Academics specializing in military history tell us with a perfectly straight face that Kutuzov ought to have turned his army down the Kaluga road long before Fili, and that someone actually suggested such a plan. But an army commander has before him, especially in a crisis, not one plan, but dozens of them. And each of them, although well founded in terms of strategy and tactics, contradicts all the others. It seems simple enough: all the commander has to do is pick one of them, but even this is beyond him. Time and events will not wait. Imagine him receiving a suggestion on the 28th to cross over to the Kaluga road, but on the instant up gallops an adjutant from Miloradovich asking whether they should immediately engage with the French or fall back. An instant response and clear instructions are required. But an order to fall back would mean not turning off to the Kaluga road. After the adjutant comes the quartermaster asking where to take the stores, and the chief medical officer wants to know where to send the wounded, then a courier rides in from Petersburg with a letter from the Tsar ruling out any possibility of abandoning Moscow, and here is one of the commander’s rivals, anxious to undermine his authority (there’s never any shortage of people like that) with a new scheme diametrically opposed to the plan of cutting across to the Kaluga road. Besides which, the commander’s own expenditure of energy demands sleep and sustenance. But a worthy general who has been bypassed when the medals were being given out has come to complain, and the local inhabitants are begging for protection. Meanwhile the officer sent out to inspect the locality comes back with a report totally different from the one just submitted by another officer, while a spy, a prisoner and a general who has been out on reconnaissance all give completely different descriptions of the enemy’s position. People who forget, or who never understood, circumstances like these under which any commander is inevitably compelled to operate will bring up, say, the position of the troops at Fili and use it to assume that on the 1st of September the commander-in-chief was at liberty to decide whether or not to abandon Moscow, whereas, given the position of the Russian army only three or four miles from Moscow, there was no question to be decided. When
CHAPTER 3
The Russian army, pulling back from Borodino, halted at Fili. Yermolov, who had ridden out to take stock of the position, came over to the commander-in-chief.
‘There is no possibility of fighting in this position,’ he said. Kutuzov looked at him in some surprise, and got him to repeat what he had said. When he had done so, he offered his hand.
‘Give me your hand, my dear fellow,’ he said, and, turning it over to feel his pulse, he went on, ‘You’re not well, dear boy. Think what you are saying.’
