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In the course of the ferocious battle for the flèches Bagration drew in reinforcements from both his right and his left. On the right this meant that some of the infantry of Nikolai Raevsky’s Seventh Corps, positioned just to the left of the Raevsky Redoubt, redeployed southwards towards Semenovskoe. Meanwhile on the far left of the Russian line Nikolai Tuchkov was forced to send one of his two infantry divisions under Petr Konovnitsyn to help Bagration.

As a result, Tuchkov was hard pressed when Prince Poniatowski’s Polish corps began its advance down the Old Smolensk Road towards the village of Utitsa. Fortunately for the Russians, Poniatowski had been forced to make a big detour to avoid getting lost in the forests, which suggests what kind of fate would have awaited Davout’s much larger force had he attempted his proposed flank attack. When Poniatowski did advance, his 10,000 men forced the outnumbered Tuchkov to fall back to a stronger position anchored by a hill just to the east of Utitsa.

For the rest of the day fierce but ultimately indecisive fighting continued around Utitsa and the Old Smolensk Road. The Poles were reinforced by most of Junot’s Westphalian corps. On the other side, Karl Baggohufvudt’s Second Corps arrived to rescue Tuchkov. Meanwhile in the Utitsa forest between the Old Smolensk Road and the open ground where the flèches had been constructed Prince Ivan Shakhovskoy’s jaeger regiments put up a tremendous fight, tying down a larger enemy force and, in the words of a German historian, showing ‘not only their courageous endurance but also a skill which Russian light infantry did not always and everywhere display’.56

Once Baggohufvudt arrived, the battle on the Russian far left became something of a sideshow. Given the relatively even balance of forces in the area, it was very unlikely that Poniatowski would succeed in pushing far down the Old Smolensk Road and into the Russian rear. Much more dangerous was the situation around the Raevsky Redoubt. If the French broke through here they would split the Russian line in two. They would also be within easy striking distance of the New Smolensk Road, Kutuzov’s key line of communication to the rear.

For more than two hours after the fall of Borodino the enemy’s artillery and skirmishers poured fire on the defenders of the Raevsky Redoubt, but no mass attack was made by the infantry of Eugeène de Beauharnais, who commanded the left wing of Napoleon’s army. When the order for the attack did finally come, its weight was too great for the redoubt’s defenders, who were driven off the mound. One problem for the Russians was that their artillery in the redoubt was running short of ammunition. In addition, the advancing columns were concealed by the dense clouds of smoke which clung around the redoubt in the still morning air. Panic resulted when the French infantry suddenly emerged out of the smoke and swarmed over the redoubt. Precise timings for the various episodes during the battle of Borodino are very difficult to establish. The one certainty as regards the attack on the redoubt is that it occurred shortly after Petr Bagration was wounded and after part of Nikolai Raevsky’s corps had left the area of the redoubt to go to his aid.57

On hearing the news that Bagration was a casualty, Kutuzov sent Aleksei Ermolov down to Second Army to help its remaining commanders and report back on the situation. Together with Ermolov rode Major-General Count Aleksandr Kutaisov, the overall commander of the artillery. Kutaisov was an able young artillerist, passionately committed to his profession. He was also handsome, kindly, charming and cultured, which helped to make him one of the most popular figures in the army. In this there was some irony since his grandfather, the first Count Kutaisov, was a universally loathed and barely literate former Turkish prisoner of war whom Paul I had made his close confidant and a count, partly to spite the Russian aristocracy.58

As Ermolov and Kutaisov were riding