nd because
Miloradovich had not yet arrived with the militia, and for many other
reasons. The fact is that other positions they had passed were stronger,
and that the position at Borodino (the one where the battle was fought),
far from being strong, was no more a position than any other spot one
might find in the Russian Empire by sticking a pin into the map at
hazard.

Not only did the Russians not fortify the position on the field of
Borodino to the left of, and at a right angle to, the highroad (that
is, the position on which the battle took place), but never till the
twenty-fifth of August, 1812, did they think that a battle might be
fought there. This was shown first by the fact that there were no
entrenchments there by the twenty fifth and that those begun on the
twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth were not completed, and secondly, by the
position of the Shevardino Redoubt. That redoubt was quite senseless
in front of the position where the battle was accepted. Why was it
more strongly fortified than any other post? And why were all efforts
exhausted and six thousand men sacrificed to defend it till late at
night on the twenty-fourth? A Cossack patrol would have sufficed to
observe the enemy. Thirdly, as proof that the position on which the
battle was fought had not been foreseen and that the Shevardino Redoubt
was not an advanced post of that position, we have the fact that up to
the twenty-fifth, Barclay de Tolly and Bagration were convinced that the
Shevardino Redoubt was the left flank of the position, and that Kutuzov
himself in his report, written in hot haste after the battle, speaks of
the Shevardino Redoubt as the left flank of the position. It was much
later, when reports on the battle of Borodino were written at leisure,
that the incorrect and extraordinary statement was invented (probably to
justify the mistakes of a commander in chief who had to be represented
as infallible) that the Shevardino Redoubt was an advanced post--whereas
in reality it was simply a fortified point on the left flank--and
that the battle of Borodino was fought by us on an entrenched position
previously selected, where as it was fought on a quite unexpected spot
which was almost unentrenched.

The case was evidently this: a position was selected along the river
Kolocha--which crosses the highroad not at a right angle but at an acute
angle--so that the left flank was at Shevardino, the right flank near
the village of Novoe, and the