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On the following day, Bagration himself rode into Barclay’s camp wearing all his decorations and accompanied by a suite of generals and staff officers. Barclay looked sober and underdressed as he came out to meet him. ‘They greeted each other with all possible marks of courtesy and the appearance of friendship, yet with coldness and distance in their hearts,’ according to Barclay’s chief of staff Yermolov. Bagration’s Second Army was only a day’s march behind him, and he graciously placed himself and it under Barclay’s command.
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‘This news filled everyone with extraordinary joy,’ recalled Nikolai Mitarevsky, a fledgling artillery officer in General Dokhturov’s corps. ‘We thought there would be no more retreating and the war would take on a different character.’ The very look of the Second Army buoyed up the spirits of the men of the First, as Yermolov explained: ‘The First Army, exhausted by the retreat, had begun to mutter and had given rise to disorders, a sure sign of the collapse of discipline. The unit commanders had cooled towards the commander, the lower ranks felt their confidence in him shaken. The Second Army was fired by a completely different spirit! The constant sound of music, the ubiquitous strains of singing coming from them, revived the spirits of the soldiers.’
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The anti-Germans and russophiles expected the brave spirit of Bagration to dominate, and the consciousness that they were now standing in defence of old Russian lands was expected to have an effect as well. ‘The spirit of the nation is awakening after a two-hundred-year
slumber, feeling the threat of war,’ wrote Fyodor Glinka, a passionately russophile officer, alluding to the Polish wars of 1612. Songs and odes were composed in honour of what was to be a heroic and successful stand at Smolensk.
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Others talked of taking the offensive and chasing the French out of Russia.

The Russians were now in a stronger position than they had been at any time since the start of the war. They had, it is true, given up a vast part of their territory, lost up to 20,000 men, a couple of dozen guns and huge stores of supplies. But they now had some 120,000 men grouped in the centre, with two forces, of 30,000 in the north and 45,000 in the south, threatening Napoleon’s flanks. From their own intelligence and the questioning of prisoners, they knew about the difficult conditions in the French army, whose main attacking force they now estimated, somewhat conservatively, at about 150,000.

Yet, as Clausewitz pointed out, their new strength was a strategic rather than a tactical one, and the French would still be bound to win a pitched battle. But the ability of the French to operate effectively was reducing with every day. There was, as a result, no point whatsoever in the Russians taking the offensive at this stage.
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Yet that is exactly what they were determined to do. The whole army, from the top down to the last ranker, was fed up with the continuous retreat. They had been told of brilliant victories won by Tormasov, Wittgenstein, Platov and others, and they could not conceive why they were themselves giving up territory without a battle. Now that Bagration had joined forces with Barclay, there seemed to be no further excuse for retreating, and there was a universal desire to stand and fight.

Barclay, who realised the pointlessness of giving battle at this stage, was being put under great pressure to do just that, from above by Alexander himself, and from below by everyone down to the ranks, and he was in no position to oppose. On 3 August he wrote to Alexander that he was going to attack the exposed corps of Ney and Murat. But everything points to the fact that he was still hoping to be able to avoid giving battle. On 6 August he held a council of war
at which he argued his case, but he was powerfully outnumbered by the hawks, and reluctantly agreed to the attack, urging everyone to proceed with extreme caution.

They set out on the morning of the following day, 7 August, in three columns, which were to attack and overwhelm Murat’s cavalry and Ney’s corps, encamped around Rudnia, ahead of the rest of the French forces. The enterprise could have been successful had it been carried out with speed and determination. It would have made no difference to the strategic situation, yet it would have raised the morale of the Russian troops and made it more difficult to retreat again afterwards (which they would have to do anyway), so in this case success would have had mixed benefits. In the event, success was not going to be an issue.

On the night of 7 August, at the end of the first day of the offensive, Barclay received intelligence, inaccurate as it turned out, that a large French force had occupied Poriechie, to the north of his line of attack. This could only be either an attempt at outflanking him or an exposed enemy unit which could be easily cut off. He therefore ordered his three columns to wheel round to face in a northerly direction. Bagration did not understand the thinking behind this order, and obeyed only with extreme reluctance. But the order never reached the cavalry, under Platov and Pahlen, and while Barclay and Bagration marched northwards on the following day, the cavalry continued to move westwards. At Inkovo it stumbled on General Sebastiani’s cavalry division, which it surprised and routed, taking a couple of hundred prisoners, but it was subsequently beaten back by a French counterattack.

When Napoleon learned of the Russian attack the next day, he deduced that Barclay had decided to fight in defence of Smolensk. But he was by now wary of the Russians. Determined to make sure that they would not escape this time, he put into action a plan to encircle them and strike them in the back. He instructed Prince Eugène to move south and join Ney in keeping an eye on the area where he assumed the Russian army to be, and ordered all other units
in the Vitebsk area to make for Rassasna on the Dnieper. They were to cross the river and join Junot’s and Poniatowski’s corps, then sweep into a presumably unoccupied Smolensk, recross the river and appear behind Barclay’s back.

But Barclay’s forces were by now in a state of such confusion that Napoleon need not have bothered. After assuring himself that there were no French at Poriechie, Barclay had marched back to his starting position and ordered Bagration to do the same, intending to implement the original plan of a frontal attack on Rudnia. But when Bagration, who was sullenly trudging back towards his starting positions, got what was now his third order to about turn and march in a different direction, he was beside himself with irritation. ‘For the love of God,’ he wrote to Arakcheev, ‘give me a posting anywhere away from here – I’ll even accept command of a regiment, in Moldavia or the Caucasus if necessary – I just cannot stand it here any longer; headquarters is so full of Germans a Russian cannot survive there.’
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He was so angry that he resolved to ignore Barclay’s order. He was moving in the direction of Smolensk, and he decided to keep going. So while two of the three Russian columns were now wheeling back to march on the French, the third was resolutely moving away in the opposite direction. This act of wilful insubordination was to save the Russian army.

All the changes of order had added to the usual degree of confusion surrounding the movements of an army, with the result that the area in front of the French forces was covered in Russian units marching and countermarching in different directions, some of them lost, most of them confused, and all of them increasingly fed up. ‘As this was the first time we had advanced after so many retreats, the joy felt by the whole corps, which was longing to be able to attack the enemy at last, would be hard to convey,’ wrote Lieutenant Simansky of the Izmailovsky Life Guards.
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The change of plan, which they assumed to herald a new retreat, was therefore greeted with fury.

Junior officers like Simansky wondered whether their commanders knew what they were doing. ‘Our lack of experience in the art of war reveals itself at every step,’ Captain Pavel Sergeevich Pushchin of the Semeonovsky Life Guards noted in his diary on 13 August. The feeling that the commander-in-chief was out of his depth was gaining ground. Staff officers were railing against ‘Germans’, and the word ‘treason’ was being muttered more and more frequently. The iron discipline gripping the Russian soldier was beginning to relax, and instances of desertion and looting multiplied.
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Had Napoleon delivered an energetic frontal attack at that moment, both Russian armies would have been annihilated.

But Napoleon was busy implementing his own plan. At dawn on 14 August the divisions of Davout’s, Murat’s, then Ney’s and Prince Eugène’s corps began to cross the Dnieper at Rassasna on three bridges constructed during the night. The troops then took the great Minsk – Smolensk highway, a wide straight road running between rows of silver birches, laid out by Catherine the Great for the rapid movement of mail and troops. They were joined along this road by
Junot’s Westphalians and Poniatowski’s Poles, coming up from Mogilev. In the early afternoon they stumbled on General Neverovsky’s 27th Division, which Bagration had left covering the southern approaches to Smolensk at a place called Krasny.
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Neverovsky had no more than about 7500 men, many of them raw recruits, with which to face Murat’s entire cavalry corps. But he did not lose his head. He sent his cavalry and his guns back to cover his retreat, and formed his men into an extended square formation. Luckily for him, Murat did not deign to stop and wait for his artillery to come up, but threw his cavalry at the Russians, meaning to sweep them out of the way. Where any other army would have laid down its arms or scattered, Neverovsky’s peasant soldiers retreated in a solid mass. ‘The very lack of experience of those Russian peasants making up this unit gives it a force of inertia which amounts to resistance,’ Baron Fain mused. ‘The dash of the cavalrymen was cushioned by this crowd which clung together, pressing and filling every gap. The most brilliant valour was exhausted by striking this compact mass which they could only hack at without breaking up.’
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Neverovsky retreated nearly twenty kilometres under constant pressure from Murat’s cavalry, which delivered some thirty charges. He lost about two thousand men and seven guns, but he reached Korytnia, where he was reinforced on the following morning by troops sent out of Smolensk, and escorted into the city. He also lost one of his regimental bands, which some French grenadiers found cowering in the ruins of a burnt-out church, brandishing their instruments as a mark of their peaceful intentions and begging for mercy in the broken French of one of their number, a native of Tuscany.
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That evening, 15 August, Napoleon reached Korytnia, and was greeted by a hundred-gun salute – it was his birthday. But he had
nothing to celebrate. His manoeuvre had failed. He had hoped to find Smolensk undefended, which would have permitted him to occupy the city and use the bridges across the Dnieper to penetrate into Barclay’s rear. As it was, the city was garrisoned – thanks to the insubordination of Bagration.

Napoleon vented his irritation on Poniatowski, whose 5th Corps had just rejoined the main force of the Grande Armée. When the Prince came to Napoleon’s bivouac to pay his respects, the Emperor unleashed a string of gross insults at him, shouting for all to hear, accusing him and his Poles of cowardice and laziness, and saying that the only thing they were good at was playing with Warsaw whores. At the same time, he was furious when he heard that the Poles were down to 15,000 men – some units had lost half of their effectives through forced marches, sickness and fighting. He taunted Poniatowski, and said he and his Poles would have a chance to show their mettle at Smolensk on the following day.
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Smolensk was a city of 12,600 inhabitants, and had no particular economic or strategic importance. It did have a certain spiritual significance, as one of its churches housed a renowned miraculous icon of the Virgin, and the city had been the scene of several desperate struggles for dominion over the area between the Poles and the Russians, who had finally wrenched it back 150 years before. It was surrounded by massive brick walls twenty-five feet high and fifteen feet thick, with a deep dry ditch in front, and strengthened by thirty massive bastion towers.
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There was no advantage for Napoleon in taking Smolensk, as his real aim was to defeat the Russian army, and since the chance of crossing the Dnieper and penetrating into their rear had been denied him here, he should have immediately gone in search of a crossing point further east. Had he done so, he would have forced the Russians to fight and would certainly have won Smolensk without a blow, probably with its magazines intact. He did send Junot off up the Dnieper in search of a crossing. But he had willed himself to believe that the Russians would come out and face him in defence of their holy city, so he decided to attack it. In doing
so he committed, according to Clausewitz, his greatest error of the whole campaign.
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