Russia Against Napoleon_ The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace - Dominic Lieven [170]
He would nevertheless be much closer than Kutuzov’s main army. After the ‘battle’ of Krasnyi Kutuzov’s main concern was to rest and feed his troops. For that reason he marched south-west from Krasnyi to the small town of Kopys, the next crossing over the river Dnieper south of Orsha. There he rested his main body and succeeded in requisitioning a significant amount of food from the neighbouring districts to his south. He also parked many of his batteries, since it was obviously no longer necessary to drag along all these guns. Kutuzov did send forward an advance guard of two infantry and one cavalry corps under Miloradovich but unless Chichagov could block Napoleon on the Berezina for four days or more there was no chance of Miloradovich’s men arriving in time to dispute the crossing. As they struggled across the Dnieper and into Belorussia Miloradovich’s troops suffered badly. The historian of the 5th Jaeger Regiment wrote that ‘from Kopys on we found no civilians anywhere: the villages were empty, there weren’t even the proverbial cats or dogs. The barns and stores were also empty: there was no grain, no groats and not even a scrap of straw.’65
Ahead of Miloradovich were Platov’s Cossacks and Aleksei Ermolov’s so-called ‘flying column’, made up of two cuirassier and three infantry regiments of the line, some Cossacks, and the two light infantry regiments of the Guards, in other words the Guards Jaegers and the Finland Guards. The flying column set off for Orsha on 19 November but was delayed for a day and a half because Napoleon had burned the bridge over the Dnieper. Ermolov’s Cossacks swam the river but his heavy cavalry horses had to be tied down on rafts to make the crossing. Only the exhaustion of the regular light cavalry could explain using Russian cuirassiers in such a role. All the baggage had to be left behind on the east bank of the Dnieper. Kutuzov ordered Ermolov not to exhaust his men and to wait for Miloradovich at Tolochin before pressing on in pursuit of Napoleon. But Ermolov knew that speed was of the essence if Napoleon was to be stopped on the Berezina, and he ignored both orders.66
By dint of heroic efforts Ermolov arrived at Borisov on 27 November, the very day that Napoleon and his Guards had crossed the Berezina 18 kilometres to the north near the village of Studenka. The Russian troops paid a high price for this speed. The Cossacks could usually forage off the road and turn up something to eat and the artillery carried some emergency rations in their caissons but life for the infantry was very hard. The Guards Jaegers had slept with a roof over their heads for one night in the last month. In their week-long march from the Dnieper to the Berezina they only twice received any biscuit. At every bivouac the men rootled for potatoes. Even they were hard to find and amidst the rush and exhaustion were often eaten raw.67
As for the Finland Guards, they did still have a little groats in their knapsacks but their kettles were with the regimental baggage and raw groats were inedible. The men survived by cutting the bark off the trees and turning it into impromptu cooking vessels. After stuffing the groats into the bark and heating this concoction up over a spluttering fire coaxed from damp wood, the Guardsmen wolfed down the whole ‘meal’, bark and all. Their reward for all these efforts was to arrive at the Berezina one day too late. The next morning the two Guards regiments crossed the river and were deployed in reserve behind Chichagov’s army, which was fighting Napoleon in the forests near the village of Brili. They spent the next two days up to their knees in snow and with no food at all. Not surprisingly, men fell ill in droves. Nevertheless the troops’ morale remained high. These Guardsmen were fine soldiers. Their spirits were buoyed by the fact that