Maloyaroslavets
Kutuzov told an enemy officer that he stood
his ground "because it was essential to force you to go back along
the route which you had earlier devastated yourselves."
From Moscow Napoleon first struck
south along the Old Kaluga Road, then veered west by secondary roads intending
to slip around Kutuzov's left flank to the important junction of Maloyaroslavets,
from where a variety of routes led through untouched country to Smolensk.
Advance troops of the French and Russian armies converged almost simultaneously
on Maloyaroslavets on 24 October, where they engaged in a fierce eighteen-hour
battle that cost 10,000 men. Kutuzov meanwhile, divining Napoleon's strategy,
assembled his main army a mile to the south, resolved to give battle the
next day rather than let the French break through to Kaluga.
Though the Russians were eventually
driven from the town, Napoleon was forced to reconsider whether his 63,000
troops could achieve a breakthrough against more than 90,000 Russians.
On October 26 Napoleon ordered the Grand Army to break contact and turn
back north to the main Smolensk road that had been stripped bare during
the advance to Moscow. The Grande Armee reached the Smolensk road at Mozhaysk,
then turned west through an all-too-familiar landscape. On the 29th
the French troops were forced to retrace their steps over the fields of
Borodino, where they witnessed the horrific sight of the entire plain covered
still with tens of thousands of unburied corpses.
Kutuzov had not thought the
French would give up there southern objective so easily. As he reported
to Alexander, the brush at Maloyaroslavets on 24 October now proved to
be "one of the most significant days of this bloody war," for
if the battle of Borodino showed that Napoleon could not defeat the Russians,
then the encounter at Maloyaroslavets ensured not just that he was going
to lose the war, but that his loss was going to be catastrophic.
Retreat
Advance