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There remained the difficult task of getting an exhausted and somewhat demoralized army with all its baggage and some of its wounded through the streets of a great city. With the enemy on their heels this could be an extremely dangerous enterprise. Matters were not helped by the fact that the news that Moscow was to be abandoned had broken on the civilian population very late. As the army passed through Moscow on 14 September a mass civilian exodus was still under way. One staff officer described the scene as ‘not the passage of an army but the relocation of whole tribes from one corner of the earth to another’. Barclay did his usual indefatigable best to impose some order on this chaos. Officers were posted at key intersections to direct the troops. Cavalry rode down the sides of the columns to stop desertion and plundering. Barclay himself oversaw arrangements.73

The true hero of the occasion, however, was Miloradovich, who was now commanding the Russian rearguard. His opposite number in the French advance guard was usually Joachim Murat, and the two men had much in common. Both generals were showmen who loved splendid clothes and the grand gesture. It would be an understatement to say that neither man was an intellectual but Miloradovich was not only honourable and generous but on occasion surprisingly modest and shrewd. He certainly summed up the essence of the present danger and with some bravura sent his aide-de-camp to Murat to suggest a one-day truce so that the Russians could depart, leaving the city intact. In the event that this request was refused, Miloradovich threatened to fight in the streets and turn Moscow into a ruin. Even more than most of the French generals, Murat was longing for comfortable quarters, peace and a return home. Perhaps lulled by Napoleon’s own illusions, he saw the fall of Moscow as a prelude to peace. All this disposed him not just to accept Miloradovich’s offer of a truce but also subsequently to extend it for a further twelve hours. As a result of Miloradovich’s cheeky initiative, the Russian army emerged from Moscow almost unscathed.74

In principle Kutuzov might have retreated out of Moscow in a number of directions. Had he turned north-west, for instance, he could have blocked the road to Tver and Petersburg, whose population was bound to be in an uproar at the news of Moscow’s fall. In fact he retreated south-eastwards down the road to Riazan. This was in many ways the safest exit from Moscow in the face of an enemy who was entering the city from the west. On 17 September, however, after crossing the river Moskva at Borovsk, Kutuzov turned sharply westwards. Marching rapidly he crossed the roads to Kashira and Tula before turning southwards down the Old Kaluga Road which led out from Moscow to the south-west.

Meanwhile on 15 September Napoleon entered Moscow and set up his headquarters in the Kremlin. That very day fires started in many parts of the city. Moscow burned for six days. Three-quarters of its buildings were destroyed. In all, during the summer and autumn of 1812, 270 million rubles’ worth of private property was destroyed in the city and province of Moscow, an astronomical sum for that era. The overwhelming majority of the civilian population had already fled but those who remained were driven from their homes, made destitute and sometimes killed. Of the more than 30,000 wounded soldiers who had been in Moscow, all but 6,000 were evacuated in time, thanks above all to the efforts of James Wylie, the efficient head of the army’s medical services. But very many of those who were left behind died in the flames. When the Russians recaptured Moscow they found and burned 12,000 corpses.75

Even before the fire began the Russians had also been forced to abandon vast stocks of military materials in the city, including more than 70,000 muskets, though admittedly half of these were in need of repair. Moscow had been the rear base for Kutuzov’s army and by the time the news came that the city was to be