Inconvenient facts of the battle with Napoleon on the Berezina

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Exactly 208 years ago, Russian troops defeated Napoleon's army at the Berezina. It is often said that the retreat of the French Grand Army from Moscow was a series of failures and Russian successes. However, the reality turned out to be much more complicated: de facto Russian troops suffered large unjustified losses, and the overall result of the campaign was the flight of Napoleon from Russia, but not his capture, which was almost inevitable in those conditions.

The most likely reason for all these problems was a special geopolitical vision of the situation by one person - Mikhail Kutuzov. We tell why he did not want to defeat Napoleon and how many lives our country paid for this.

The crossing of the Berezina by the French on November 17, 1812 (November 29, new style). As a result of a successful breakthrough from Russia, Napoleon was able to fight with it for two more years, inflicting very sensitive losses on our country / © Wikimedia Commons

Most of us see the Patriotic War of 1812 through the eyes of its greatest popularizer - Leo Tolstoy. Formally, War and Peace is a fiction book, but the author and many readers perceived it as an epic canvas from the real world, into which Tolstoy simply woven the fates of some smaller characters.

Due to the "Tolstoyism" of the history of the Patriotic War, many still believe that Kutuzov, as a commander, acted wisely. Allegedly, he did not want to give Napoleon the Battle of Borodino, planning to give Moscow as soon as possible, and only under the pressure of Alexander I and the court did he give this battle.

Moreover, Kutuzov did not want casualties from the Russian army and therefore avoided decisive battles with the French when they retreated along the Old Smolensk road, and also therefore did not surround them near Krasnoye, even in the depths of Russia, where the border was very far away. For the same reason, he did not want a decisive battle with Napoleon on the Berezina, did not drive forward his tired troops, and from this the defeat of Bonaparte in Russia was not complete and was not accompanied by his capture at the same time, in the autumn of 1812.

Unfortunately, Leo Tolstoy played a disservice to all of the above in popularizing Russian history. Today it is reliably known that Kutuzov planned to give a decisive battle to Napoleon so that he would not take Moscow. We know with no less certainty that at first he planned to continue the battle the next day, and only after learning the enormous scale of the Russian losses at Borodino (45, 6 thousand according to the Military Registration Archives of the General Staff), he decided to retreat.

But this is perhaps the lesser of evils. Much more unpleasant is something else: Kutuzov really did not want to finish off Napoleon in the fall of 1812, but not at all because he did not want to waste the lives of his soldiers. Moreover, it was his unwillingness that led to the deaths of more than hundreds of thousands of our compatriots in the war with Napoleon. However, first things first.

Before Berezina: how did Napoleon get so far from Moscow at all?

As you know, the turning point of the war of 1812 was not Borodino. After him, Napoleon still had two free routes of retreat from Russia. Yes, retreat in winter, due to Alexander I's unwillingness to capitulate, was inevitable. But it shouldn't have been a disaster at all. It is portrayed as such only in our history textbooks, and even in War and Peace - but Napoleon believed, and justifiably, that this was not at all necessary.

Napoleon and his army on the roads of retreat from Moscow, painting by an English artist / © Wikimedia Commons

The emperor of the French himself said in 1816: “I wanted [after the capture of Moscow] to move from Moscow to St. Petersburg, or to return along the southwestern route; I never thought of choosing the road to Smolensk for this purpose. " Exactly the same thing about his plans was written by Kutuzov. By the "southwestern route" Napoleon meant specifically Ukraine. Kutuzov understood this, and therefore set up camp at Tarutino, south of Moscow. From here he could threaten the movement of the French to the southwest.

If Napoleon had moved from Moscow immediately after its occupation, he could have made it: the Russian troops after Borodino were extremely weakened, there were not even a hundred thousand people in the Tarutino camp. But Bonaparte waited a month for the Russian ambassadors who wanted to declare surrender, and, of course, did not wait for them (the emperor can hardly be called an expert on the Russian mentality, so here his mistake is natural).

When Napoleon realized it, he tried to break through to Ukraine through Maloyaroslavets. On October 12, 1812 (hereinafter, the dates are according to the old style), thanks to the quick reaction of Ermolov, this maneuver was blocked, the battle for Maloyaroslavets took place. The French did not dare to vigorously break through, because they had only 360 guns left against the 600 Russians and only one ammunition box per gun.

They lost many horses, because they could not estimate in advance their mortality in Russian conditions - because of this, there was often no one to carry both guns and cannonballs with gunpowder. As a result, a breakthrough near Maloyaroslavets would have gone without artillery, which threatened to turn into carnage. In such conditions, Napoleon tried to retreat through the Old Smolensk road, which he had ruined earlier, through which he invaded Russia.

The idea looked doomed from the start. The Russian army followed him in parallel along the New Smolensk road, the surroundings of which were not ravaged by French foragers. There were a thousand kilometers from Maloyaroslavets to the Russian border. Hungry people with horses falling from malnutrition cannot walk a thousand kilometers faster than less hungry people with horses that don't fall. Technically, the French could not have won this race.

Battle of Krasnoye, November 3, old style, the first day of the battle. The French are shown in blue, the Russians are shown in red / © Wikimedia Commons

And reality seemed to confirm this. On November 3-6, 1812, in the battle of Krasnoye (Smolensk region), the Russians could cut off Napoleon's main forces from the retreat to the west and defeat them in a decisive battle. From the blow of a small detachment of Miloradovich on the corps of Eugene Beauharnais, the latter lost six thousand people - and the Russians only 800. There is nothing to be surprised: without the support of artillery, exhausted from a hungry and cold march, the French could do little.

However, on the second day of the battle, Kutuzov not only did not support the Russian forward detachments participating in it with the main forces, but also ordered General Miloradovich to move closer to the Russian main forces near Shilov (on the map) - which did not allow him to attack the French.

Battle of Krasnoye, November 4, old style, the second day of the battle. The French are shown in blue, the Russians are shown in red / © Wikimedia Commons

Kutuzov even planned an attack on the Red by these very main forces - but at one o'clock in the morning on the third day of the battle at the Red one he learned that Napoleon was there and … canceled the attack. When Davout's corps went to Krasnoye, Miloradovich hit him point-blank from artillery - but because of Kutuzov's order not to cut off the French route to retreat, Miloradovich did not attack him, although he had superior forces. The French simply walked in columns along the road, on the side of which were hanging large Russian forces - they fired at them, but did not finish them off.

Battle of Krasnoye, November 5, old style, the third day of the battle. The French are shown in blue, the Russians are shown in red / © Wikimedia Commons

Only when Napoleon began to retreat with the main forces, Kutuzov resumed pursuit - before that, for days his main forces had stood in place in a defensive position, and the vanguards were in every possible way restrained by orders from above (not only Miloradovich, but also Golitsyn).

As a historian who is benevolent to Kutuzov writes about this mildly: "With more energy on the part of Kutuzov, the entire French army would have become his prey, like its rearguard - Ney's corps, which did not manage to slip through and put down its weapons." Why was this "greater energy" not there?

The traditional explanation for the extremely strange actions of Kutuzov in the face of the French army "dying of hunger" (the assessment of Napoleon, given in the days of the battles near Red) of the French army is as follows: Kutuzov was the coast of the soldiers of the Russian army. Allegedly, he wanted to wait for the greatest possible exhaustion of the French.

Alas, this explanation does not stand up to fact. The fact is that the frosty marches influenced the Russians no better than the French. Yes, the soldiers of Kutuzov were better fed - fortunately, they walked along the not ruined Smolensk road, but the wheeled carts were not very good when driving in the winter season.

In addition, the Russian military uniform was very similar to the western one - that is, it looked good on parades, but was poorly adapted for active hostilities in the Russian winter. Purely theoretically, the army should have been improvised to dress in sheepskin coats and felt boots - but in practice "a number of units, including the Semyonovsky Life Guards regiment, had to do without sheepskin coats and felt boots."

It is not difficult to predict the results: "Ours were also blackened [from frostbite] and wrapped in rags … Almost everyone had something touched by frost." These words of the participants in the Russian campaign cannot be seen in Tolstoy's verbose reasoning about the wise Kutuzov, who is waiting for Napoleon to be defeated by some magical (and mythical) power of things or some abstract "people." They cannot be seen on the pages of our history textbooks - but such are the facts.

Painting by Peter von Hess showing the Battle of Krasny / © Wikimedia Commons

Wheeled transports and the general lack of experience in the operation of the supply system in the winter months also seriously limited the army's ability to move: "The Guards have already been 12 days, the whole army has not received bread for a whole month," testifies A. V. Chicherin on November 28, 1812. E. F. Kankrin, in an official report, admitted that grain for the army in the winter months of 1812 "was extremely scarce." Without bread, in uniforms tailored according to Western patterns, the Russians could not help but lose people on the march - albeit not as monstrously as the French.

Another important factor that is rarely mentioned is typhus. Its epidemics flared up steadily during the cold season, and 1812 was no exception. In the total losses of the military campaign of 1812, the Russians accounted for 60% of the disease - the troops outside the winter apartments were deprived of a bath and therefore could not get rid of the lice that carried typhus - the main killer in both the French and Russian armies.

The combination of these factors led to the fact that by the beginning of December 1812, Kutuzov had brought only 27,464 people and 200 guns to the Russian border. From the Tarutino camp in October of the same year, according to the very minimum estimates, 97112 soldiers and 622 guns came out with him. No less than seventy thousand, about three quarters of the entire Russian army, did not reach the border. And we did not even count the losses on the march from other groups of the Russian army - Wittgenstein or Chichagov.

Fighting near Krasny, November 3 - Russian units from the roadside area fire at the French moving along the road past them, but do not engage in a decisive battle / © Wikimedia Commons

In other words, the thousand-kilometer march left our army without soldiers to a greater extent than any battle of 1812. Yes, yes, we did not make a reservation: exactly any. Indeed, out of these 70 thousand killed and wounded, there were less than 12 thousand - non-combat losses from frost and diseases inevitable when the body weakened, amounted to 58 thousand. Meanwhile, near Borodino, the Russian army had a little more than 45 thousand killed and wounded.

Therefore, when Russian writers and poets talked in broad strokes about the fact that Napoleon was overcome by "the frenzy of the people, Barclay, winter or Russian God?" - they were somewhat unaware of the real picture of events. Winter (or rather, frosty November 1812) really deprived the French of most of the soldiers. But Kutuzov also lost most of the soldiers from the same winter.

Had he attacked at Krasnoye in mid-November, the non-combat losses of the Russian army would have been much less. After all, from Krasnoye to the border of the empire there were more than 600 kilometers - the main part of the march to the border in this case would not be needed. The defeat of Napoleon at Krasnoye without artillery, with a shortage of ammunition for guns and hungry soldiers was absolutely inevitable - and it would obviously cost the Russians much less casualties than Borodino. In the end, at Krasny, we lost two thousand people - and the French more than 20 thousand.

It is clear that a decisive blow at Krasnoye would mean the end of the war and the campaign - without the army, Napoleon could not have escaped from Russia. Without Napoleon, France would not have been able to resist and would have been forced to go to peace, as after the defeat of Napoleon III in 1870. In this case, the losses of the Russians in the war of 1812 would be lower than in our scenario - lower because a series of grueling marches of more than 600 kilometers ultimately cost us tens of times more than the battle of Krasnoye.

Separately, we note: Kutuzov, for obvious reasons, saw poorly, but was not blind. He was one hundred percent aware of the fact that his people, even in the absence of decisive battles, littered the roads of the parallel pursuit of the French with their bodies. Here is a description of a contemporary:

The count was excellent at managing people: it was useless to hang officials, because the issues of ensuring the pursuit were not worked out in advance at the level of the army as a whole. Therefore, he could not give bread and meat. But he was able to set up the Izmailovites in such a way that they resigned themselves to the lack of supplies and were ready to continue the march. Of course, it's hard not to admire their dedication. It is no less obvious that one of them could not help but die of all this: a hungry march is difficult in a severe frost.

Kutuzov, even before 1812, could not help but know that winter was killing the army, because any Russian commander knew about it before him (except for Suvorov, who knew how to organize supplies).

Here is a description by a Russian contemporary of the brief winter battles with French troops in 1807, five years before that war: “The [Russian] army cannot endure more suffering than what we have experienced in the last days. Without exaggeration, I can say that each mile passed recently cost an army of thousands of people who did not see the enemy, and what our rearguard experienced in continuous battles!..

In our regiment, which crossed the border in full force and had not yet seen the French, the composition of the company decreased to 20-30 people [from 150 normal numbers - AB]."

Conclusion: in November 1812, Kutuzov "let go" of Napoleon, not because the shore was a soldier. Literally every kilometer of the march cost him many dozens of soldiers who had fallen behind the army in complete incapacity or death. This was not the army's savings - it was a desire not to interfere with Napoleon's retreat.

Berezina: the second salvation of Napoleon by Kutuzov

The last battle of the war of 1812 was Berezina - November 14-17, old style (November 26-29, new style). Usually in our literature it is presented as an undoubted victory of the Russian troops and even Kutuzov. Unfortunately, the reality was not that brilliant.

The plan for the battle on the Berezina, which Kutuzov had agreed upon in his correspondence with the tsar even before the battle itself, actually assumed the encirclement and elimination of Napoleon's units by the efforts of three armies. To the west of the Berezina River, Wittgenstein's Russian corps (36 thousand people) and Chichagov's 3rd Western Army (24 thousand) were supposed to occupy all the crossings and prevent Napoleon from crossing to the western bank of the river that had not yet risen under the ice.

At this time, the main forces of Kutuzov - in number no less than any of the first two detachments - were to attack the army of Napoleon squeezed from the west and destroy it.

French engineering units direct the crossing of the Berezina to the chest in icy water. Contemporaries testify to both the great dedication of the bridge builders and the fact that most of them finished rather poorly, but at least quickly. / © Wikimedia Commons

But in life it was not at all like that. On November 11, the French vanguard Oudinot approached the city of Borisov on the eastern bank of the Berezina. On November 12, Admiral Chichagov, fearing to be crushed by the entire Napoleonic army (other Russian forces had not yet approached), withdrew to the right bank of the Berezina, planning to defend himself under the cover of the river.

On November 14, 30-40 thousand of Napoleon's main forces approached the river. In theory, he had twice as many people, but these were "non-combatants" - the sick, the waitresses, and the like. Bonaparte found out where the two shallowest crossing points are. In the most suitable of them, he imitated the guidance of the ferry, and a few tens of kilometers upstream - near the village of Studyanka - began to build a real ferry.

Chichagov, believing in the demonstration, withdrew his forces tens of kilometers south of Borisov, leaving a small barrier at the ford opposite Studyanka. On the morning of November 14, the French began their crossing. And they threw back the Russian barrier.

Battle of the Berezina. The actions of the French are shown in blue, the Russians are shown in red. Wittgenstein's corps was supposed to close the encirclement around Napoleon from the north, Chichagov from the south, and Kutuzov from the east. In real life, only Chichagov interfered with the crossing of Napoleon's main forces / © mil.ru

On November 16, Chichagov arrived at this place with his own forces, but there were more French than Russians, and the neighboring armies did not come to the rescue. Wittgenstein's corps pursued Victor's corps and did not participate in the battle with the main forces of Napoleon. For all three days of the battle, Kutuzov's forces did not reach the Berezina.

On November 17, Napoleon realized that he did not have time to complete the crossing - Wittgenstein's forces began to approach the battle area - and burned it down. The non-combatants who remained on the other side were killed (a minority) or captured during the Cossack raid.

In terms of the ratio of losses, Berezina looks like a defeat for the French. According to archival data, Russians lost four thousand people here - and the estimates of French historians at 20 thousand are not based on anything other than the French’s unfamiliarity with Russian documents and the desire to better describe the Berezinsky defeat.

After the Berezina, the French had less than 9 thousand combat-ready soldiers, while before the crossing there were 30 thousand of them according to the most conservative estimates. It is obvious that 20 thousand were captured, or killed, or drowned. All these losses became possible mainly due to the actions of Chichagov - it was he who did most of all in that battle, since the other two groups of Russians were never able to fully come to his aid.

Kutuzov, in a letter to Alexander, explaining the failure of the attempt to completely destroy the French and the departure of Napoleon, hastened to lay the blame on Chichagov. Meanwhile, this is an extremely dubious idea. Chichagov's detachment was the weakest of the three Russian detachments, and one fought with the main forces of Bonaparte, inflicting huge losses on them. He could not stop them - but it is not a fact that in his place someone would have done better.

Another picture showing the crossing of the French river. According to the memoirists, those who did not have time to cross the bridges walked directly through the water, but such actions in those conditions were fraught with hypothermia and pneumonia: the soldiers of the former Great Army were in extremely poor physical condition and without swimming in icy water / © Wikimedia Commons

But the actions of Kutuzov himself in the battle raise much more questions. The first day of the battle, November 14, found him and his army in Kopys (eastern edge on the map above) - 119 kilometers from the Berezina. On November 16, on the third day of fighting, he and his forces were in Somr, still far from the battlefield. On that day, he received news from Chichagov that Napoleon had crossed the river - and in his reply Kutuzov writes: "This I almost cannot believe."

And this is not a reservation: on November 17, he ordered his vanguard (under the command of Miloradovich) to find out "whether any enemy remains on this side of the Berezina River." On November 18, a day after the end of the battle on the Berezina, Kutuzov wrote to Chichagov:

"My uncertainty continues, whether the enemy has crossed to the right bank of the Bereza … Until I know completely about the enemy's march, I cannot cross the Bereza, so as not to leave Count Wittgenstein alone against all the enemy forces."

This his thesis cannot be understood otherwise than as an excuse, and a rather ridiculous one. On November 18, Wittgenstein himself was on the same bank of the Berezina (west) as Napoleon.

An amazing picture is emerging: the battle on the Berezina ended a day after, and Kutuzov still does not want to cross to at least pursue Napoleon - since he did not have time to crush him during the battles on the river itself. As a result, Mikhail Illarionovich and his army crossed Berezin only on November 19, two days later than Napoleon, and 53 kilometers to the south, and not in the same place where he was - although this point would be more advantageous for pursuit.

Another picture of the crossing of the Berezina - the topic was too much occupied by European artists of that century / © Wikimedia Commons

The general opinion of contemporaries is well expressed in the diary of a participant in the campaign, Captain Pushchin: "No one can give oneself an account of why we did not get ahead of Napoleon at the Berezina or did not appear there simultaneously with the French army."

In fact, it is quite simple to give a report - and we will do it below. For now, let's summarize: although Berezina tactically was an undoubted Russian victory, strategically it should be recognized as a failure. Napoleon left, the war dragged on for another 1813-1814, during which the Russians irrevocably lost at least 120 thousand people.

Why did Kutuzov behave so strangely?

A good teacher, even in the first year of history faculty, tells students: if it seems to you that a person of the past acted incorrectly in a given situation, it is illogical, then in 99% of cases it seems so to you because you know his time too poorly.

It's true. To understand why Mikhail Illarionovich did everything he could, so that Napoleon left our country alive and free (and it was not easy), and with the nucleus of the future army, we should get to know his era better. To do this, you need to turn to the reality with which they forgot to introduce us at school.

The thing is that Russia's entry into the wars with Napoleon was accidental and did not correspond to its interests as a state. Moreover, Kutuzov fully understood this. At the end of the 18th century, Russia's western allies logically treated our country as an object of manipulation, a strong, but not the smartest player in the international arena - and not as a full-fledged ally.

This is normal: Russians were culturally very distant for them, and the interests of their states were close. Paul I, who began his rule as an ally of the Western states in the fight against Napoleon, quickly appreciated this and by 1799 decided that it would be more logical for him to enter into an alliance with France.

The rationale behind this was simple: traditional Western players were not ready to give Russia anything worthwhile in exchange for an alliance. Napoleon was a new figure on the world stage and professed a kind of "moral capitalism": he was ready to give to those who collaborated with him according to their contribution. For example, Russia - what she can snatch away from those states that are fighting against Napoleon.

In this regard, Paul organized a campaign against the British-controlled India. The campaign had some prospects for success: Platov's Cossacks, like many Russian-speaking southerners of that time, were relatively resistant to the disease that destroyed the regular armies in India and Central Asia. And the huge amount of gold and jewelry in India would not have allowed them to retreat from these lands upon reaching them.

England, of course, was not thrilled with the whole story. As expected, a circle was organized in the house of the British ambassador in St. Petersburg, where an anti-Paul conspiracy was formed. Paul was killed, his son Alexander knew who did it, since he was in close contact with the conspirators. As a result of the pro-English conspiracy and action to eliminate Paul, Russia withdrew from the alliance with Napoleon.

Bonaparte, however, being a victim of his version of moral capitalism, mistakenly believed that people are guided by their objective interests, which have rational justification.

He himself was extremely rational and, due to this limitation of his, did not understand the importance of taking into account the purely irrational factors that shape the reactions of the leaders of other states. Therefore, he teased those who behaved irrationally - and among the victims of his teasing was Alexander I.

In 1804, in an official message, he allowed himself to remark that if the killers of Father Alexander were near the borders of Russia, he would not have protested if the Russian emperor captured them.

The assassination of Paul I by conspirators / © Wikimedia Commons

As Tarle noted, “it was impossible to call Alexander Pavlovich publicly and officially a parricide more clearly.

All of Europe knew that the conspirators strangled Paul after an agreement with Alexander and that the young tsar did not dare to touch them with a finger after his accession: neither Palen, nor Bennigsen, nor Zubov, nor Talyzin, and none of them in general, although they calmly sat not on " foreign territory "and in St. Petersburg we also visited the Winter Palace." However, Alexander was not honest enough with himself not to be ashamed of the murder of his father, de facto justified by him.

From this, he reacted emotionally - and entered the war with Napoleon.

We can criticize Tolstoy and his "War and Peace" as much as we like for re-ennobling Kutuzov, but you can't say better than Lev Nikolaevich:

“It is impossible to understand what connection these circumstances have with the very fact of murder and violence; why as a result … thousands of people from the other end of Europe killed and ruined the people of the Smolensk and Moscow provinces, and were killed by them”.

It is, in principle, easy to understand: Napoleon offended Alexander, and personal insult in politics is always an irrational motive. And irrational motives act on a person, as a rule, stronger than rational ones. And from this, Russia under Alexander again and again returned to the anti-Napoleonic coalitions, although in Tilsit (now Sovetsk) Napoleon tried to offer Alexander the most solid compensation for peace between Russia and France (Finland, Galicia and much more).

But you can understand a lot - it is much more difficult to justify. Kutuzov was one of those who knew well the history of the conflict between Russia and France and understood better than many how much he contradicted the interests of his state. It is clear that Alexander so wanted to appear moral to himself that he was ready to fight Napoleon even to the last Russian.

But Kutuzov did not understand (and not only him) why the personal problems of Alexander (unable to come to terms with the fact that he took the throne, covered in the blood of his father) should have made Russia an enemy of France. A country that objectively tried to pacify Russia by giving it Finland and Galicia.

Therefore, Mikhail Illarionovich was against the war. And for this reason, he did not want to see Russia de facto become a dull battering ram in the skillful hands of British foreign policy, which brought to power the emperor she needed, who pursued - although he believed that he was acting in his own interests - exactly the line by which desired London.

As the English envoy Wilson notes in his diaries, Kutuzov in the fall of 1812 did not plan to destroy either Napoleon or his army at all. The commander, according to the messenger, stated:

“I am not sure that the complete destruction of the Emperor Napoleon and his army would be such a boon for the whole world. Its place will not be taken by Russia or some other continental power, but by the one that already dominates the seas, and in such a case, its dominion will be intolerable."

Kutuzov said directly (and many Russian generals of his time wrote about the same): he wants to build a golden bridge from Russia to Napoleon. This position looks rational, but it suffers from the same weakness as the position of Napoleon. Both Kutuzov and Napoleon thought that the heads of state were doing what was objectively beneficial to them. Alexander, like his father, was objectively more profitable to become an ally of France, which offered much more for the union than England in its entire history was ready to give Russia.

But in real life, the heads of state do what they think is subjectively beneficial - and this is completely, completely different. It seemed to Kutuzov that by letting Napoleon go, he could return the situation to the Tilsit era of 1807, when the French and Russians signed a treaty that ended the war.

In the situation of the new Tilsit, peace could be concluded between Bonaparte and Alexander - but at the same time England, which conspired to kill the Russian emperor in the Russian capital, would still be restrained by Paris.

Kutuzov was wrong. Alexander could calm down only by completely depriving him of the power of Bonaparte who had offended him. Realizing this, they should have captured Napoleon while still in Russia, without letting him go to Europe. To be able to let him go - despite all the opportunities presented by Krasnoye and Berezina to destroy the enemy - Kutuzov had to suffer tens of thousands of casualties on the march from Maloyaroslavets to the Russian border.

In addition, by this he gave Napoleon the opportunity to flee to Europe, create a new army there and fight with Russia back in 1813 and 1814.

These campaigns cost the Russians no less than 120 thousand irrecoverable losses, and, definitely, they were completely redundant. The reasons for them were that Kutuzov unreasonably believed that Alexander's foreign policy could be rational - although, in general, the history of the latter's reign did not give any factual indications of this.

As a result, it came out as in the well-known idiom: "We wanted the best, but it turned out as always." It seems that Kutuzov wanted the good for his country: to make sure that its enemies counterbalanced each other, and the losses of the Russians in the war were lower. As a result, Russia had to pay with its own blood for the liquidation of the French Empire, and its losses in the overseas campaign were greater than that of any other Allied army. Which is quite logical considering that she played a key role in it.

Usually we end the texts with some kind of conclusion. But this time no reasonable conclusions can be drawn. The irrational won out over the rational not for the first or the last time. But the phrase "reasonable conclusions" is not entirely compatible with all this.