Russia Against Napoleon

By 5 November Kutuzov acknowledged that ‘the rapid movement of the army in pursuit of the fleeing enemy means that the transport with food for the troops is falling behind and therefore the army is beginning to suffer a shortage of victuals’. As a result he issued detailed orders on where and how much to requisition from the local population, threatening anyone failing to cooperate with field courts martial. The problem, however, was that as the army approached Smolensk in mid-November it was entering an area ravaged by war and previously occupied by the enemy, where part of the population had fled to the forests, very many farms had been destroyed and there was no friendly local administration to help levy supplies. When they reached the area around the city of Smolensk many of Kutuzov’s troops began to go hungry for the first time in the campaign.⁴³

The only major clash between regular Russian troops and Napoleon’s retreating army occurred at Viazma on 3 November. The various corps of Napoleon’s army retreating down the Smolensk highway were strung out over 50 kilometres. Miloradovich therefore attempted to cut off the French rearguard, commanded by Marshal Davout. The attempt failed, above all because Miloradovich was tightly constrained by Kutuzov’s cautious orders and the field-marshal refused to move up in his support with the army’s main body. The corps of Eugène de Beauharnais, Poniatowski and Ney were still close enough to help Davout, and together they well outnumbered Miloradovich’s force. Most of Davout’s corps therefore escaped but since the day ended with the Russians storming into Viazma and driving the enemy off the battlefield the Russian soldiers saw themselves as clear victors, which was good for their morale.

The battle of Viazma showed that there was still plenty of fight left in many of Napoleon’s troops but it also revealed his army’s growing weakness. For the first time in 1812, a clash between Kutuzov and Napoleon’s infantry resulted in much heavier French than Russian losses. Lieutenant Ivan Radozhitsky’s battery was part of Miloradovich’s force and fought at Viazma. He wrote that ‘our superiority was clear: the enemy had almost no cavalry and in contrast to previous occasions his artillery was weak and ineffective…we rejoiced in our glorious victory, and in addition saw our superiority over the terrible enemy’. Eugen of Württemberg wrote that at any time after the battle of Viazma a determined attack by the whole Russian army would have destroyed Napoleon’s force. But Kutuzov preferred to leave the job to the winter, which put in its first appearance three days after the battle.⁴⁴

Subsequently Napoleon himself and some of his admirers were much inclined to blame the unusually cold winter for the destruction of his army. This is mostly nonsense. Only in December, after most of the French army had already perished, did the winter become unusually and ferociously cold. October had been exceptionally warm, maybe lulling Napoleon into a false sense of security. As sometimes happens in Russia, winter then came suddenly. By 6 November Napoleon’s men were marching through heavy snow. All the Russian sources say, however, that November 1812 was cold but seldom exceptionally so for this time of year. The main ‘trick’ played on Napoleon in this month by the weather was in fact the milder spell in the second half of November, which thawed the ice on the river Berezina and thereby created a major obstacle to his retreat. The basic point, however, is that Russian Novembers are cold, especially for exhausted men who sleep in the open, without even a tent, with very inadequate clothing, and with little food.⁴⁵