Russia Against Napoleon_ The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace - Dominic Lieven [119]
What Kutuzov got was a position near the village of Borodino, 124 kilometres from Moscow. For the Russian staff officers who initially viewed this position from the main highway – the so-called New Smolensk Road – first impressions were very good. Troops standing on either side of the highway would have their right flank secured by the river Moskva and their front protected by the steep banks of the river Kolocha. Problems became much greater when one looked carefully at the left flank of this position, south of the main road. Initially the Russian army took up position on a line which ran from Maslovo north of the road, through Borodino on the highroad itself and down to the hill at Shevardino on the left flank. The centre of the position could be strengthened by the mound just to the south-east of Borodino which became the famous Raevsky Redoubt. Meanwhile the left could be anchored at Shevardino, which Bagration began to fortify.
Closer inspection soon revealed to Bagration that the position on the left assigned to his army was very vulnerable. A ravine in his rear impeded communications. More important, another road – the so-called Old Smolensk Road – cut in sharply behind his line from the west, joining with the main highway to the rear of the Russian position. An enemy pushing down this road could easily roll up Bagration’s flank and block the army’s line of retreat to Moscow. Faced by this danger, Bagration’s army began to withdraw to a new position which abandoned Shevardino and turned sharply southwards from Borodino in a straight line to the village of Utitsa on the Old Smolensk Road. On 5 September Bagration’s troops at Shevardino fought off fierce French attacks in order to cover the redeployment to this new line, losing 5,000–6,000 men and inflicting perhaps slightly fewer casualties on the enemy.37
The new line was certainly safer because it blocked the Old Smolensk Road. To do this, however, it had been forced to abandon the strong position at Shevardino and instead to stretch across terrain between Borodino and Utitsa which offered no help to the troops that were defending it. In addition, by turning sharply southwards near Borodino and the Raevsky Redoubt the Russian line now became a sort of salient with all the troops between Borodino and the left of Bagration’s line beyond the village of Semenovskoe vulnerable to French artillery crossfire.
During the battle of Borodino on 7 September the great majority of the Russian army was packed into this small salient. This included five of the seven Russian infantry corps, which alone added up to 70,000 men. In addition, there were more than 10,000 cavalry in the ‘salient’. Even the other two Russian infantry corps – Baggohufvudt’s Second and Tuchkov’s Third – detached half of their men to defend this area. The Russian deployment was not just on a very narrow front but also extremely dense. The infantry divisions were drawn up in three lines. In front were the jaegers. Behind them came two lines of infantry, deployed in so-called ‘Battalion Columns’. These columns had a frontage of one company and a depth of four. Not far to the rear of the infantry divisions stood the cavalry, with the army’s reserve units deployed behind them but still often within range of Napoleon’s heavy artillery, to which the six or even sometimes seven lines of Russian troops offered a fine target.38
To explain what all this means to an English-language readership it is perhaps useful to make comparisons with the familiar landscape of Waterloo. Napoleon brought 246 guns to Waterloo,