Russia Against Napoleon

37 The secondary literature on Borodino is vast: English-language readers should start with A. Mikaberidze, The Battle of Borodino, Barnsley, 2007, which provides a clear and fair interpretation, above all from the Russian perspective. Duffy, Borodino, remains a good, brief introduction. As almost always, the place to start in the case of Russian-language work is the entry in Entsiklopediia (in this case ‘Borodinskoe srazhenie’, pp. 80–92), which gives a good summary of the best contemporary Russian interpretation of the battle. The Russian literature on military operations in 1812 is immense, detailed and often very good. An example of this is the three long articles which A. A. Smirnov devotes to the battle at Shevardino on 5 September: these cover tsarist, Soviet and post-Soviet historiography respectively. See Epokha 1812 goda: Issledovaniia, istochniki, istoriografiia, TGIM, Moscow, vol. 3, 2004, pp. 320–51; vol. 4, 2005, pp. 239–71; vol. 5, 2006, pp. 353–68: ‘Chto zhe takoi Shevardinskii redut?’

38 There is a good description of this deployment and its implications in the memoirs of a young staff officer in Fifth Corps, Nikolai Muravev: see ‘Zapiski Nikolaia Nikolaevicha Murav’eva’, RA, 3, 1885, pp. 225–62, at p. 250. For a discussion of casualties caused by artillery fire, see: A. A. Smirnov, ‘Somnitel’nye vystrely’, in Problemy izucheniia istorii otechestvennoi voiny 1812 goda, Saratov, 2002, pp. 150–4.

39 Mark Adkin, The Waterloo Companion, London, 2001, pp. 120–21, 284–301.

40 The distances are from Entsiklopediia, pp. 80–83. Barclay’s report to Kutuzov is in Valkovich and Kapitonov (eds.), Borodino: Dokumental’naia khronika, no. 331, 26 Sept. 1812 (OS), pp. 249–51. In his excellent book Tactics and the Experience of Battle in the Age of Napoleon, London, 1998, Rory Muir states on p. 15 that the Russians had 36,000 men per mile in comparison to 24,000 in Wellington’s army. These calculations are always difficult to make but I suspect that if one looked at where the Russian army actually fought rather than where it was initially deployed the figure would be even higher.

41 For example, Barclay through Löwenstern urged the commander of the Guards cavalry to try to keep his men, the army’s ultimate elite reserve, under cover. General Shevich responded that there was no cover to be found. Löwenstern, Mémoires, vol. 1, p. 264. Grabbe, for example, writes that Ermolov told him to order the troops covering the Raevsky Redoubt to lie down in order to reduce the impact of artillery fire but that they refused to do so: P. Grabbe, Iz pamiatnykh zapisok: Otechestvennaia voina, Moscow, 1873, p. 77.

42 The best description from the Russian viewpoint is the official history of the Russian corps of military engineers in this period: Fabritsius, Glavnoe inzhenernoe upravlenie, pp. 760–65, covers Borodino but needs to be read in the context of other sections on sieges in 1812 and on the structure and tasks of the corps of military engineers at that time. Bogdanovich has a sensible description of the fortifications, which he describes as ‘very weak’ in Istoriia…1812, vol. 2, pp. 142–3. Inevitably the English-language secondary literature usually just repeats established myths of French origin. Thus the recently published Fighting Techniques of the Napoleonic Age, London, 2008 (edited by Robert Bruce et al.), writes of ‘the daunting defences of the…massive Russian redoubt’: p. 113.

43 Bogdanov’s memoirs are reproduced in Borodino v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov, SPB, 2001, pp. 169–71.

44 Fabritsius, Glavnoe inzhenernoe upravlenie, pp. 762–4. Clausewitz, Campaign, p. 151.

45 Liprandi, Materialy, pp. 177–80.

46 Mikaberidze, Borodino, pp. 75–6, handles these issues well. Even young (and at this point retired) Lieutenant Glinka records seeing from Borodino bell-tower how Napoleon’s troops massed on the left towards the evening of 6 September and recalls ‘the general opinion’ of Russian officers he met that day that Napoleon would attack the Russian left: Pis’ma, pp. 18, 299.

47 Löwenstern, Mémoires, vol. 1, pp. 261–2.

48 Mikaberidze, Borodino, pp. 49–53, discusses numbers and provides a table showing the many differing estimates by historians and contemporaries.

49 On Miloradovich’s reinforcements, see his report to Alexander of 18 Aug. 1812 (OS), in Valkovich and Kapitonov (eds.), Borodino: Dokumental’naia khronika, pp. 21–2.