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peasants, usually so friendly, hospitable and patient, had been turned into ‘veritable tigers’ by the depredations of French foraging parties and marauders. Sir Robert Wilson recalls that enemy soldiers who fell into the peasants’ hands suffered ‘every imaginable previous mode of torture’. The narratives of torture, mutilation and burial alive might be put down to foreign prejudice, were they not confirmed by many Russian sources too. In military terms the main significance of this ‘people’s war’ was that it made it even more difficult for the French to forage. Any large and static army had trouble feeding its horses in this era. Napoleon’s cavalry had suffered badly at Borodino, but it was the weeks spent in Moscow with ever-diminishing supplies of forage that destroyed most of his mounted regiments and devastated his artillery horses. Foraging expeditions had to travel ever greater distances with larger and larger escorts. Even so they often returned empty-handed, having lost men to ambushes and exhausted their horses without reward.5

In the classic style of guerrilla war, the peasants and the army’s partisan units helped each other. The partisan commanders often distributed arms to the peasantry and came to their assistance when large enemy requisition parties were spotted. The peasants in turn provided the intelligence, local guides and extra manpower which enabled the cavalry to track down and ambush enemy detachments and to evade capture by superior forces. Partisan units operated along all the roads leading out from Moscow. Already by mid-October they were willing to take on quite large enemy detachments. On 20 October, for example, Denis Davydov’s partisans attacked an enemy transport column near Viazma which was escorted by no less than three regiments, capturing most of the wagons and five hundred men. During the weeks that Napoleon spent in Moscow his communications with Smolensk and Paris were harried but never cut. Had he chosen to spend the winter in the city, however, it would have been a very different matter.6

Denis Davydov was one of the first partisans, having persuaded a doubtful Kutuzov on the eve of Borodino to detach him with a small band of cavalry and Cossacks to raid enemy communications. Davydov’s success in the following weeks won him reinforcements and helped to legitimize the whole idea of partisan warfare, which was new to Russian generals. Karl von Toll in particular urged this new form of war on Kutuzov and the commander-in-chief quickly grasped its potential. Davydov captured or destroyed enemy supply columns, routed detachments sent to gather food, liberated many hundreds of Russian prisoners of war and gathered useful intelligence. He also punished traitors and collaborators, whom he describes as a very small minority. Davydov’s weapons were speed, surprise, daring and excellent local sources of information. His bands struck out of nowhere, dispersed and then regrouped secretly for further attacks.

Davydov was not only one of the most successful of the partisans but also the most famous and romantic. A well-known poet, he was immortalized by his friend Aleksandr Pushkin thus: ‘Hussar-poet, you’ve sung of bivouacs / Of the licence of devil-may-care carousals / Of the fearful charm of battle / And of the curls of your moustache.’ Well after his death, Davydov became more famous than ever as the figure on whom Tolstoy based his character Denisov, the charming and generous hussar who loses his heart to Natasha Rostov and in whose band of partisans her brother Petia loses his life in the autumn of 1812.7

The most notorious partisan commander was Captain Alexander Figner, who commanded an artillery battery at the battle of Borodino. The fall of Moscow left Figner lost in gloom and determined to revenge himself on the French for his country’s humiliation. The battery’s second-in-command described him as ‘good-looking, of medium height: he was a true son of the North, muscular, round-faced, pale and with light-brown hair. His big, bright eyes were full of liveliness and he had a powerful voice.