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From the Niemen to Vitebsk
When Napoleon first set foot in Russia, he had no expectation
of marching to Moscow. His avowed aim was to force the Russian
armies into major battle at the earliest possible moment somewhere
in the frontier region, ideally in scattered detachments. No specific
target was laid out, but it was thought that the Russian army
would be engaged in the vicinity of Vilna, fifty miles inside
the Russian border.
The Russian army had decided, however, on a tactic of strategic
retreat, whereby Barclay's First West Army would draw Napoleon
to Drissa, allowing Bagration's Second West Army to strike the
Grand Army from the flank. The effect of this dispersion was to
allow Napoleon to drive between the two Russian armies, and penetrate
deep into the right center of the Russian lines.
Napoleon pursued Barclay to Vitebsk on the Duna River, while the
French divisions led by Marshal Davout sought to block Bagration's
path north to join with Barclay. Seeing that he would be without
support, Barclay abandoned his position at Vitebsk, and the two
Russian armies made haste by converging courses to set up new
defensive positions at Smolensk.
As they fell back, though, they pursued a strategy of stripping
the land of food and fodder, making the invaders dependent on
long supply lines that would grow more vulnerable as they lengthened.
Vitebsk to Smolensk
On the 10th of August Napoleon gave the order to advance from
Vitebsk where he had remained only fifteen days. His plan was
to move 185,000 men around the left flank and to the rear of the
Russian armies in a counter-clockwise sweep, engaging the Russian
armies separately and attacking Smolensk from the south.
Siege of Smolensk
For more than two months Napoleon's armies had sought to bring
the Russians to a decisive battle. Napoleon believed he had them
pinned down at Smolensk where the Russian generals, Barclay and
Bagration, had brought their forces together. When the Russian
armies were seen, nearly one hundred and twenty thousand men,
marching across the right bank of the Dnieper River, Napoleon
hoped their intent was to deploy their forces beneath the city's
walls to wage the battle so long awaited.
On the morning of the seventeenth the Russians were seen in full
retreat on the eastern road to Moscow. Napoleon responded with
a full-scale assault on the city. His flamboyant marshal Murat
opposed such a violent action, especially since the Russians were
withdrawing on their own initiative. But the city was stormed
and fighting ensued with the Russian rearguard, left behind to
defend and evacuate the city as the main armies withdrew. The
entire city was set on fire as a barrier to French pursuit. A
part of the French army was able to catch the rearguard of Barclay's
army in a bloody encounter at Valutino, on the plateau east of
Smolensk. But the Russians had again evaded the Grand Army and
left Smolensk a smoldering ruin for the French to inhabit.
Smolensk to Borodino
At Smolensk Napoleon paused to take stock of his situation.
Sickness and desertion had thinned his army's ranks to 185,000
men by the time he'd reached Smolensk; the heavy marching and
fighting of the last few days had cost him 25,000 more. It seemed
prudent to consolidate his forces here behind the river lines
of the Dvina and the Dnieper, to wait out the winter while he
made ready for a new campaign in 1813. He had by now outrun his
supply depots, overextended his lines, and 280 miles separated
him from the next major town to the east, which was Moscow.
Nonetheless, Napoleon decided that Russia would not surrender
and Alexander would not negotiate until there had been a decisive
battle. Smolensk was at the junction of the main roads to St.
Petersburg and Moscow--twenty-nine days' march from the first
of these capitals, fifteen from the second. On 25 August, 1812
the French left Smolensk, following the Russian armies on their
retreat along the road to Moscow.
The Russian general Barclay's tactics of strategic withdrawal
had been intrinsically sound for the circumstances, but the Russian
aristocracy vehemently denounced him for "leading the French
straight to Moscow." Yielding to the outcry, Tsar Alexander
abruptly replaced him with the aged general Kutusov. Kutusov knew
that he would now be expected to stand and fight.
Preparation for Battle
The Russian army under Kutusov drew up at a site south of the village of Borodino, on a ridge intersected with ravines and behind the Kolotcha, a tributary of the Moskowa, the river which flowed through Moscow seventy-two miles to the east. Napoleon's Grand Army arrived on the hills facing the Russians on 5 September with 130,000 men to face 115,000 Russians. This was the battle Napoleon had wanted, but the battlefield was not one he would have chosen. The country was wooded and therefore unsuitable to the cavalry and the flanking movements by which Napoleon was accustomed to defeating the enemy. The Russians had also been afforded the time to dig in on sloping ground; their main batteries were protected by turf redoubts and would be difficult to capture.
The Russian lines stretched north and south for two and a half
miles from Borodino to the village of Utitza, on the Old Smolensk-Moscow
road. On the Russian right Barclay with 75,000 men held high ground
protected by giant earthworks known as the Great or Raevsky Redoubt,
then came a dip in the land; beyond the dip three more redoubts--the
Bagration Fleches--and finally the wooded ground above Utitza.
Napoleon's strategy was a simple one. His stepson Eugene would
attack the village of Borodino, as though the main French thrust
was to come on the Russian right. In fact, it would come at the
Russian center and the left, where the Russian lines were weakest.
There Marshal Davout would attack Bagration, while the Polish
Prince Poniatowski's cavalry, using the Old Smolensk-Moscow road,
would try to maneuver behind the left flank of the Russians, driving
the whole army to the right and into the ravine of the Kolotcha.
On the evening before the battle, Napoleon asked his aide-de-camp
Rapp if he expected a victory. "Without any doubt,"
Rapp replied. "But a bloody one."
Battle of Borodino, 7 September 1812
Read more about the Battle of Borodino
At half past five on the morning of September 7, Napoleon ordered
his French batteries to begin firing. By ten o'clock Napoleon's
original plan had been overtaken by events. Eugene had done better
than expected, capturing Borodino, bringing up guns, and pounding
the Raevsky Redoubt. But Poniatowski had fared less well. Though
he had battered the Russian left--General Tuchkov was dead and
Bagration dying of wounds--he was unable to take the Bagration
Fleches from behind.
In the Aftermath
It was clear then that the remainder of the battle would consist
of gun duels, frontal attacks, and hand-to-hand fighting. By midday,
the center of action was shifting to the Raevsky Redoubt, a fortified
emplacement of twenty-seven guns. The fighting was so fierce there,
according to one eyewitness, that "the approaches, ditches,
and interior all disappeared under a mound of dead and dying,
an average six to eight men piled on top of one another.
It was in the late afternoon that Eugene from the north, Ney and
Murat from the south, launched a combined attack on the Raevsky
Redoubt. This time they succeeded in capturing it and turned round
the guns on the Russians retreating over the ravines to the east.
The French had taken this battlefield but they were too decimated
to pursue the Russian armies any further as they withdrew towards
Moscow.
The losses at Borodino were enormous and without proportionate
results. The Russians had fought and died with stubborn heroism,
44,000 dead and wounded. The French had lost 33,000 men, including
forty-three of their generals who had been killed or wounded.
Arithmetically, and in the sense that the road to Moscow now lay
open, Borodino was a French victory. But it was far from the crippling,
decisive victory on which Napoleon had been trusting his campaign.
It was the most terrible battle Napoleon had ever fought.
The Grand Army was left with only 95,000 men to continue its march
toward Moscow. They met little resistance as they moved through
the towns of Mozhaysk and Krymskoie. But the Russian army had
not been vanquished by its losses, resuming its evasive tactics
and withdrawing to a base south of Moscow. Napoleon sent an urgent
message to the Duke of Bellano who had remained behind with reserves
in Poland, requesting that all manner of reinforcements be dispatched
immediately to Moscow.
Entry into Moscow
On the 13th of September, almost three months after entering
Russia, the main body of the Grand Army reached the outskirts
of 
Moscow and climbed the western
hills to gaze at last, after hundreds of miles of empty spaces
and burned-out ruins, on the gilded roofs and domes of a city
rising from the middle of a fertile plain.
At three in the afternoon, Napoleon and the Imperial Guard arrived
before the Dragomilov Gate, expecting to be met by a deputation
of the city elders bearing the municipal keys and other tokens
of submission. In fact, most Muscovites had been ordered to evacuate
by the governor Rostopchin. Of 250,000 residents, only 15,000
remained. The French found no delegation ready to parley with
them, a fact that troubled Napoleon although he dismissed its
significance. As the Grand Army rode through an untended gate,
their boots and hooves echoed through the city streets, deserted
save for a few convicts and wounded soldiers.
Napoleon took up residence in the Kremlin, from whence he sent
out overtures to Tsar Alexander for terms of peace. Now that he
had defeated the Russians and occupied their capital, he was sure
that they would act like reasonable Europeans and meet his demands.
Perhaps he and Alexander could even be allies again.
Moscow in Flames
The night of 15 September fires broke out all over Moscow.
The French had to fight them with buckets of water, as hoses and
pumps had been removed on orders from Rostopchin. Many more fires
were ignited the 
next day, and the
French soon found out that Rostopchin had armed a thousand released
convicts with fuses and gunpowder and instructed them to burn
Moscow to the ground. The French could not check the raging fires,
and over the next four days four-fifths of the city of domes had
been destroyed.
As at Smolensk, the French were appalled and daunted by such uncompromising
determination and sacrifice by the Russians, willing to turn their
own capital into a blackened ruin. Napoleon wrote to Alexander,
seeking some form of accommodation: "If your Majesty still
conserves for me some remnant of your former feelings, you will
take this letter in good part."
For five weeks Napoleon waited in vain in the ruins of Moscow
for an answer from St. Petersburg. His original plan had been
to winter in Moscow where his soldiers would be comfortable, with
plenty to eat and drink. But as supplies of food and forage diminished
and the Russian army encamped to the south at Tarutino grew in
strength, Napoleon decided that there was no point any longer
in holding on to his increasingly precarious position in an isolated
city 550 miles inside enemy territory. He proposed instead to
take the Grand Army on a wide circuit south and west through fertile
and unspoiled land to the area of Minsk-Smolensk-Vitebsk, where
he would set up winter quarters and prepare for a campaign against
St. Petersburg in 1813.
Napoleon intended to begin the evacuation on the 20th of October.
On the 15th three inches of snow fell over the black ruins of
Moscow. On October 18 Murat's advance guard lost 2,500 men in
a surprise attack by the Russian army at Vinkovo south of Moscow.
Napoleon pushed the date forward by a day, and on 19 October the
first units of the Grand Army, after a stay of 35 days, filed
out of the city. The immense crawling procession of 90,000 infantry
and 15,000 cavalry, with carriages, wagons, artillery, pack animals,
and useless booty of all kinds crowded the westward roads leaving
Moscow.
Maloyaroslavets
From Moscow Napoleon first struck south along the Old Kaluga
Road, then veered west by secondary roads intending to slip around
Kutuzov's left flank to the important junction of Maloyaroslavets,
from where a variety of routes led through untouched country to
Smolensk. Advance troops of the French and Russian armies converged
almost simultaneously on Maloyaroslavets on 24 October, where
they engaged in a fierce eighteen-hour battle that cost 10,000
men. Kutuzov meanwhile, divining Napoleon's strategy, assembled
his main army a mile to the south, resolved to give battle the
next day rather than let the French break through to Kaluga.
Though the Russians were eventually driven from the town, Napoleon
was forced to reconsider whether his 63,000 troops could achieve
a breakthrough against more than 90,000 Russians. On October 26
Napoleon ordered the Grand Army to break contact and turn back
north to the main Smolensk road that had been stripped bare during
the advance to Moscow. The Grande Armee reached the Smolensk road
at Mozhaysk, then turned west through an all-too-familiar landscape.
On the 29th the French troops were forced to retrace their steps
over the fields of Borodino, where they witnessed the horrific
sight of the entire plain covered still with tens of thousands
of unburied corpses.
Kutuzov had not thought the French would give up there southern
objective so easily. As he reported to Alexander, the brush at
Maloyaroslavets on 24 October now proved to be "one of the
most significant days of this bloody war," for if the battle
of Borodino showed that Napoleon could not defeat the Russians,
then the encounter at Maloyaroslavets ensured not just that he
was going to lose the war, but that his loss was going to be catastrophic.
Retreat through Russia
Kutusov's strategy was to avoid a major engagement with Napoleon's
army on a battlefield such as at Borodino, and merely to interpose
his army between Napoleon and the fertile, unspoiled lands to
the south of the main road, leaving hunger, fatigue, sickness,
and the onslaught of winter to do what his armies could not. Any
stragglers or foragers off the main road were to be cut down by
flying columns of Cossacks and bands of peasants, restricting
the area from which Napoleon could draw his supplies.
Following this method, Kutusov turned north and west in limited
pursuit of the Grande Armee. On November 3 Marshal Davout's I
Corps were cut off from the main body of the French army at Viazma.
French troops under Eugene, Poniatowski, and Ney turned back to
free their comrades, but at a cost of 6,000 casualties, 2,500
prisoners and, more significantly, the total disarray of the once
highly-disciplined I Corps.
Onset of Winter
In late October the first severe snows fell, accompanied by bitter frost and driving winds, covering the landscape and the sky in an unbroken whiteness. "Snow fell in enormous flakes; we lost sight of the sky and the men in front of us." Though swathed in fur and wadded coats, the men had no protection for their faces. Their lips became cracked, noses frost-bitten, eyes blinded by the glare. The horses in weakened condition could no longer haul the guns up icy slopes, and they began to be abandoned. As soon as anyone died, whether of wounds or frostbite, his fellows stripped him of his boots, any food in his haversack, and left him unburied to the wolves. "Pity was driven down to the bottom of our hearts by the cold, like mercury in a thermometer."
Tens of thousands fell in exhaustion and froze to death. Thousands more who wandered off in search of food and shelter were cut down by marauding Cossacks or murdered by an enraged peasantry.
Smolensk to Krasnoye
A tattered remnant of 75,000 made their way into Smolensk at
the beginning of November. Napoleon had hoped to consolidate the
Grand Army here for the winter. But there was to be no respite
here, for news was received of two fresh Russian armies to the
west, closing in on Napoleon's path of retreat. Wittgenstein from
the north and Admiral Tchitchagov from the south were positioning
themselves like the two jaws of a beartrap to crush Napoleon before
he could get across the next major obstacle, the Berezina River.
On 9 November two Russian divisions captured Augereau's French
brigade of two thousand men at Lyakhovo on the road between Elnia
and Smolensk. Kutukov believed that this episode was peculiarly
significant, for it was the first time in the war that an entire
enemy unit had allowed itself to be taken prisoner.
On 12 November the first columns of the Grand Army trailed out
of Smolensk. Disorder was growing in the ranks; lack of horses
forced the abandonment of supply wagons and artillery.The corps
were more than usually strung out, enabling Miloradovich to practically
cut the army in two on the 15th, when he moved up from the south
with his 16,000-strong command and placed himself across the main
road over Krasnoye. Napoleon and the Imperial Guard, who had already
passed through in safety, were able to doubleback and fight their
way through the roadblock to free the trapped troops, but the
encounter cost the Grand Army 6,000 dead and wounded and about
20,000 prisoners.
Crossing the Berezina
More information about the Crossing of Berezina
In the last week of November the surviving Russian and Napoleonic
armies converged on the River Berezina. On the afternoon of the
25th, in the wake of a snowstorm, Napoleon arrived at the Berezina
crossing at Borissov to find the weather had played a cruel trick.
A week earlier the winter had seemed to be set in so firmly that
he had burned his pontoon train at Orsha, confident that he'd
be able to cross the frozen rivers dryshod. Now an unseasonable
thaw had turned the ice into drifting mush, and the Grand Army
was marooned on the east bank of the Berezina, looking across
an icy torrent 300 yards wide, its bridge burned in three different
places, irreparable in the face of heavy Russian fire from Tchitchagov's
army on the far bank.
Napoleon had 49,000 men fit enough to fight and 250 guns. Wittgenstein
with 30,000 men was sweeping in from the north, Tchitchagov with
34,000 men held he opposite bank, ready to contest any crossing,
while Kutusov with 80,000 men was moving up from the rear.
Napoleon decided to make the crossing upstream near the village
of Studienka north of Borissov, where the ford was only 100 yards
across. Two bridges were constructed by 400 pontoneers up to their
shoulders in the icy waters over a twenty-four hour span--a light
one for the infantry, a heavier one downstream for wagons and
cannon.
At one o'clock on 26 November 11,000 men began to cross the frail
wooden life-line. By four o'clock the larger bridge was ready,
and guns, wagons, and caissons rolled across. The crossing was
still in progress two days later when Wittgenstein arrived close
enough to bombard the bridges. Those remaining on the eastern
bank now pressed forward in desperation to cross. Discipline broke
down and troops, horses, and wagons in dense masses fought to
get to the bridge entrances at the river. Adding to the disorder,
one of the bridges collapsed under the weight of the guns, causing
a rush to the other bridge which was jammed up even more. Kutuzov's
troops arrived on the scene to find the areas around the two enemy
bridges "so obstructed with the bodies of men and horses
that at some points it was possible to cross the Berezina on foot."
By the morning of November 29 Napoleon had succeeded in bringing
all his fit troops across the bridges, at the cost of several
thousand killed or wounded in the fighting, and another twenty
thousand stragglers and refugees who were stranded and captured
on the east bank.
End of an Army
Napoleon left the banks of the Berezina with an army that was
still sixty thousand strong but now wholly without organization--nothing
in the shape of divisions, brigades, or regiments; cavalry, infantry,
artillery all mixed up in a formless mass. Not just the campaign
but the army Napoleon knew was lost beyond all hope of retrieval,
and on 5 December he left the command in the hands of Murat and
sped on by sledge to the Polish frontier, with the intent of reaching
Paris to inform and reassure the people concerning the disastrous
retreat.
The 'abandoned' army straggled on in an even more disordered and
desperate fashion towards Vilna, losing many men every hour to
the fury of the winter, the raiding Cossacks, and the slow-moving
pursuit of the Russian army. The road to the Russian frontier
now lay open, but it was a brutal path, instilling the most of
both physical and moral distress.
On 14 December Marshal Ney led the troops over the frontier at
Kovno, crossing the Niemen River that the Grand Army had poured
across in three long impressive columns six months before. The
campaign of 1812 was effectively at an end.
