Battle of Borodino
The bloodiest single day of the Napoleonic wars was fought seventy miles west of Moscow on 7 September 1812. Kutuzov had taken command of the Russian armies three weeks earlier with instructions, in effect, to stop retreating, and chose ground where he could not be outflanked easily and fortified it with earthworks — the Raevsky redoubt in the centre and the Bagration flèches on the left. Napoleon had perhaps 130,000 men and 587 guns against about 120,000 and 640, and he needed a decisive result because his army was starving and shrinking daily. Davout proposed a wide flanking march and was overruled in favour of a frontal attack. The battle was ten hours of massed artillery and repeated infantry and cavalry assaults on the same two positions. The flèches changed hands seven or eight times, the redoubt was taken by cavalry riding into the embrasures, and the smoke was thick enough that neither commander could see much of it. Napoleon refused to commit the Imperial Guard, saying he would not destroy his last reserve 800 leagues from Paris. Around 70,000 men were killed or wounded, and some fifty generals died. The Russians withdrew in good order overnight, which made it a French victory that decided nothing. Kutuzov gave up Moscow a week later without another battle, on the argument that losing the city was not losing Russia, and the city burned. Napoleon left it on 19 October. Napoleon called it the most terrible of all his battles, in which the French showed themselves worthy of victory and the Russians of being invincible. Tolstoy devoted a large part of War and Peace to arguing that neither commander controlled any of it.
- Year: 1812 CE
- Category: Military
