Russia Against Napoleon

Ivan Radozhitsky’s battery pursued the enemy down the Smolensk highway from Viazma to Dorogobuzh. He wrote that a mass of prisoners were taken and led away under Cossack escort but they still included very few officers. Dead and dying men littered the road in large numbers. For the Russian troops the sight of French soldiers eating often semi-raw horsemeat was deeply disgusting. Radozhitsky recalls one particularly awful scene of a French soldier frozen in death at the very moment he was trying to rip the liver out of a fallen horse. The Russian soldiers had no love for their enemy but even so pity often became the dominant feeling amidst such dreadful scenes. Things were not easy for the Russians themselves, however, let alone for their horses. Radozhitsky writes that there was no hay, his battery had exhausted its supply of oats and the exhausted animals were surviving on whatever scraps of straw could be scrounged. His soldiers did at least have fur jackets and felt boots, which had been distributed to his battery at the camp in Tarutino before the campaign began, but they had nothing to eat save biscuit and a very thin gruel. A growing number of sick and exhausted men dropped out of the ranks and by the time it turned off the highway and joined Kutuzov’s main body on 11 November very few infantry companies had more than eighty men. Nevertheless, buoyed by victory, their morale was excellent.⁴⁶

Napoleon himself arrived in Smolensk on 9 November and left five days later. For the soldiers retreating down the highway the city offered the hope of warmth, food and security. In different circumstances it might have been just that. Its stores contained plentiful food and until recently the fresh corps of Marshal Victor, 30,000 strong, had been located in Smolensk. The advance of Peter Wittgenstein had forced Victor to march to the support of Saint-Cyr and Oudinot, however, leaving the city with a feeble garrison, far too weak to protect the food-stores or impose order on the arriving horde of desperate soldiers from Moscow. Even the day before the main body of the Grande Armée arrived a senior commissariat officer in Smolensk was predicting disaster. Marauders were already trying to storm the magazines and he had almost no troops to stop them. Subsequently he wrote that the ‘regiments’ entering the city looked like convicts or lunatics and had lost all traces of discipline. The Guards took far more than their share, whereas those corps which arrived last received a pittance. Amidst the chaos, food which could have lasted a week was devoured in a day. Stores of food and spirits were stormed and looted, with his own men overwhelmed and often deserting in droves.⁴⁷ Napoleon’s advance guard left Smolensk on 12 November and began the retreat westwards. His army’s immediate goal was to cross the river Dnieper at Orsha.

The emperor’s lack of cavalry made reconnaissance impossible and meant that he did not know Kutuzov’s whereabouts. In fact Napoleon’s delay in Smolensk, however essential, had enabled the main Russian enemy to catch up and move around the city to the south. By 12 November it was within Kutuzov’s power to place his whole army across the road to Orsha and force Napoleon to fight his way back to the Dnieper. Most Russian generals longed for Kutuzov to do this. They included Karl von Toll, who later said that if Kutuzov had acted in this way the great majority of the enemy army would have been destroyed, though no doubt Napoleon himself and a picked escort would have sneaked away.⁴⁸

Kutuzov, however, remained true to his system of offering Napoleon a ‘golden bridge’. He refused to commit the bulk of his army to battle, and certainly not until he was sure that Napoleon and his Guards were safely out of the way. The last thing he wanted was to wreck the core of the Russian army in the life-and-death struggle that the French Guards would undoubtedly wage to save their emperor and themselves. Kutuzov’s caution inevitably affected his subordinates. Vladimir Löwenstern recalls how Baron Korff, the commander of much of the main army’s cavalry, cited Kutuzov’s words about a ‘golden bridge’ as a reason not to allow his corps to become too closely engaged with the French. Miloradovich was more direct. His subordinate, Eugen of Württemberg, was furious at being ordered to let the enemy pass, as he had also been told to do once before at Viazma. Miloradovich responded that ‘the field-marshal has forbidden us to get involved in a battle’. He added: ‘The old man’s view is this: if we incite the enemy to desperation, that will cost us useless blood: but if we let him run and give him a decent escort he will destroy himself in the course of a few days. You know: people cannot live on air, snow doesn’t make a very homely bivouac and without horses he cannot move his food, munitions or guns.’⁴⁹