Even leaving aside the fact that Napoleon could not see into the future, there were, however, powerful arguments against stopping in Smolensk. Napoleon was very unwilling to spend more than one campaigning season away from Paris. As we have seen, Chernyshev had pointed this out before 1812 and linked it to the nature of the Bonapartist regime and the challenges it faced. After noting a number of these challenges (the economy, the Pope, Spain, the elites) the leading contemporary French expert on Napoleon concludes that ‘Chernyshev was correct when he reported to his government that Napoleon would take a major domestic risk if the war against Russia was prolonged’. If this judgement can be made now in calm retrospect, how much greater must Napoleon’s feeling of insecurity have been in 1812? He had seen the enormous instability of French politics in the 1790s. He understood how very conditional was the French elite’s loyalty to him. He knew how much his throne owed to victory and to chance.53
He also knew that consolidating a secure base in the western borderlands would be difficult. Lithuania and Belorussia found it hard to feed armies even in peacetime, and especially in winter and spring. The Russian First Army was far smaller than Napoleon’s forces and by no means all of it had wintered in the western borderlands in 1811–12. Even so it had been forced to quarter itself across a huge area to secure adequate supplies. This was particularly true of the cavalry. The five regiments of Baron Korff’s Second Cavalry Corps had been quartered all the way from the Prussian frontier to central Ukraine in order to feed their horses.54
Matters were hardly likely to be better in the winter of 1812 after a year in which the region had been plundered by two armies. The Russian light cavalry was superior to the French even in the early summer of 1812. As Napoleon had discovered in 1806–7, however, the Cossacks revealed their true potential in winter, when they could operate in conditions which destroyed regular light cavalry. With the full manpower of the Cossack regions now being mobilized by the Russians, the French would face huge difficulties in securing their base or feeding their horses and even their men in the winter of 1812.
Of course, if Napoleon had stopped at Smolensk his entire army would not have been destroyed, as happened after his botched invasion of the Russian heartland. But the destruction of Napoleon’s army was by no means inevitable just because he advanced from Smolensk. Other factors – and mistakes – intervened.
In August 1812 Napoleon would have preferred not to be sitting in Smolensk with an undefeated Russian army still in the field. His strategy had been rooted in the correct belief that if he could destroy First and Second armies Russia would lose any hope of ultimate victory. He had chased the Russians all the way to Smolensk in pursuit of this strategy but they had frustrated him. One political calculation made by Napoleon was correct: the Russians could not surrender Moscow without a fight. Moscow was two weeks’ march from Smolensk. Since he had come this far in pursuit of a battle, it might well seem foolish to give up now with the prize so nearly in his grasp. Operating in the rich Moscow region in the midst of the harvest season, he would have no serious problems feeding his men and horses so long as they kept on the move. No doubt to advance was a gamble, but Napoleon was a great gambler. He was also right to believe that in August 1812 stopping in Smolensk was by no means a safe bet. So he decided to push on towards Moscow.
Borodino and the Fall of Moscow
As Napoleon’s main body advanced into central Russia in the second half of August 1812 the situation on its northern and southern flanks began to turn against the French. In part this reflected the enormous area across which Napoleon’s armies were now being forced to operate. In the north, Marshal MacDonald, the descendant of a Scottish Jacobite émigré, had been given the task of covering Napoleon’s left flank, clearing Courland and capturing Riga. In the south, the Austrians and Saxons were facing General Aleksandr Tormasov’s Third Army on the borders of Ukraine. More than 1,000 kilometres separated these forces. The distance between Napoleon’s spearhead beyond Smolensk and his bases in East Prussia and Poland was even greater. Inevitably, as distance and sickness took their toll, his forces began to thin out. Napoleon could not be strong everywhere.
