Borodino 1812: Bagration's Flèches, 300 Idle Guns and the Unused Guard

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On September 7, 1812, about 250,000 men fought near the village of Borodino, roughly 70 miles west of Moscow, in the bloodiest single day of the Napoleonic Wars. Since the French crossed the Neman in June, General Barclay de Tolly had retreated in a Fabian, scorched-earth campaign that stretched Napoleon's supply lines. After the fall of Smolensk, Russian nobles distrustful of Barclay's Scottish ancestry, and his rival Prince Pyotr Bagration, demanded a battle, and General Mikhail Kutuzov took command to give them one. Kutuzov built three V-shaped earthworks on his left, the Bagration flèches, and the Raevsky Redoubt in the center, but expected the attack on his right and stacked his best troops there.

Napoleon, ill with a cold and dysuria and posted far behind the lines, rejected Marshal Davout's proposal to swing south around the weak Russian left and ordered frontal assaults. Bagration was hit in the leg by cannonball splinters around 11 a.m. In the afternoon Napoleon refused to commit the Imperial Guard, and the Russian army withdrew intact. He entered an abandoned Moscow a week later and watched it burn, as starving horses and typhus wrecked his army.

• The flèches were open at the back, so attackers who took them sat exposed to Russian artillery fire.
• About 300 Russian guns held in reserve for the right wing never fired because no one with authority ordered them moved.
• Some 8,000 Cossacks crossed a shallow ford and raided the French rear, forcing infantry into squares and halting the assault on the Raevsky Redoubt.
• British observer Sir Robert Wilson called it the Battle of the Generals, with about 80 generals killed or wounded.
• Napoleon reportedly told his marshals that at 800 leagues from Paris one does not risk one's last reserve.