardino Redoubt and Lejeune afterwards recalled, ‘Every time I returned from one of my numerous missions, I found him sitting there in the same position, following all the moves through his pocket telescope, and issuing his orders with imperturbable calm.’90

  Reconnoitring the edge of the battlefield the day before, Napoleon, Berthier, Eugène and some other staff officers had been forced to withdraw after being fired upon by grapeshot and threatened by Cossack cavalry.91 The Emperor could see how strongly the Russians were posted, yet when he sent out a series of officers to observe the defences they failed to spot the Great Redoubt in the centre of the battlefield which the Moscow militia had built for eighteen guns (a number soon increased to twenty-four). They also missed the fact that the Great Redoubt and the two flèches in the centre of the battlefield were on two entirely separate pieces of high ground, and that there was a third flèche hidden out of sight.

  ‘Soldiers,’ read the proclamation written the night before Borodino,

  here is the battle which you have so long desired! Henceforth the victory depends upon you; it is necessary for us. It will give you abundance, good winter quarters, and a speedy return to our homeland! Behave as you did at Austerlitz, at Friedland, at Vitebsk, at Smolensk, and the remotest posterity will quote with pride your conduct on this day. Let it say of you: ‘He was at the great battle under the walls of Moscow.’92

  The battle of Borodino – the bloodiest single day in the history of warfare until the first battle of the Marne over a century later – was fought on Monday, September 7, 1812.* ‘The emperor slept very little,’ recalled Rapp, who kept waking him up with reports from the advance posts that made it clear that the Russians hadn’t escaped in the night yet again. The Emperor drank some punch when he rose at 3.a.m., telling Rapp: ‘Fortune is a liberal mistress; I have often said so, and now begin to experience it.’93 He added that the army knew it could only find provisions in Moscow. ‘This poor army is much reduced,’ he said, ‘but what remains of it is good; my Guard besides is untouched.’94 He later parted his tent curtains, walked past the two guards outside and said, ‘It’s a little cold but here comes a nice sun; it’s the sun of Austerlitz.’95

  At 6 a.m. a battery of one hundred French guns opened fire on the Russian centre. Davout launched his attack at 6.30, committing 22,000 superb infantry in three divisions under generals Louis Friant, Jean Compans and Joseph Dessaix deployed in brigade columns, with seventy guns in close support. Ney’s three divisions of 10,000 men followed them in, and 7,500 Westphalians were in reserve. This truly savage fight took all morning, during which Davout had a horse shot from under him and was himself wounded. The Russian soldiers showed their customary reluctance to cede ground in battle. By the end some 40,000 French infantry and 11,000 cavalry had to be committed to the struggle to take the flèches. Only when two of them had been captured by close-quarter bayonet fighting did the French discover the third, which then started pouring fire into the unprotected rear of the other two; that too had to be captured at great expense. The flèches were taken and retaken seven times – just the kind of attritional combat at which the Russians excelled and Napoleon, so far from home, needed to avoid.

  By 7.30 a.m. Eugène had captured the village of Borodino by bayonet charge, but then he went too far, crossing the bridge over the Kalatscha river and charging on towards Gorki. His men were mauled as they retreated to Borodino, which they nonetheless managed to retain for the rest of the battle. At 10 a.m. Poniatowski took the village of Utitsa, and the Great Redoubt was captured by an infantry brigade under General Morand, but as it wasn’t properly supported he was soon ejected with heavy losses. Also at 10 a.m., with the Bagration flèches finally in French hands, Bagration himself was mortally wounded in a counter-attack when his left leg was smashed by a shell splinter. When the 120-house village of Semyonovskoe was captured by Davout in the late morning, Napoleon was able to move up artillery to fire into the Russian left flank. Noon saw the crisis of the battle as several marshals – there were seven present, and two future ones – begged Napoleon to unleash the Imperial Guard to smash through the Russian line while it was still extended. Rapp, who was wounded four times in the battle, also implored Napoleon to do this.

  Napoleon refused – there was a limit even to his audacity 1,800 miles from Paris without any other reserves – and so the opportunity, if such it was, was lost. Ségur recalled General Belliard being sent by Ney, Davout and Murat to ask for the Young Guard to be committed against the half-opened flank of the Russian left when Napoleon ‘hesitated and ordered the general to go and look again’.96 Bessières arrived at this point and said that the Russians were merely falling back in good order to a second position. Belliard was told by Napoleon that before he would commit his reserves he wanted ‘to see more clearly upon his chessboard’, a metaphor he used several times.

  Ségur thought there might have been a political motive behind the decision: due to the polyglot nature of ‘an army of foreigners who had no other bond of union except victory’, Napoleon ‘had judged it indispensable to preserve a select and devoted body’.97 He couldn’t commit the Guard with the Russian General Platov threatening his left f
lank and rear; and if he had sent them down the Old Post Road on the southern flank of the battlefield at noon, when Poniatowski had not captured one side of the road, it might have been severely damaged by the Russian artillery. Later in the battle, when Daru, Dumas and Berthier again urged him to commit the Guard, Napoleon replied: ‘And if there should be another battle tomorrow, with what is my army to fight?’ For all the wording of his pre-battle proclamation, he was still 65 miles from Moscow. Ordering the Young Guard to take their position on the battlefield that morning, Napoleon had been keen to emphasize to Mortier that he must not act without direct orders: ‘Do what I ask and nothing more.’98

  Kutuzov lost little time in tightening his line, and the cannon in the Great Redoubt continued, in the words of Armand de Caulaincourt, to ‘belch forth a veritable hell’ against the French centre, holding up any other major advance elsewhere.99 At 3 p.m. Eugène attacked the Redoubt with three infantry columns, and a cavalry charge managed to get into it from its rear, though at the cost of the lives of both Montbrun and Auguste de Caulaincourt, the grand equerry’s brother. ‘You have heard the news,’ Napoleon said to Caulaincourt when Auguste’s death was reported at headquarters, ‘do you wish to retire?’100 Caulaincourt made no reply. He merely raised his hat in acknowledgement, with only the tears in his eyes signifying that he had heard it.101

  By 4 p.m. the Grande Armée had taken the field of battle. When Eugène, Murat and Ney repeated their request to release the Guard, this time its cavalry, Napoleon again refused.102 ‘I do not wish to see it destroyed,’ he told Rapp. ‘I am sure to gain the battle without it taking a part.’103 By 5 p.m. Murat was still arguing for the Guard’s deployment but Bessières was now against it, pointing out that ‘Europe was between him and France’. At this point Berthier also changed his mind, adding that by then it was too late anyhow.104 Having withdrawn half a mile by 5 p.m., the Russians stopped and prepared to defend their positions, which an exhausted Grande Armée was ready to shell but unwilling to attack. Napoleon ordered the commander of the Guard artillery, General Jean Sorbier, to fire at the new Russian positions, saying: ‘Since they want it, let them have it!’105

  Under the cover of darkness, Kutuzov withdrew that night, having lost an immense number of casualties – probably around 43,000, though so dogged was the Russian resistance that only 1,000 men and 20 guns were captured.106 (‘I made several thousand prisoners and captured 60 guns,’ Napoleon nonetheless told Marie Louise.107) The combined losses are the equivalent of a fully laden jumbo jet crashing into an area of 6 square miles every five minutes for the whole ten hours of the battle, killing or wounding everyone on board. Kutuzov promptly wrote to the Tsar claiming a glorious victory, and another Te Deum was sung at St Petersburg. Napoleon dined with Berthier and Davout in his tent behind the Shevardino Redoubt at seven o’clock that evening. ‘I observed that, contrary to custom, he was much flushed,’ recorded Bausset, ‘his hair was disordered, and he appeared fatigued. His heart was grieved at having lost so many brave generals and soldiers.’108 He was presumably also lamenting the fact that although he had retained the battlefield, opened the road to Moscow and lost far fewer men than the Russians – 6,600 killed and 21,400 wounded – he had failed to gain the decisive victory he so badly needed, partly through the unimaginative manoeuvring of his frontal assaults and partly because of his refusal to risk his reserves. In that sense, both he and Kutuzov lost Borodino. ‘I am reproached for not getting myself killed at Waterloo,’ Napoleon later said on St Helena. ‘I think I ought rather to have died at the battle of the Moskwa.’109

  Napoleon was clearly sensitive to the idea that he ought to have committed the Guard at noon. At 9 p.m. he summoned generals Dumas and Daru to his tent to inquire about care of the wounded. He then fell asleep for twenty minutes, woke suddenly and continued talking: ‘People will be surprised that I did not commit my reserves to obtain greater results,’ he said, ‘but I had to keep them for striking a decisive blow in the great battle the enemy will fight in front of Moscow. The success of the day was assured, and I had to consider the success of the campaign as a whole.’110 Soon afterwards he completely lost his voice, and had to give all further orders in writing, which his secretaries found hard to decipher. Fain recalled that Napoleon ‘piled up the pages during this mute work and banged on the table when he needed each order to be transcribed’.111

  Larrey amputated two hundred limbs that day. After the battle the 2nd Light Horse Lancers of the Guard, known as the Dutch Red Lancers, spent the night in woods that had been captured by Poniatowski’s infantry, where the ground around the trees was so heavily littered with corpses that they were forced to carry scores out of the way before they could clear a space for their tents.112 ‘In order to get some water it was necessary to travel far from the field of battle,’ wrote the veteran Major Louis Joseph Vionnet of the Middle Guard in his memoirs. ‘Any water to be found on the field was so soaked with blood that even the horses refused to drink it.’113 When the next day Napoleon arrived to thank and reward the remains of the 61st Demi-Brigade for capturing the Grand Redoubt, he asked its colonel why its third battalion wasn’t on parade. ‘Sire,’ came the reply, ‘it is in the redoubt.’114

  25

  Retreat

  ‘More battles are lost by loss of hope than loss of blood.’

  Attributed to Napoleon

  ‘Retreats always cost more men and matériel than the bloodiest engagements.’

  Napoleon’s Military Maxim No. 6

  On the afternoon following Borodino, Napoleon visited the battlefield. ‘Whole lines of Russian regiments, lying on the ground wet with their blood, showed that they preferred death to retiring a single step,’ recalled Bausset. ‘Napoleon collected all possible information on these sorrowful places, he even observed the numbers on the buttons of their uniforms in order … to ascertain the nature and positions of the Corps put in motion by the enemy, but what he was chiefly anxious about was the care of the wounded.’1 When his horse trod on a dying Russian, Napoleon reacted by ‘lavishing the attentions of humanity on this unfortunate creature’, and when one of the staff officers pointed out that he was ‘only a Russian’ Napoleon snapped back, ‘After a victory there are no enemies, only men.’2

  The Emperor hoped that his taking Moscow might ease the pressure on Macdonald’s and Schwarzenberg’s forces to the north and south, telling the latter on September 10: ‘Now the enemy has been struck at his heart, he is concentrating only on the heart and not thinking about the extremities.’3 Murat began to pursue the retreating Russians, occupying Mozhaisk and capturing 10,000 of their wounded. The next day the main French force resumed its advance after two days’ rest, by which time it was clear that the Russians were not going to fight another major battle in front of Moscow. ‘Napoleon is a torrent,’ Kutuzov said in deciding to surrender the city, ‘but Moscow is the sponge that will soak him up.’4 The Russian army marched straight through Moscow on the morning of the 14th; when it became clear that it was being abandoned, virtually the entire population of the city evacuated their homes in a mass exodus, hiding or destroying anything of use to the invader that they couldn’t carry away with them. Of its 250,000 inhabitants, only around 15,000 stayed on, many of them non-Russians, although looters did come in from the surrounding countryside.5 On September 13, the president of Moscow University and a delegation of French Muscovites had visited Napoleon’s headquarters to tell him that the city was deserted and no deputation of notables would therefore be coming to offer the traditional gifts of bread and salt and to surrender its keys.6 Instead an enterprising old peasant sidled up to offer the Emperor a guided tour of the city’s major places of interest – an opportunity that was politely refused.7

  When the soldiers saw the city laid out before them from the Salvation Hills they shouted ‘Moscow! Moscow!’ and marched forward with renewed vigour. ‘Moscow had an oriental, or, rather, an enchanted appearance,’ recalled Captain Heinrich von Brandt of the Vistula Legion, �
��with its five hundred domes either gilded or painted in the gaudiest colours and standing out here and there above a veritable sea of houses.’8 Napoleon more prosaically said: ‘There, at last, is that famous city; it’s about time!’9 Murat arranged a truce with the Russian rearguard and occupied the city. For supply and security reasons, and in the hope that the Grande Armée would not sack it wholesale, only the Imperial Guard and Italian Royal Guard were billeted inside the city; all others remained in the fields outside, though men swiftly made their way through the suburbs for pillage.

  Napoleon entered Moscow on the morning of Tuesday the 15th, installed himself in the Kremlin (once it had been checked for mines), and went to bed early.* ‘The city is as big as Paris,’ Napoleon wrote to Marie Louise, ‘provided with everything.’10 Ségur recalled how ‘Napoleon’s earlier hopes revived at the sight of the palace’, but at dusk that evening fires broke out simultaneously across the city which could not be contained because of a strong north-easterly equinoctal wind and the fact that the city’s governor, Fyodor Rostopchin, had removed or destroyed all the city’s fire-engines and sunk the city’s fleet of fire-boats before leaving.11 ‘I am setting fire to my mansion’, he wrote to the French on a sign on his own estate at Voronovo outside Moscow, ‘rather than let it be sullied by your presence.’12 (Although he later was fêted for having ordered the burning of Moscow, some of it initiated by criminals he had released from the city’s jails for the purpose, towards the end of his life Rostopchin denied that he had done so, to the bemusement of his friends and family.13) That night the fires were so bright that it was possible to read in the Kremlin without the aid of lamps.