Mikhail Kutuzov: Shot Twice in the Head, Then Napoleon Outlasted

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Mikhail Kutuzov was born into the Russian upper nobility in St. Petersburg in 1745, entered a military engineering school at 12 and was teaching mathematics to his peers by 15. In 1762 he came under Alexander Suvorov, who taught him to keep orders simple, care for the common soldier and lead from the front. In the Crimea in 1774, rallying a faltering battalion with a fallen regimental standard, he took a musket ball through the left temple that exited near his right eye. During his convalescence in London he studied George Washington's war of exhaustion against the British, and in 1788 he was shot in the head again in almost the same place, and survived again.

At Austerlitz in 1805 Tsar Alexander I and his Austrian advisers overruled Kutuzov's plea to hold the Pratzen Plateau, and Napoleon split the allied army in half; the Tsar blamed Kutuzov and stripped him of command. Recalled in 1812 as the only commander with the authority to unite the army, he fought at Borodino, then chose at a council in a village cabin to abandon Moscow without a shot. He flank-marched south to Tarutino, blocked Napoleon's southern escape at Maloyaroslavets and let Cossacks, partisans and starvation destroy the Grande Armée on the road home.

• The first musket ball destroyed his nasal cavity, twisted his right eye and left him with lifelong migraines.
• After surviving two head wounds, his soldiers came to regard him as a man protected by providence.
• He argued that Moscow was only geography and that the army, not the capital, was the nation.
• At the Berezina he slowed his pursuit, telling a British liaison that destroying France would only hand world dominance to Britain.
• He died in spring 1813; Tolstoy later made him the soul of Russia in War and Peace, and Stalin created the Order of Kutuzov in World War II.