War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [494]
The Russians were not seeking the best position; on the contrary, during their retreat they passed many positions that were better than Borodino. They did not stop at any of those positions, because Kutuzov did not want to accept a position that he had not chosen, and because the people’s call for battle had not yet expressed itself strongly enough, and because Miloradovich had not yet arrived with the militia, and for countless other reasons. The fact is that the former positions were stronger, and the position at Borodino (the one on which the battle was fought) not only was not strong, but could no more be considered a position than any other place in the Russian empire on which, by guesswork, one might randomly stick a pin in a map.
The Russians not only did not fortify the position on the field of Borodino to the left, at a right angle to the road (that is, the place where the battle was fought), but never thought, until the twenty-fifth of August, 1812, that the battle could be fought in that place. This is proved, first, by the fact that there not only were no fortifications in that place on the twenty-fifth, but that, having been begun on the twenty-fifth, they were not finished on the twenty-sixth; second, it is proved by the position of the Shevardino redoubt: the Shevardino redoubt, in front of the position on which battle was accepted, made no sense at all. Why was this redoubt fortified more than any other point? And why, in defending it until late at night on the twenty-fourth, were all efforts exhausted and six thousand men lost? A mounted Cossack patrol would have sufficed to observe the enemy. The third proof that the position on which the battle took place had not been foreseen and that the Shevardino redoubt was not an outpost of that position, is that until the twenty-fifth, Barclay de Tolly and Bagration were convinced that the Shevardino redoubt was the left flank of the position, and that Kutuzov himself, in his report written hot on the heels of the battle, called Shevardino the left flank of the position. Much later, when there was more leisure for writing reports about the battle of Borodino, the incorrect and strange testimony was invented (probably to justify the mistakes of the commander in chief, who must be infallible) that the Shevardino redoubt was supposedly an outpost (whereas it was only a fortified point on the left flank), and that the battle of Borodino was accepted by us at a fortified and previously chosen position, whereas it occurred in a completely unexpected and almost unfortified place.
This is evidently how it was: a position was chosen along the river Kolocha, which crossed the high road not at a right angle but at an acute angle, so that the left flank was in Shevardino, the right near the village of Novoe, and the center in Borodino, by the confluence of the rivers Kolocha and Voyna. For an army that aims at stopping the enemy from moving down the Smolensk road towards Moscow, this position, under cover of the river Kolocha, is obvious to anyone who looks over the field of Borodino forgetting how the battle took place.
Napoleon, having ridden to Valuevo on the twenty-fourth, did not see (as the history books say) the position of the Russians from Utitsa to Borodino (he could not have seen that position because it did not exist), and did not see the outpost of the Russian army, but ran into the Shevardino redoubt as he pursued the Russian rear guard, and, unexpectedly for the Russians, had his troops cross the Kolocha. And the Russians, even before the general battle, withdrew their left wing from the position they had intended to occupy and took up a new position that had not been foreseen or fortified. By crossing to the left side of the Kolocha, to the left of the road, Napoleon shifted the whole future battle from right to left (viewed from the Russian side), and transferred it to the field between Utitsa, Semyonovskoe, and Borodino (a field no more advantageous as a position than any other