Word: borodino
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They Are the Army. The love of land, the hatred of trespassers was strong and deep in the Russian soldier long before political commissars appeared to share and fan it, to shape and use it as a weapon. The tunes that Tsar Alexander's soldiers sang at Borodino, when they fought Napoleon, rang over the Red Army's lines last week. In War and Peace Leo Tolstoy's Andrey Bolkonsky said to Pierre: "Victory never can be, and never has been, the outcome of position, numbers and character of arms...
Pressure in the North. Although the Germans' main blow fell south of Moscow, their summer strategy, as it unfolded, embraced the whole Russian front. Near Borodino, where Napoleon won a Pyrrhic victory, Nazi artillery and infantry made just enough of a gesture to pin down the Red forces defending the capital to keep them from relieving Timoshenko. Then, on the Kalinin front northwest of Moscow, the Germans began still another drive. It was geared for speed: fleets of Luftwaffe transports swarmed into rear-line fields to supply the mobile Nazi forces. This served immediately to divert the Red Army...
Before he stood in the courtyard of the Kremlin, watching Moscow and his hopes go up in flames, Napoleon Bonaparte had lost three-quarters of his Army in the weary march from the Russian border and in the costly Battle of Borodino, just before Moscow...
Napoleon won at Borodino, but not without heavy losses. It looked as if Hitler's battle for Moscow might be the same story, writ large...
This same phenomenon did not help Adolf Hitler either. And Hitler's stakes were incomparably greater. At Borodino the line of battle was two miles long; this week it was 3,000 miles long. At Borodino 250,000 men were engaged; this week several million men were fighting...