Battle of Borodino

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 7th of September 1812, near a small village called Borodino on the outskirts of Moscow, roughly a quarter of a million soldiers collided in a single day of fighting that would leave at least 68,000 of them dead or wounded. Napoleon Bonaparte had marched his Grande Armee into Russia that summer, crossing the Niemen river on the 24th of June. Now, after months of retreat and scorched earth, the Russians had finally turned to face him. The man Napoleon faced that day was General Mikhail Kutuzov, appointed just days earlier by Tsar Alexander I to replace the retreating Barclay de Tolly. What followed was a battle so ferocious it would be called by some a French victory, by others a Russian triumph, and by most historians something far harder to name. It is the bloodiest single day in the entire Napoleonic Wars. The questions this battle raises have never been fully resolved: why did Napoleon refuse to unleash his Imperial Guard when his generals begged him to? What did Kutuzov really do on that battlefield? And how does a battle with this many casualties end without a clear winner? The answers lie in the dust and smoke of Borodino.

• 2. The Road to Borodino

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  Barclay de Tolly had a strategy that worked, even if it was deeply unpopular. Outnumbered by Napoleon's forces, he refused to give battle, trading ground for time in a fighting retreat that stretched deep into Russian territory. By the time the armies approached Borodino, the ratio of French to Russian forces had narrowed from 3:1 to 5:4. Napoleon had entered Russia with 286,000 soldiers in his main column alone, but starvation and disease had gnawed away at that number long before a Russian sword could. Kutuzov replaced Barclay on the 18th of August at a village called Tsaryovo-Zaymishche, and he understood immediately that Barclay had been right to retreat. But the Tsar, the army, and Russia itself could no longer endure the humiliation of falling back. A battle had to happen, not because the military calculus demanded it, but because morale demanded it. Kutuzov searched for ground east of Gzhatsk and eventually settled on a field near Borodino. The field was not ideal; it was too open, with too few natural obstacles to protect the Russian center and left flank. It was chosen because it blocked both Smolensk-Moscow roads, and because there was simply nowhere better. Beginning on the 3rd of September, Kutuzov ordered the construction of earthworks: the Raevsky Redoubt in the center-right of the line, and three arrowhead-shaped fortifications on the left that would bear the name of the general who defended them, Prince Pyotr Bagration.

• 3. The Bagration Fleches

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  At 06:00 on the morning of the 7th of September, 102 French guns opened fire against the Russian center. The battle for the Bagration fleches, those three open-backed arrowhead earthworks on the Russian left, immediately became the most savage contest of the day. Marshal Davout sent his divisions into the teeth of the defense, despite his own earlier suggestion that Napoleon instead outflank the weak Russian left. Napoleon rejected that idea, giving the flanking role to Prince Poniatowski's smaller Fifth Corps while Davout's superior strength went straight into the fortifications. Davout himself had his horse shot from under him mid-charge, and General Jean Rapp arrived to take over only to be wounded himself, for the 22nd time in his career. By 07:30, Davout held all three fleches, but Bagration's counterattack threw the French straight back out again. Marshal Ney then led the 24th Regiment in a charge that retook the positions, and this pattern of assault, counterattack, and recapture repeated itself in brutal waves. Seven French assaults were launched against the fleches; each time they were beaten back in fierce close combat. Bagration, in some instances leading the counterattacks personally, was struck in the leg by cannonball splinters around 11:00 and had to be carried from the field. The news of his wounding spread instantly through the Russian line and collapsed morale in the 2nd Army. Dust, smoke, and exhaustion meant that even the French commanders, including Davout, Ney, and Murat, failed to realize the Russians had fallen back and were briefly vulnerable. Napoleon, sick with a cold and far from the action, refused to reinforce them.

• 4. The Cossack Raid

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  Around 07:30, Don Cossack patrols from Matvei Platov's regiment found a ford across the Kolocha river on the extreme northern flank of the Russian position. The ground ahead was clear of enemy forces. Platov sent an aide immediately to seek Kutuzov's permission for an operation to swing around the French left flank and into their rear. The aide encountered Colonel von Toll of Kutuzov's staff, who expanded the plan to include General Uvarov's 1st Cavalry Corps, and together they went before the commander-in-chief. Kutuzov gave his permission with a nonchalance that matched the looseness of the plan itself: no clear objectives were drawn up, and both Kutuzov and Uvarov viewed it as nothing more than a feint. Platov and Uvarov rode out with roughly 8,000 cavalry and 12 guns, without any infantry support. Their sudden appearance near the French supply trains and Napoleon's own headquarters caused immediate panic. Beauharnais cancelled his planned assault on the Raevsky Redoubt and pulled his entire corps westward to deal with the threat. The Russian cavalry, with no infantry of their own, could not exploit what they had stumbled into, and they eventually returned to their lines having achieved little in a direct military sense. The Russian General Staff regarded the action as a failure. But it delayed Beauharnais' attack on the Raevsky Redoubt by a critical two hours, hours in which the Russians recognized the desperate state of Bagration's 2nd Army and rushed reinforcements forward. Napoleon later observed the delay embodied a principle he had stated many times: "Ground I may recover, time never." The Cossack raid would prove one of the reasons he declined to commit his Imperial Guard.

• 5. The Final Battle for the Redoubt

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  At 14:00, Napoleon renewed the assault on the Raevsky Redoubt, that massive open-backed earthwork mounting nineteen 12-pounder cannons. General Caulaincourt ordered Watier's cuirassier division to lead the charge on the rear opening of the redoubt; Caulaincourt was killed as the charge was beaten off by Russian musketry. General Thielmann then led eight Saxon and two Polish cavalry squadrons against the rear of the position. His officers and sergeants forced their horses through the redoubt's own embrasures, creating confusion among the defenders from within. By 15:30, the redoubt had fallen, and General Likhachyov, who had urged his 24th Division forward under the motto "Brothers, behind us is Moscow!", was captured by the French. The Russian Guard Cavalry then charged and repelled the French attempt to break through further, and cavalry general Grouchy was wounded in the fighting. Barclay himself was forced to draw his sword in self-defense. The battle had effectively ended by this point, both armies too spent to continue. Russian forces withdrew southward the following day. Napoleon had taken the two main Russian defensive positions, the flèches and the redoubt, but the Russian army remained intact and unbroken as a fighting force, retreating in good order. The capture of these positions was the best Napoleon could claim for an extraordinary expenditure of men.

• 6. Napoleon's Imperial Guard Decision

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  Towards 15:00, with the Russian army in dire straits, Murat's chief of staff General Belliard rode directly to Napoleon's headquarters. According to General Segur's account of the campaign, Belliard told Napoleon that the Russian line was breached, the road to Mozhaysk was visible through the gap, and an enormous crowd of retreating soldiers and vehicles was visible through the opening. A final push, Belliard argued, would decide the fate of both the Russian army and the war. Generals Daru, Dumas, and Marshal Berthier all joined in, telling the Emperor the moment had come for the Imperial Guard to act. Marshal Bessières, commander of the Guard cavalry, was one of the very few generals to advise strongly against it. General Rapp, just brought in wounded from the battlefield, immediately recommended to the Emperor that the Guard be deployed. Napoleon reportedly replied: "I will most definitely not; I do not want to have it blown up. I am certain of winning the battle without its intervention." He also refused the same request when it came from Marshal Ney. Instead, he ordered Marshal Mortier, commanding the Young Guard, to hold the field without advancing or retreating, and unleashed a massive cannonade with his 400 guns. The Imperial Guard, 18,500 troops including 30 infantry battalions, 27 cavalry squadrons, and 109 artillery pieces, never committed to action. Historian Oleg Sokolov, writing on this decision, quoted Marshal Laurent de Gouvion Saint-Cyr, one of Napoleon's finest strategists, who concluded that an intervention of the Guard would have torn the Russian army to pieces and allowed Napoleon to safely winter in Moscow while resuming his campaign in spring.

• 7. Casualties and Aftermath

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  The losses at Borodino were staggering by any measure. Combined casualties fell between 72,000 and 73,000 for the single day of fighting, a figure that exceeded even Waterloo, which would claim roughly 55,000 in a later day of battle. According to French General Staff Inspector P. Denniee, the Grande Armee lost approximately 28,000 soldiers, with 6,562 reported dead including 269 officers, and 21,450 wounded. Historian Aristide Martinien, however, counted at least 460 French officers killed by name, and the Grande Armee's total officer losses, dead and wounded, reached 1,928, including 49 generals. Russian losses were reported at 52,000 dead, wounded, or missing; some 8,000 separated soldiers returned over the following days, bringing Russian losses to approximately 44,000. Among those was Prince Bagration himself, who died of his wounds on the 24th of September. Historian Gwynne Dyer compared the carnage at Borodino to a loaded 747 crashing with no survivors every five minutes for eight hours. Suffering a wound on that battlefield was effectively a death sentence, as the French forces did not have enough food for their healthy soldiers, let alone their sick. Of the more than 600,000 soldiers who had invaded Russia, only 112,000 returned. Napoleon himself wrote of the battle: "The French showed themselves worthy of victory and the Russians of being invincible."

• 8. Legacy and Contested Memory

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  Kutuzov proclaimed a victory to both the Russian army and to Emperor Alexander I. Alexander was not deceived by the announcement, but it gave him the justification needed to let Kutuzov march his army off to rebuild and ultimately complete what the source describes as the near-utter destruction of the French. During the Soviet era, historians depicted Kutuzov as a master tactician directing every move with the precision of a ballet master, a portrait sharply at odds with what his contemporaries and fellow Russian generals actually wrote about him. Historian David G. Chandler, writing in 1966, echoed the Soviet-era view, asserting Kutuzov remained in full command throughout. Later historians Riehn and Mikaberidze found a very different picture: Kutuzov left most of the battle's conduct to Bagration and Barclay de Tolly, and departed early in the afternoon to relay orders from a camp thirty minutes from the front. Ludwig von Wolzogen, writing with what the source describes as dripping sarcasm, described Kutuzov found a half-hour down the road to Moscow, encamped with an entourage of young nobles, grandly pronouncing he would drive Napoleon off the next day. The historiography became so politically charged that deliberate inflation and underplaying of casualty figures occurred on both sides, continuing into the Soviet period. The battle's cultural afterlife proved no less vast. Leo Tolstoy set a defining scene of War and Peace at Borodino, calling it the wound from which the French army would bleed to death. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky wrote his 1812 Overture in part to commemorate the defense. Poet Mikhail Lermontov romanticized the battle in his poem Borodino. Franz Roubaud painted a panorama for the battle's 100th anniversary in 1912, the same year France and Russia jointly erected a monument at the exact spot where Napoleon had pitched his tent, a rare example of a monument on Russian soil dedicated to the enemies who fought there.