Russia Against Napoleon

Just to list what needed to be done more or less describes what did not happen. The fire of Moscow had encouraged all the army’s worst plundering instincts but ever since Napoleon’s first great campaign in Italy in 1796–7 his troops had plundered on a grand scale wherever they went. Segur comments that the army leaving Moscow ‘resembled a horde of Tatars after a successful invasion’, but the emperor could not ‘deprive his soldiers of this fruit of so many toils’. While carts bulged with plunder, some food supplies were burned before leaving Moscow. Finding enough to eat quickly became a matter of every man for himself in many units, Fezensac commenting that the system of distribution was uneven and chaotic. Caulaincourt is even more scathing about the near total and entirely avoidable failure to provide winter horseshoes, which in his opinion killed many more horses than even hunger. Sir Robert Wilson’s comment that ‘never was a retreat so wretchedly conducted’ might seem the biased view of an enemy were it not confirmed by Caulaincourt: ‘The habit of victory cost us even dearer in retreat. The glorious habit of always marching forwards made us veritable schoolboys when it came to retreating. Never was a retreat worse organized.’²⁶

Napoleon marched out of Moscow on 19 October down the Old Kaluga Road which led towards Kutuzov’s headquarters at Tarutino. About halfway to Tarutino he swung to the west down the side roads which brought him out on to the New Kaluga Road near Fominskoe. His goal was to get ahead of Kutuzov on the road to Kaluga. The emperor’s movements were shielded by Murat’s advance guard. The presence of enemy troops near Fominskoe was quickly discovered by the Russians and Kutuzov sent Dmitrii Dokhturov’s Sixth Corps to attack them. Just in time, in the evening of 22 October, Russian partisans warned Dokhturov that the enemy force at Fominskoe was not an isolated detachment but Napoleon’s main army, including the Guards and the emperor himself. Armed with this information Kutuzov was able both to stop what would have been a disastrous attack on overwhelmingly superior enemy forces and to send Dokhturov scurrying southwards to block the New Kaluga Road at the small town of Maloiaroslavets, thereby denying Napoleon the chance to take Kaluga. Kutuzov himself marched cross-country from Tarutino to Maloiaroslavets to support Dokhturov.²⁷

Napoleon’s advance guard on the New Kaluga Road was the largely Italian corps commanded by his stepson, Eugène de Beauharnais. The first units of this corps crossed the river Luzha in the evening of 23 October and entered Maloiaroslavets, a town with 1,600 inhabitants, from the north. At dawn the next day the first regiments of Dokhturov’s corps arrived from the south and drove the enemy out of most of the town.

All that day the battle swung back and forth in the streets of Maloiaroslavets as one assault succeeded another. Some 32,000 Russian troops fought 24,000 Italians. If Eugène’s men had not succeeded in barricading themselves behind the stout walls of the Chernoostrov Nicholas monastery in the centre of the town it is possible that the Russians would have driven them out of Maloiaroslavets and back over the river. The Russians had the advantage of attacking downhill towards the river valley. Eugène’s Italians fought with immense courage and pride. So too did the Russian regiments, their ranks filled with new recruits and militiamen. At the forefront of Dokhturov’s attacks was, for instance, the 6th Jaeger Regiment. This was a fine unit whose inspiring colonel-in-chief, Prince Petr Bagration, had led it through Suvorov’s Italian campaign of 1799 and many rearguard actions in 1805. At Maloiaroslavets, however, 60 per cent of its men were new recruits or militia.

By the end of the day the largely wooden town of Maloiaroslavets had burned to the ground. With it burned hundreds of wounded Russian and Italian soldiers, who had been unable to drag themselves away from the flames. The narrow streets of the town were an appalling sight, with bodies pulped into sickening mounds of blood and flesh by the infantry and guns which had fought their way up and down the steep sides of the valley. In tactical terms the battle was more or less a draw. Napoleon’s troops held the town itself, while the Russians ended the day deployed in a strong position just south of the town but blocking the road to Kaluga. Casualties were roughly equal too, both sides having lost some 7,000 men.²⁸