The dense Russian deployment was designed to force Napoleon to fight a battle of attrition. The cramped battlefield would give his units little room to manoeuvre or to exploit tactical successes. It would in the most literal sense cramp Napoleon’s own genius. The price to be paid, as the Russian commanders knew, was very high casualties. In addition, committing oneself to a battle of attrition more or less precluded any chance of a striking Russian victory. With Napoleon present in person and his army considerably outnumbering the Russians as regards trained troops, such a victory was in any case unlikely. In many ways therefore the battle of Borodino was a microcosm of the 1812 campaign as a whole, during which the Russian high command had forced Napoleon to fight the kind of war that suited them but not him.
History had accustomed Russian troops to fighting on terrain that gave them few natural advantages. By tradition therefore they were more inclined than most European armies to build field fortifications to strengthen a position. This they did at Borodino but with only limited success. The strongest and most professionally constructed fortifications were on the far north of the Russian line, beyond the village of Gorki. No fighting occurred in this area, so the fortifications were largely wasted. The two fortifications which did play a significant role in the battle were the much weaker Bagration flèches and the Raevsky Redoubt. Though the redoubt in particular was a key element in the Russian line of defence, one has to be very cautious in taking French descriptions of these supposedly formidable fortifications at face value.42
Neither the flèches nor the Raevsky Redoubt were built by engineer officers. All the small cadre of army engineers were assigned on other tasks as were most of the pioneer companies, which in any case even in principle were only 500 strong. The Moscow militiamen who did most of the construction work on the Raevsky Redoubt had no clue about how to build fortifications and were impeded by the stony ground and lack of implements. Matters were not helped by an argument between Toll and Bennigsen about how best to construct fortifications on the mound. Karl Oppermann, the army’s senior and most authoritative engineer, devoted most of his attention to fortresses in 1812 and had not yet rejoined the main army in time for the battle. In addition, however, there were delays in finding spades and pickaxes for the militiamen. Work therefore began in the late afternoon of 6 September and continued through the night. Ensign Dementii Bogdanov and his small command of pioneers only arrived to help with the construction of the redoubt shortly before midnight. It was far from completed when the battle began on the morning of 7 September.43
As a result, according to the official history of the military engineering corps, there were all sorts of elementary mistakes even in the redoubt, let alone the flèches. The mound on which the Raevsky Redoubt was constructed is in any case small and low. In the end eighteen guns with one battalion of infantry as a covering force was all that could be squashed into the position. When one walks over the mound, it seems remarkable that the Russians managed to pack in even this many men. The slope up to the front of the redoubt was very gentle, the slope in its rear only a little less so. The militiamen had done their best to make up for these weaknesses but with limited success. One problem was that ‘the counter-escarpment was much lower than the escarpment, and the ditch in front of the redoubt was completely inadequate’. Of course, the militiamen had no idea how to use fascines, gabions and other elements of the pioneer’s art. Through lack of time, embrasures were only constructed for ten guns. One result of this was that the artillery within the redoubt could not cover part of the approaches. The area in front of the redoubt was swept by the fire of Russian batteries of First Army to the north and Second Army to the south but almost all these guns were deployed in the open and subjected to devastating enemy counter-battery fire. All of this, together with the massive artillery bombardment which it suffered on 7 September, helps to explain how the redoubt could finally be stormed by cavalry.44
