him, why had not similar considerations ruled out the march on Moscow
after Borodino? As it was, the battle of Maloyaroslavets followed by the
diversion in route to the outward itinerary meant that a week had been
lost for no good reason; this lost week was to be crucial later on.
Having handed Kutusov a great strategic victory on a plate, Napoleon
managed to coax his army to complete the fifty miles from Maloyarosla
vets to Mojaisk in two days (27-28 October). Next day they marched
through the village of Borodino, skirting the battlefield. Psychologically,
this had a disastrous affect on morale. Although the men tried to shield
their eyes they could not avoid the sight of the 3o,ooo corpses on which
wolves had fed, the immense tomb-like open grave into which bodies had
been shovelled, the wheeling of carrion crows in the sky or the stench of
myriad rotting corpses. At 2 a.m. on 30 October Napoleon asked
Caulaincourt for a prognosis. He replied that things could only get worse:
the weather would grow colder and the Russians stronger. The self
deceiving Emperor argued lamely that the superior native intelligence of
the French would allow them to prevail.
Kutusov's failure to move in with his vastly superior numbers and
finish off the French has forever puzzled military historians. Kutusov has
his claque of admirers who see him as a brilliant Fabius to Bonaparte's
Hannibal, but there has always been a revisionist point of view that sees
him as bumbling and inept, slow and ponderous by nature rather than
design. The most interesting suggestion is that Kutusov believed the
destruction of the Grande Armee would ultimately benefit England more
than Russia and so, as an Anglophobe who suspected the British of being
an ungrateful, unreliable and treacherous ally, he refrained from
delivering the coup de grace. Those who champion Kutusov sometimes
advance the unlikely suggestion that he was so keen to avoid casualties
among his own men that he preferred to allow starvation, panic,
demoralization and 'General Winter' to do his job for him.
The most sinister interpretation is that Kutusov did not want to take
prisoners so he allowed the peasant guerrillas to exact their own grisly
revenge; it is significant that he remained insouciant when Lauriston
complained to him about atrocities by the partisans. Russian cynicism has
since been rewritten in the form of a myth about a 'people's war',
supposedly analogous to that visited on the Germans by Tito's partisans
in 1942-44. Nothing could be less historically sound. Class antagonism in
early nineteenth-century Russia was so acute that the nobility would have
been terrified of a genuine people's war, since they would, rightly,
identify themselves as next in the line of fire after the French. The thing
that most terrified the oligarchy of Moscow and St Petersburg in r8r2
marcin
(Marcin)
#1