TWO HUNDRED years ago this morning, Napoleon watched the sun rise over a village in western Russia and declared it was the “sun of Austerlitz” returned.
He was alluding to one of his greatest victories, seven years earlier, when the French advance was disguised by fog until, at a key moment, the sun burst through and lit the way to victory. To this day, the fame of the Battle of Austerlitz is commemorated by, among other things, the name of a railway station in Paris.
But there is no Parisian railway station named after Borodino, the village near Moscow where Bonaparte’s army fought on September 7th, 1812. Not that they lost the battle. In fact, strictly speaking, they won. Or at least they ended the day in possession of the field, from which the Russians had withdrawn.
It’s just that, as the Greek general Pyrrhus had discovered two millennia before them, the cost of a battle can sometimes render negligible the difference between victory and defeat. For Napoleon, Borodino was the beginning of the end.
The extent of the day’s slaughter was put in perspective by one modern historian who equated the death toll to “a fully-loaded [Boeing] 747 crashing, with no survivors, every five minutes for eight hours”. The Russians bore the worst of it, losing 50,000 men. Added to the 30,000 of so French dead, that made for a combined total far worse than there would be at Waterloo.
But the Russians had deeper reserves, whereas Napoleon’s forces had already been drastically reduced by their epic march eastwards. Of the more than half a million men with whom he launched the invasion of Russia, he could muster 130,000 at Borodino. And by the end of his ignominious retreat from Moscow three months later, barely one in 20 of the original force remained.
TO BE INSTANTLYobliterated by a cannon-ball was far from the worst fate a solider could suffer at Borodino. Along with the dead, there were appalling injuries, and medical care was desperately overstretched. It was also, of necessity, crude. Such was the risk of infection that amputation was a ready resort. Napoleon's famous physician Dr Larrey is said to have carried out 200 amputations in a single day alone.
Many of those who did not die from their injuries were later finished off by starvation and the cold. In his memoirs, Larrey noted that some of the initial survivors hastened their ends by eating snow or drinking ice-cold water to ease the hunger. (In true French style, he praised the effects of wine and coffee for keeping his own stomach distracted.) Larrey also recorded, with grim logic, that bald men and those who hadn’t worn fur caps died sooner than others. As, for less obvious reasons, did pale-skinned northern Europeans. Not only did they lose body heat faster, he suggested, they were mentally predisposed to the worst, resigning themselves to their fate more quickly than the more emotionally resilient southerners.
Napoleon’s own health at the time was not good. In War and Peace (which dates the battle to August 26th, as it was in the old Julian calendar then used in Russia), Tolstoy describes the pampered emperor dressing in his bedroom, on the eve of battle, looking “puffy and yellow”, although no less pleased with himself than usual, as one valet brushes his chest hair and another rubs him with eau de cologne.
His growing list of ailments by then included a difficulty urinating. And in general, his health has been blamed for what seems to have been uncharacteristically passive behaviour during the battle.
After his usual stirring address to the troops – “May posterity recall with pride your achievement on this day! And may they say of each of you: he was at the great battle before Moscow!” – he greeted the battle’s reverses with an apparent torpor from which he couldn’t rouse himself.
Later, when the two sides had fought each other to exhaustion, Tolstoy has him touring the blood-drenched field in unusually downcast mood but nevertheless congratulating himself (misleadingly) that for every prostrate French body, there were “five Russians”.
As for the author, the chaos of the day’s events provoked a long philosophical reflection on one of the book’s main themes. The battle had proved Tolstoy’s theory that history is not the creation of great men, as Napoleon was especially wont to assume, but rather the combined result of countless small chains of cause and effect, incapable of analysis and beyond the control of so-called rulers.
Whether the Russians should have bothered trying to stop Napoleon at Borodino is still debated. They paid a very high cost in mortally wounding his campaign there.
In any case, after making that brief but bloody stand, the Russians successfully resumed the now-famous tactic – retreating constantly into the depths of a vast country, burning crops (and Moscow) along the way, and waiting for the decisive intervention of their greatest military ally, General Winter.