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By Root 3830 0

down country lanes. The historian of the general staff claims, not altogether implausibly, that there were simply too few staff officers available for all the tasks in hand in the immediate aftermath of the evacuation of Smolensk. Some had been sent ahead to look for quarters for the following night and others had been dispatched to find possible battlefields on the road to Moscow where the army might make a stand. It is certainly evident from staff officers’ memoirs that their corps was seriously overstretched in the first half of the 1812 campaign with very responsible jobs sometimes being allocated to junior and inexperienced officers. That was no doubt the inevitable price of having to build the general staff corps at such speed in the years just before the war.49

Whatever the reasons, the result was confusion. Only one-third of Nikolai Tuchkov’s column – mostly made up of his own Third Corps – set off at the right time and took the correct road. Even they faced many obstacles in trying to get artillery and thousands of cavalry down lanes and over bridges designed to carry peasant carts. Next to move was Ostermann-Tolstoy’s Fourth Corps, but they started late, lost track of Tuchkov’s men and completely lost their way, splitting up into separate groups and wandering around through the night down a number of country lanes.

This threw into confusion the final third of the column, Karl Baggohufvudt’s Second Corps. The last elements of Second Corps, commanded by Prince Eugen of Württemberg, could only set off far behind schedule at one in the morning of 19 August. Since Second Corps was following Ostermann-Tolstoy they inevitably got lost too and wandered in their own circle. At roughly six o’clock in the morning of 19 August Prince Eugen and his men found themselves near the village of Gedeonovo less than 2 kilometres from the Smolensk suburbs and in full view of Marshal Ney’s corps, whose bands they could hear playing rousing music to get the men from their bivouacs.

Disaster loomed. Ney’s corps far outnumbered the three infantry regiments and handful of cavalry and guns which Eugen commanded. Most of the rest of Fourth and Second corps were still wandering around in the forests and would be routed and cut off from the Moscow road should Ney advance and push Eugen aside. Fortunately, Barclay himself turned up – completely by accident – at the point of crisis and began making arrangements to block any advance by Ney.

The commander-in-chief will not have been overjoyed to find that his army’s fate rested in the hands of by far its youngest and least experienced division commander. The 24-year-old Eugen held his rank because he was Empress Marie’s favourite nephew and Alexander’s first cousin. Barclay disliked aristocratic amateurs and was suspicious of Eugen’s relatives and friends at court. No doubt the decent but rather solemn Barclay saw the lively young prince, whose pastimes included writing plays and operas, as a terrible dilettante. In fact, however, Eugen was to prove one of Russia’s best generals in 1812–14. He had received a thorough military education, had seen a little of war in 1807 and against the Turks, and was to prove himself a courageous, resolute and intelligent commander in the campaigns of 1812–14. The battle outside Smolensk on 19 July was to be his first real test and he passed it well.

Luckily for Eugen, Ney was as surprised to see the Russians as they were to see him. It took him three hours to begin his attack. Even then, Eugen recalled, large numbers of French troops never moved from their camp. During these three hours Eugen could post his three regiments in good positions behind breastworks and bushes in the woods. Russian infantry of the line did not always perform well in a light infantry role but on the morning of 19 August the men of the Tobolsk, Wilmanstrand and Beloozero regiments fought like heroes, beating off repeated French attacks for just long enough for reinforcements to hurry through the forest to the sound of the guns. When Barclay finally ordered a retreat, Eugen was able