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had forced Victor to march to the support of Saint-Cyr and Oudinot, however, leaving the city with a feeble garrison, far too weak to protect the food-stores or impose order on the arriving horde of desperate soldiers from Moscow. Even the day before the main body of the Grande Armée arrived a senior commissariat officer in Smolensk was predicting disaster. Marauders were already trying to storm the magazines and he had almost no troops to stop them. Subsequently he wrote that the ‘regiments’ entering the city looked like convicts or lunatics and had lost all traces of discipline. The Guards took far more than their share, whereas those corps which arrived last received a pittance. Amidst the chaos, food which could have lasted a week was devoured in a day. Stores of food and spirits were stormed and looted, with his own men overwhelmed and often deserting in droves.47 Napoleon’s advance guard left Smolensk on 12 November and began the retreat westwards. His army’s immediate goal was to cross the river Dnieper at Orsha.

The emperor’s lack of cavalry made reconnaissance impossible and meant that he did not know Kutuzov’s whereabouts. In fact Napoleon’s delay in Smolensk, however essential, had enabled the main Russian enemy to catch up and move around the city to the south. By 12 November it was within Kutuzov’s power to place his whole army across the road to Orsha and force Napoleon to fight his way back to the Dnieper. Most Russian generals longed for Kutuzov to do this. They included Karl von Toll, who later said that if Kutuzov had acted in this way the great majority of the enemy army would have been destroyed, though no doubt Napoleon himself and a picked escort would have sneaked away.48

Kutuzov, however, remained true to his system of offering Napoleon a ‘golden bridge’. He refused to commit the bulk of his army to battle, and certainly not until he was sure that Napoleon and his Guards were safely out of the way. The last thing he wanted was to wreck the core of the Russian army in the life-and-death struggle that the French Guards would undoubtedly wage to save their emperor and themselves. Kutuzov’s caution inevitably affected his subordinates. Vladimir Löwenstern recalls how Baron Korff, the commander of much of the main army’s cavalry, cited Kutuzov’s words about a ‘golden bridge’ as a reason not to allow his corps to become too closely engaged with the French. Miloradovich was more direct. His subordinate, Eugen of Württemberg, was furious at being ordered to let the enemy pass, as he had also been told to do once before at Viazma. Miloradovich responded that ‘the field-marshal has forbidden us to get involved in a battle’. He added: ‘The old man’s view is this: if we incite the enemy to desperation, that will cost us useless blood: but if we let him run and give him a decent escort he will destroy himself in the course of a few days. You know: people cannot live on air, snow doesn’t make a very homely bivouac and without horses he cannot move his food, munitions or guns.’49

Kutuzov’s strategy is the key to understanding what happened in the so-called battle at Krasnyi between 15 and 18 November. In reality this was less a battle than an uncoordinated succession of clashes as Napoleon’s corps passed one after the other around the Russians on the same ground where Neverovsky’s detachment had held off Murat three months before. Napoleon sent his corps out of Smolensk at one-day intervals, which could have had serious consequences if Kutuzov had made a serious effort to intercept the retreat. Instead the Russian commander-in-chief watched happily as the French Guards and the remnants of the Polish and Westphalian corps brushed past him down the road from Smolensk to Orsha. By the evening of 15 November they had reached the village of Krasnyi. They were followed by the corps of Beauharnais and Davout: any thought Kutuzov might have had of intervening to block their retreat ended when Napoleon threatened to move back with part of his Guard to their rescue. Eugène and Davout therefore both escaped though only