Russia Against Napoleon

To the fury of most of his generals, Kutuzov decided on the following day to fall back towards Kaluga. He subsequently claimed that he had done so because Prince Poniatowski’s Polish corps was advancing through the small town of Medyn to his left and threatening his communications with Kaluga. Meanwhile, after wavering for two days, Napoleon himself decided to retreat up the road which led through Borovsk to the Moscow–Smolensk highway at Mozhaisk. He took this decision despite the fact that Kutuzov’s retreat meant that he could have marched along the road that led out westwards from Maloiaroslavets through Medyn and thence to Iukhnov and Smolensk. Perhaps he believed that it would be both quicker and safer to march down the highway rather than to entrust his army and its baggage to unknown country roads infested by swarms of Cossacks and with Kutuzov’s army hovering menacingly nearby. Whatever the reasoning behind his move, the attempt to march on Kaluga had proved a disaster. The army had eaten nine days of its food supply and come nine days closer to winter without achieving anything or getting away from the Moscow region and back towards its base at Smolensk.²⁹

With the French retreat from Maloiaroslavets the second stage of the autumn campaign had begun. Kutuzov was happy to wear down the enemy with his Cossacks, relying on nature and French indiscipline to do its work. Quite rightly, he retained a healthy respect for French courage and élan on the battlefield. Despite pleas even from Konovnitsyn and Toll, his most devoted subordinates, he was unwilling to commit his infantry to pitched battles, at least until the enemy was further weakened.

Along with the good military reasons for this strategy, politics probably also played a role. Stung by Sir Robert Wilson’s complaints about his retreat after the battle of Maloiaroslavets, Kutuzov retorted:

I don’t care for your objections. I prefer giving my enemy a ‘pont d’or’ [golden bridge], as you call it, to receiving a ‘coup de collier’ [blow born of desperation]: besides, I will say again, as I have told you before, that I am by no means sure that the total destruction of the Emperor Napoleon and his army would be of such benefit to the world; his succession would not fall to Russia or any other continental power, but to that which commands the sea, and whose domination would then be intolerable.³⁰

Kutuzov was not personally close to Nikolai Rumiantsev but their views on foreign policy and Russian interests did to some extent overlap, as one might indeed expect of Russian aristocrats brought up in Catherine II’s reign and deeply involved in her expansion southwards against the Ottomans. Like Rumiantsev, he was no lover of England, once commenting to Bennigsen that it would not worry him if the English sank to the bottom of the sea. How much these views influenced Kutuzov’s strategy in the autumn and winter of 1812 it is difficult to say. The field-marshal was a shrewd and slippery politician who seldom exposed his innermost thoughts to anyone. He would certainly be slow to admit to any Russian that his strategy was driven by political motives, since this was to stray into a sphere which belonged to the emperor and not to any military commander. Probably the safest conclusion is that Kutuzov’s political views were an additional reason not to risk his army in an attempt to capture Napoleon or annihilate his army.³¹

Alexander was kept aware of Kutuzov’s unwillingness to confront the retreating enemy, not least by Wilson. The emperor had encouraged the Englishman to write to him, employing this foreigner as an additional, ‘unaffiliated’ source of information on his generals, while secretly intercepting and deciphering Wilson’s correspondence with the British government to make sure that his British ‘agent’ was not trying to pull the wool over his eyes. Wilson was one of a number of people who begged the emperor to return to headquarters and take over command himself. Another officer who did so was Colonel Michaud de Beauretour, who came to Petersburg on 27 October with news of the victory over Murat at Tarutino.³²

Alexander responded to Michaud that