page_title: Battle of Borodino
section_title: End of the battle
hierarchical_section_title: Battle of Borodino / End of the battle
caption_attribution_description: Michail Illarionovich Kutuzov (1745 - 1813), commander-in-chief of the Russian army is sitting on the far left, with his generals at the talks deciding to surrender Moscow to Napoleon. Fili is today a forest park in a western district of Moscow. The room is the home of peasant A.S. Frolov. Barclay de Tolly is sitting at the corner, under the Virgin and Child icon Fyodor Uvarov is sitting near Barclay holding a paper Nikolay Raevsky is sitting by the window with his fingers locked together Alexey Yermolov is standing on the far right, resenting the Kutuzov's plan and demanding to fight the enemy generals listen carefully to their commander-in-chief
context_page_description: The Battle of Borodino was a battle fought on 7 September 1812 in the Napoleonic Wars during the French invasion of Russia.
  The fighting involved around 250,000 troops and left at least 68,000 dead, making Borodino the deadliest day of the Napoleonic Wars and the bloodiest single day in the history of warfare until the First Battle of the Marne in 1914. Napoleon's Grande Armée launched an attack against the Imperial Russian Army, driving it back from its initial positions but failing to gain a decisive victory. Both armies were exhausted after the battle and the Russians withdrew from the field the following day. Borodino represented the last Russian effort at stopping the French advance on Moscow, which fell a week later. However, the French had no clear way of forcing Tsar Alexander to capitulate because the Russian army was not decisively defeated, resulting in the ultimate defeat of the French invasion following the retreat from Moscow in October.
  After a series of Russian retreats at the beginning of the campaign, the nobility grew alarmed about the advancing French troops and forced the Tsar to dismiss the army's commander, Michael Andreas Barclay de Tolly.
context_section_description: Napoleon went forward to see the situation from the former Russian front lines shortly after the redoubts had been taken. The Russians had moved to the next ridge-line in much disarray; however, that disarray was not clear to the French, with dust and haze obscuring the Russian dispositions.  Kutuzov ordered the Russian Guard to hold the line and so it did.  All of the artillery that the French army had was not enough to move it.  Those compact squares made good artillery targets and the Russian Guard stood in place from 4pm to 6pm unmoving under its fire resulting in huge casualties. All he could see were masses of troops in the distance and thus nothing more was attempted. Neither the attack, which relied on brute force, nor the refusal to use the Guard to finish the day's work showed any brilliance on Napoleon's part.
  Both the Prussian Staff Officer Karl von Clausewitz, the historian and future author of On War, and Alexander I of Russia noted that the poor positioning of troops in particular had hobbled the defense. Barclay communicated with Kutuzov in order to receive further instructions. According to Ludwig von Wolzogen (in an account dripping with sarcasm), the commander was found a half-hour away on the road to Moscow, encamped with an entourage of young nobles and grandly pronouncing he would drive Napoleon off the next day.
  Despite his bluster, Kutuzov knew from dispatches that his army had been too badly hurt to fight a continuing action the following day. He knew exactly what he was doing: by fighting the pitched battle, he could now retreat with the Russian army still intact, lead its recovery, and force the weakened French forces to move even further from their bases of supply. The dénouement became a textbook example of what a hold logistics placed upon an army far from its center of supply. On September 8, the Russian army moved away from the battlefield in twin columns to Semolino, allowing Napoleon to occupy Moscow and await for 5 weeks a Russian surrender that would never come.
  Kutuzov would proclaim over the course of several days that the Russian Army would fight again before the wall of Moscow. In fact, a site was chosen near Poklonnaya Gora within a few miles of Moscow as a battle site. However, the Russian Army had not received enough reinforcements, and it was too risky to cling to Moscow at all costs. Kutuzov understood that the Russian people never wanted to abandon Moscow, the city which was regarded as Russia's "second capital"; however he also believed that the Russian Army did not have enough forces to protect that city. Kutuzov called for a council of war on the night of September 12 at Fili village. In a heated debate that split the council five to four in favour of giving battle, Kutuzov, after listening to each General, endorsed retreat. Thus passed the last chance of battle before Moscow was taken.
caption: M. I. Kutuzov and his staff in the meeting at Fili village, when Kutuzov decided that the Russian army had to retreat from Moscow.
  Painting by Aleksey Kivshenko.
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