Russia Against Napoleon_ The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace - Dominic Lieven [132]
Who or what caused the fire has always been a source of dispute. The one certain point is that neither Alexander nor Napoleon ordered the city to be burned. Rostopchin said before the city’s fall that the French would only conquer its ashes. He evacuated the 2,000 men of Moscow’s fire brigade and all its equipment. Cossack detachments from Kutuzov’s army burned one at least of the city’s quarters, following a scorched-earth policy of destroying all houses which the Russians had pursued ever since Napoleon passed Smolensk and invaded the Russian heartland. Kutuzov also ordered that the many remaining military stores should be set alight. Although French carelessness and plundering may have contributed to the city’s destruction, it was undoubtedly the Russians who were most responsible for what happened. What mattered at the time, however, was the perception that Napoleon was to blame and that the city’s destruction was a huge sacrifice to Russian patriotism and Europe’s liberation.77
Maybe the fire helped to distract French attention from Kutuzov’s flank march from the Riazan to the Kaluga road. In normal circumstances this would have been a risky undertaking since it took the Russian columns right across the front of Napoleon’s army in Moscow. In fact, however, a combination of French exhaustion and the Cossack rearguard’s skill meant that it was some time before Napoleon even realized that his enemy was no longer en route to Riazan.
Once installed in his camp near Tarutino on the Old Kaluga Road, Kutuzov was in a strong position. He could cover the arms works and stores at Briansk and above all the crucial arms factories and workshops at Tula. At the news of Moscow’s fall many artisans in the Tula arms works fled back to their native villages. Major-General Voronov, the commandant of the Tula arms works, reported that if he was forced to evacuate Tula it would be six months before production could resume, which would have been a disaster for the Russian war effort. The field-marshal was able to reassure him that Tula was now covered by the Russian army and in no immediate danger.78
At Tarutino Kutuzov was excellently positioned to send out raiding parties to harass the long French lines of communication stretching westwards from Moscow all the way back to Smolensk. He was also best placed for communication with Tormasov and Chichagov. Since his food supplies and reinforcements were mostly coming up through Kaluga from the fertile and populous southern provinces, his new deployment gave him every opportunity to feed his men and horses and rebuild their strength. To understand how this was done, however, means we must turn aside from military operations for a moment and look instead at the mobilization of Russia’s home front.
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The Home Front in 1812
Napoleon’s plan had been to wage a limited ‘cabinet’ war against Alexander I. The French emperor might contemplate wiping Prussia off the map but he believed that it was neither in his power nor in his interests to destroy the Russian Empire. Instead he hoped to weaken Russia, force her back into the Continental System, and make her accept French domination of Europe. Far from desiring to drive Alexander off his throne or throw Russian society into revolution and chaos, Napoleon looked to the tsar to agree peace conditions and then enforce them on Russian society. Partly for this reason, he stressed his personal respect for Alexander during the 1812 campaign and made clear his view that the true initiator of the war was Britain and