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nobility. To complicate matters still further, frustrated and humiliated, the officer corps was rebellious and dissatisfied. ‘If we persist in the pattern of retreat chosen by Barclay de Tolly . . . Moscow will fall, peace will be signed there, and we shall all march off to India to fight for the French . . . If I have to die, let it rather be here!’ raged one cavalry officer.35 Just as irritated was Boris von Uxkull: We are running away like hares. Panic has seized everyone. Our courage is crushed; our march looks like a funeral procession. My heart is heavy. We are abandoning all our rich and fruitful land to the fury of an enemy who spares nothing in his cruelty, it is said . . . One hears that they are burning and desecrating the churches, that the weaker sex . . . are sacrificed to their brutality and the satisfaction of their infernal lusts. Children, greybeards - it is all the same to them - all perish beneath their blows.36

And, finally, having just triumphed over Speransky, whom the tsar had been persuaded to send into internal exile as a dangerous radical in May 1812, the ‘easterners’ in the Russian court and administration had since the start of the campaign been looking for a way to get rid of Barclay, who, though extremely competent, was seen as a foreigner. Aiding this were the conscious efforts of the regime to whip up a mood of militant ‘Great Russian’ nationalism. For weeks there were insinuations of cowardice and treason, and in the wake of the fall of Smolensk Alexander finally cracked. Having recently travelled to Moscow and promised, amidst scenes of great patriotic enthusiasm, that the city would never be taken by the French, he was faced with an increasingly dangerous situation:

The spirit of the army was affected by a sense of mortification, and all ranks loudly and boldly complained: discontent was general and discipline relaxing. The nobles, the merchants and the population at large were indignant at seeing city after city, government [i.e. province] after government, abandoned, till the enemy’s guns were almost heard at Moscow.37

On 20 July, the tsar took the only step possible and appointed the most prominent soldier in the Russian army of Russian ethnic stock as commander-in-chief, in the person of the hero of Rustchuk, Mikhail Kutuzov, Alexander also hinting that he would adopt a more aggressive posture.

Oddly enough, Kutuzov, whom Alexander had never forgiven for Austerlitz, was never given any formal order to fight the French. But in the circumstances he had little option, and therefore deployed his army across the Moscow highroad at Borodino in a solid defensive position. By the time the French reached him, Napoleon’s army amounted to no more than 130,000 men. Yet the Russians, who had 121,000 men, were still outnumbered, and for a moment a crushing victory seemed to be in the emperor’s grasp: Kutuzov had not only deployed his army in such a position that it was in grave danger of being outflanked and trapped, but also arranged its command in a manner that can only be described as bizarre. Fortunately for him, when the main battle began on 7 September, Napoleon’s generalship was even worse. For no very good reason the emperor rejected the idea of envelopment, and instead settled upon a series of massive frontal assaults that could not but lead to heavy casualties. With such a battle plan, the only hope of victory was that the Russian army would break in panic, but in fact the French were confronted with the most obstinate resistance. Gradually, however, the Russians were overborne, and by late afternoon it was clear that Napoleon had only to throw in the 18,000 men of the Imperial Guard, who constituted his last reserve, to win the day. But the emperor was tired and ill, and perhaps because of this failed to act. All the fighting achieved, therefore, was to prostrate both sides more or less equally, and allow the Russians to slip away yet again. It had been a terrible day. As Caulaincourt remembered:

Never had a battle cost so many generals and officers . . . There were