a general... then he should go back to the Tuileries and let us be
generals for him.'
The first breakthrough for the French came with the fall of Utitsa,
during which Bagration was mortally wounded. But a lull allowed the
Russians to move men across and hold the line at prepared positions.
Predictably, however, the centrepiece of the entire battle was the titanic
struggle for the Great Redoubt, which went on in more or less intense
form from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. Eugene managed to take Borodino village but
could make no headway against the Redoubt. During his first full-scale
assault on it, a murderous struggle developed. Eyewitnesses said that
cannonballs and shells fell like hail and the smoke was so thick that one
could only rarely make out the enemy. Repulsed, the trench fell back
while the first massive cavalry battle of the day engaged attention.
Napoleon decided to commit his penultimate reserves and unleashed
Murat but he too failed to make a breakthrough. It was not until early
afternoon that Eugene's second onslaught at last made some ground when
a cuirassier division finally broke into the rear of the Redoubt. After a
second great cavalry battle the French held on to their gains; the whole of
the original Russian line was taken but Kutusov simply retreated to the
next ridge and formed up again.
This was the moment when Napoleon could have won an outright
victory by sending in the Guard. But, despite many urgent entreaties
from the marshals he refused to do so. The usual explanation is his
illness, but there was more to it than that. The Emperor never liked to use
the Guard, whatever the circumstances, almost as though he were a
Corsican peasant with one final secret hoard of gold that the tax collector
knew nothing of. In this particular case, other considerations weighed. He
felt that he was too far from his main base of operations to take any risks
which was partly why he had vetoed Davout's flanking movement. And,
knowing well that even victory now would be no Austerlitz or Friedland,
he hesitated to commit the flower of his army, reckoning that there must
be at least one more battle to come.
He may also have been appalled at the scale of slaughter he had already
witnessed. Some authorities claim that Borodino was the worst single
day's fighting in all history. The Grande Armee alone fired go,ooo artillery
rounds and two million infantry cartridges. The Russians lost 44,ooo
dead and wounded and the French 35,ooo, though some military
historians have claimed this is a conservative estimate and the true total
for the day's casualties is roo,ooo; it seems that initial estimates of death
rolls in Russian warfare are always timid, so that the higher figure is
marcin
(Marcin)
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