%DOWNFALL OF CHARLES XII AT POLTAVA%
TRIUMPH OF RUSSIA
A.D. 1709
K. WALISZEWSKI[1]
[Footnote 1: Translated from the Russian by Lady Mary Loyd.]
The battle of Poltava was selected by Sir Edward Creasy as one of the fifteen great decisive contests which have altered the fate of nations. His able narrative of the battle has been superseded in scholars' eyes by the more modern work of the great Russian authority, Waliszewski; but the importance of the event remains. It reversed the positions of Sweden and Russia in European politics, and placed Russia among the great countries of the modern world; Sweden among the little ones.
Before 1709 Sweden still held the rank to which Gustavus Adolphus had raised her in the Thirty Years' War. Her prestige had been a little dimmed by the victories of the "Great Elector" of Prussia; but her ally Louis XIV had saved her from any considerable diminution of the extensive territories which she held on the mainland to the south and east of the Baltic Sea. About 1700 the young and gallant warrior, Charles XII, the "Madman of the North," reasserted her prowess, made her once more the dictator of Northern Europe, one of the five great powers of the world.
Meanwhile Peter the Great was progressing but slowly with his transformation of Russia. His people had little confidence in him; his armies were half-barbaric hordes. When he ventured into war against Sweden Europe conceived but one possible result: these undisciplined barbarians would be annihilated. At first the expected occurred. Again and again large Russian armies were defeated by small bodies of Swedes; but with splendid tenacity Peter persisted in the face of revolt at home and defeat abroad. "The Swedes shall teach us to beat them" was his famous saying, and at Poltava he achieved his aim. From that time forward Russia's antagonism to her leader disappeared. His people followed him eagerly along the path to power.
It would appear that it was not till Peter's visit to Vienna, in 1698, that he conceived the idea of attacking Sweden. Up till that time his warlike impulse had rather been directed southward, and the Turk had been the sole object of his enmity. But at Vienna he perceived that the Emperor, whose help he had counted on, had failed him, and forthwith the mobile mind of the young Czar turned to the right-about. A war he must have of some kind, it little mattered where, to give work to his young army. The warlike instincts and the greed of his predecessors, tempted sometimes by the Black Sea, sometimes by the Baltic and the border provinces of Poland, had, indeed, always swung and turned back and forward between the south and the north. These alternate impulses, natural enough in a nation so full of youth and strength, have, since those days, been most unnecessarily idealized, erected into a doctrine, and dignified as a work of unification. It must be acknowledged that every nation has at one time or the other thus claimed the right to resume the national patrimony at the expense of neighboring peoples, and Peter, by some lucky fate, remained in this respect within certain bounds of justice, of logic, and of truth. Absorbed and almost exhausted, as he soon became, by the desperate effort demanded by his war in the North, he forgot or imperilled much that the conquering ambition of his predecessors had left him in the South and West. He clung to the territory already acquired on the Polish side, retired from the Turkish border, and claimed what he had most right, relatively speaking, to claim in the matter of resumption, on his northwestern frontier.
On that frontier the coast country between the mouth of the Narva, or Narova, and that of the Siestra, watered by the Voksa, the Neva, the Igora, and the Louga, was really an integral part of the original Russian patrimony. It was one of the five districts (piatiny) of the Novgorod territory, and was still full of towns bearing Slavonic names, such as Korela, Ojeshek, Ladoga, Koporie, Iamy, and Ivangrod. It was not till 1616 that the Czar Michael Feodorovitch, during his struggle with Gustavus Adolphus, finally abandoned the seacoast for the sake of keeping his hold on Novgorod. But so strong was the hope of recovering the lost territory, in the hearts of his descendants, that, after the failure of an attempt on Livonia, in Alexis' reign, a boyar named Ordin-Nashtchokin set to work to build a number of warships at Kokenhausen, on the Dvina, which vessels were intended for the conquest of Riga. Peter had an impression, confused it may be, but yet powerful, of these historic traditions. This is proved by the direction in which he caused his armies to march after he had thrown down the gauntlet to Sweden. He strayed off the path, swayed, as he often was, by sudden impulses, but he always came back to the traditional aim of his forefathers—access to the sea, a Baltic port, "a window open upon Europe."
His interview with Augustus II at Rawa definitely settled his wavering mind. The pacta conventa, signed by the King of Poland when he ascended his throne, bound him to claim from the King of Sweden the territories which had formerly belonged to the republic of Poland. For this end the help of Denmark could be reckoned on. The Treaty of Roeskilde (1658), which had been forced on Frederick III, weighed heavily on his successors, and the eager glances fixed by the neighboring states on Holstein, after the death of Christian Albert, in 1694, threatened to end in quarrel. There were fair hopes, too, of the help of Brandenburg. When Sweden made alliance with Louis XIV and Madame de Maintenon, that country abandoned its historic position in Germany to Prussia. But Sweden still kept some footing, and was looked on as a rival.
Further, Augustus had a personal charm for Peter sufficient in itself to prove how much simplicity, inexperience, and boyish thoughtlessness still existed in that half-polished mind. The Polish Sovereign, tall, strong, and handsome, an adept in all physical exercises, a great hunter, a hard drinker, and an indefatigable admirer of the fair sex, in whose person debauch of every kind took royal proportions, delighted the Czar and somewhat overawed him. He was more than inclined to think him a genius, and was quite ready to bind up his fortunes with his friend's. At the end of four days of uninterrupted feasting, they had agreed on the division of the spoils of Sweden, and had made a preliminary exchange of arms and clothing. The Czar appeared at Moscow a few weeks later wearing the King of Poland's waistcoat and belted with his sword.
In the beginning of 1700 Augustus and Frederick of Denmark attacked Sweden; but Peter, though bound by treaty to follow their example, neither moved nor stirred. Frederick was beaten, his very capital was threatened. So much the worse for him! Augustus seized on Dunamunde, but utterly failed before Riga. All the better for the Russians; Riga was left for them! Another envoy came hurrying to Moscow. The Czar listened coolly to his reproaches, and replied that he would act as soon as news from Constantinople permitted it. Negotiations there were proceeding satisfactorily, and he hoped shortly to fulfil his promise, and to attack the Swedes in the neighborhood of Pskof. This was a point on which the allies had laid great stress, and Peter had studiously avoided contradicting them. It was quite understood between them that the Czar was not to lay a finger on Livonia. At last on August 8, 1700, a courier arrived with the longed-for dispatch. Peace with Turkey was signed at last, and that very day the Russian troops received their marching orders. But they were not sent toward Pskof. They marched on Narva, in the very heart of the Livonian country.
The army destined to lay siege to Narva consisted of three divisions of novel formation, under the orders of three generals—Golovin, Weyde, and Repnin—with 10,500 Cossacks, and some irregular troops—63,520 men in all. Repnin's division, numbering 10,834 men, and the Little Russian Cossacks, stopped on the way, so that the actual force at disposal was reduced to about 40,000 men. But Charles XII, the new King of Sweden, could not bring more than 5300 infantry and 3130 cavalry to the relief of the town. And, being obliged, when he neared Wesemburg, to throw himself in flying column across a country which was already completely devastated, and, consequently, to carry all his supplies with him, his troops arrived in presence of an enemy five times as numerous as themselves, worn out, and completely exhausted by a succession of forced marches.
Peter never dreamed that he would find the King of Sweden in Livonia. He believed his hands were more than full enough elsewhere with the King of Denmark; he was quite unaware that the Peace of Travendal, which had been signed on the very day of the departure of the Russian troops, had been already forced upon his ally. He started off gayly at the head of his bombardier company, full of expectation of an easy victory. When he arrived before the town, on September 23d, he was astounded to find any preparations for serious defence. A regular siege had to be undertaken, and when, after a month of preparations, the Russian batteries at last opened fire, they made no impression whatever. The artillery was bad, and yet more badly served. A second month passed, during which Peter waited and hoped for some piece of luck, either for an offer to capitulate or for the arrival of Repnin's force. What did happen was that on the night of November 17th news came that within twenty-four hours the King of Sweden would be at Narva. That very night Peter fled from his camp, leaving the command to the Prince de Croy.
None of the arguments brought forward by the sovereign and his apologists in justification of this step appears to me to hold water. The necessity pleaded for an interview with the Duke of Poland, the Czar's desire to hasten on Repnin's march, are mere pitiful excuses. Langen and Hallart, the generals sent by Augustus to observe the military operations in Livonia, gravely reported that the Czar had been obliged to go to Moscow to receive a Turkish envoy—who was not expected for four months! The Emperor's envoy, Pleyer, is nearer the mark when he says the sovereign obeyed the entreaties of his advisers, who considered the danger too great for him to be permitted to remain. And Hallart himself, speaking of these same counsellors, whether ministers or generals, does not hesitate to declare, in his rough soldierly language, that "they have about as much courage as a frog has hair on his belly." The Russian army, disconcerted by the unexpected resistance of the Swedes, ill-prepared for resistance, ill-commanded, ill-lodged, and ill-fed, was already demoralized to the last extent. The arrival of Charles caused a panic, and from that panic Peter, the most impressionable of men, was the first to suffer.
The startling rapidity with which Charles had rid himself of the weakest of his three adversaries, under the very walls of Copenhagen, would have been less astonishing to Peter if the young sovereign had better realized the conditions under which he and his allies had begun a struggle in which, at first sight, their superiority appeared so disproportionate. King Frederick had reckoned without the powers which had guaranteed the recent Treaty of Altona, by which the safety of Holstein was insured; without the Hanoverian troops, and those of Luneburg, which at once brought succor to Toeningen; without the Anglo-Dutch fleet, which forced his to seek shelter under the walls of Copenhagen, and thus permitted the King of Sweden to cross the Sound unmolested, and land quietly in Zealand; and finally, he reckoned—and for this he may well be excused—without that which was soon to fill all Europe with terror and amazement: the lucky star and the military genius of Charles XII.
This monarch, born in 1682, who had slain bears when he was sixteen, and at eighteen was a finished soldier, greedy for glory and battle and blood, was the last representative of that race of men who, between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, held all Central Europe in their iron grip; fierce warriors who steeped Germany and Italy in fire and blood, fought their way from town to town, and hamlet to hamlet; giving no truce and showing no mercy; who lived for war and by war; grew old and died in harness in a very atmosphere of carnage, with bodies riddled with wounds, with hands stained with abominable crimes, but with spirits calm and unflinching to the last. Standing on the threshold of the new period he was the superb and colossal incarnation of that former one, which, happily for mankind, was to disappear in his person.
Count Guiscard, who as envoy from the King of France accompanied him on his first campaign, describes him thus: "The King of Sweden is of tall stature; taller than myself by almost a head; he is very handsome, he has fine eyes and a good complexion, his face is long, his speech a little thick. He wears a small wig tied behind in a bag, a plain stock, without cravat, a very tight jerkin of plain cloth, with sleeves as narrow as our waistcoat sleeves, a narrow belt above his jerkin, with a sword of extraordinary length and thickness, and almost perfectly flat-soled shoes—a very strange style of dress for a prince of his age."
In order to reach Narva with his eight thousand men, Charles, after having crossed a tract of desert country, was obliged, at a place called Pyhaioggi, to cross a narrow valley divided by a stream, which, if it had been fortified, must have stopped him short. The idea occurred to Gordon, but Peter would not listen to him, and it was not till the very last moment that he sent Sheremetief, who found the Swedes just debouching into the valley, received several volleys of grape-shot and retired in disorder. The mad venture had succeeded. But Charles' farther advance involved the playing of a risky game. His men were worn out, his horses had not been fed for two whole days. Still he went on; he reached Narva, formed his Swedes into several attacking columns, led one himself, and favored by a sudden hurricane which drove showers of blinding snow into his adversaries' faces, threw himself into their camp and mastered the place in half an hour. The only resistance he met was offered by the two regiments of the guard. All the rest fled or surrendered. A few Russians were drowned in the Narva. "If the river had been frozen," said Charles discontentedly, "I do not know that we should have contrived to kill a single man."
It was a total breakdown; the army had disappeared, and the artillery. The very sovereign was gone, and with him the country's honor. That had sunk out of sight amid the scornful laughter with which Europe hailed this undignified defeat. The Czar was in full flight. All Peter's plans of conquest, his dreams of European expansion and of navigating the northern seas, his hopes of glory, his faith in his civilizing mission, had utterly faded. And he himself had collapsed upon their heaped-up ruins. Onward he fled, feeling the Swedish soldiers on his heels. He wept, he sued for peace, vowing he would treat at once and submit to any sacrifice; he sent imploring appeals to the States-General of Holland, to England and to the Emperor, praying for mediation.
But swiftly he recovered possession of his faculties. Then, raising his head—through the golden haze with which his insufficient education, the infatuation inherent to his semi-oriental origin, and his inexperience, had filled his eyes, through the rent of that mighty catastrophe and that cruel lesson—he saw and touched the truth at last! He realized what he must set himself to do if he was to become that which he fain would be. There must be no more playing at soldiers and sailors; no more of that farce of power and glory, in which, till now, he had been the chief actor; no more aimless adventure, undertaken in utter scorn of time and place. He must toil now in downright earnest; he must go forward, step by step; measure each day's effort, calculate each morrow's task, let each fruit ripen ere he essayed to pluck it; learn patience and dogged perseverance. He did it all. He found means within him and about him to carry out his task. The strong, long-enduring, long-suffering race of which he came endowed him with the necessary qualities, and gave him its own inexhaustible and never-changing devotion and self-sacrifice.
Ten armies may be destroyed, he will bring up ten others to replace them, no matter what the price. His people will follow him and die beside him to the last man, to the last morsel of bread snatched from its starving jaws. A month hence, the fugitive from Narva will belong to a vanished, forgotten, almost improbable past; the future victor of Poltava will have taken his place.
Of the Russian army, as it had originally taken the field, about twenty-three thousand men remained—a certain number of troops—the cavalry under Sheremetief's command, and Repnin's division. The Czar ordered fresh levies. He melted the church-bells into cannon. In vain the clergy raised the cry of sacrilege; he never faltered for a moment. He went hither and thither giving orders and active help; rating some, encouraging others, inspiring everyone with some of his own energy—that energy which his misfortune had spurred and strengthened. Yet, Byzantine as he was by nature, he could not resist the temptation to endeavor to mislead public opinion. Matvieief was given orders to draw up his own special description of the battle of Narva and its consequences, for the benefit of the readers of the Gazette de Hollande and of the memoranda which he himself addressed to the States-General.
The Swedes, according to this account, had been surrounded by a superior force within the Russian camp, and had there been forced to capitulate; after which event, certain Russian officers, who had desired to pay their respects to the King of Sweden, had been treacherously seized by his orders. Europe only laughed, but in later years this pretended capitulation, and the supposed Swedish violation of it, were to serve Peter as a pretext for violating others, to which he himself had willingly consented. At Vienna, too, Count Kaunitz listened with a smile while Prince Galitzin explained that the Czar "needed no victories to prove his military glory." Yet, when the vice-chancellor inquired what conditions the Czar hoped to obtain from his victorious adversary, the Russian diplomat calmly claimed the greater part of Livonia, with Narva, Ivangrod, Kolyvan, Koporie, and Derpt—and future events were to prove that he had not asked too much.
Before long this boldness began to reap its own reward. To begin with, Charles XII made no immediate attempt to pursue his advantage on Russian soil; Peter had the joy of seeing him plunge into the depths of the Polish plains. The King of Sweden's decision, which, we are told, did not tally with his generals' opinion, has been severely criticised. Guiscard thought it perfectly justifiable, so long as the King had not rid himself of Augustus, by means of the peace which this Prince appeared more than willing to negotiate, through the mediation of Guiscard himself. But Charles turned a deaf ear to the French diplomat's prayers and remonstrances. He feared, declared Guiscard, "he might run short of enemies," and as he could not advance on Russia and leave the Saxons and Poles in his rear, he desired—and here doubtless he was right—first of all to insure his line of communication, and of possible retreat. Thus, by his own deed, he strengthened and cemented an alliance which had already been shaken by common defeat.
Augustus, repulsed by the Swedish King, threw himself into Peter's arms,
and in February, 1701, the common destinies of the Czar and the King of
Poland were once more bound together. A fresh treaty was signed at the
Castle of Birze, close to Dunaburg.
The year 1701 was a hard one for Peter. The junction between the army, which he had contrived after some fashion to put on a war footing, and the Saxon troops of Augustus, only resulted in the complete defeat of the allied forces under the walls of Riga, on July 3d. In the month of June the Moscow Kremlin caught fire; the state offices (prikaz) with their archives, the provision-stores, and palaces, were all devoured by the flames. The bells fell from the tower of Ivan the Great, and the heaviest, which weighed over a hundred tons, was broken in the fall. But in midwinter Sheremetief contrived to surprise Schlippenbach with a superior force, and defeated him at Erestfer, December 29th.
Peter's delight, and his wild manifestations of triumph, may easily be imagined. He did not content himself with exhibiting the few Swedish prisoners who had fallen into his hands at Moscow, in a sort of imitation Roman triumph; his practical mind incited him to make use of them in another way, and Cornelius von Bruyn, who had lived long enough in the country to be thoroughly acquainted with its customs, calmly reports that the price of war captives, which had originally been three or four florins a head, rose as high as twenty and thirty florins. Even foreigners now ventured to purchase them, and entered into competition in the open market.
On July 18, 1702, Sheremetief won a fresh victory over Schlippenbach—30,000 Russians defeated 8000 Swedes. According to Peter's official account of the battle, 5000 of his enemies were left dead on the field, while Sheremetief lost only 400 men. This report made Europe smile, but the Livonians found it no laughing matter. Volmar and Marienburg fell into the hands of the victor, who ravaged the country in the most frightful fashion. The Russians had not as yet learned any other form of warfare, and, as we may suppose, the idea that he might ever possess these territories had not yet occurred to Peter. His mind, indeed, was absorbed elsewhere. His old fancies and whims were strong upon him, and he left Apraxin to rage on the banks of the Neva, in Ingria, on the very spot where his future capital was to stand, while he himself gave all his time and strength to the building of a few wretched ships at Archangel. It was not till September, when the ice had driven him out of the northern port, that he returned to the west and took up his former course. He reached the Lake of Ladoga, sent for Sheremetief, and the end he was to pursue for many a long year seems at last to have taken firm root in his hitherto unstable mind. He laid siege to Noteburg, where he found a garrison of only four hundred fifty men, and on December 11, 1702, he rechristened the little fortress he had captured, by a new and symbolic name, "Schluesselburg" (Key of the Sea).
Next came the capture of Nienschantz, at the very mouth of the Neva, in April, 1703, a personal success for the captain of Bombardiers, Peter Mikhailoff, who there brought his batteries into play. A month later the artilleryman had become a sailor, and had won Russia's first naval victory. Two regiments of the guard manned thirty boats, surrounded two small Swedish vessels, which, in their ignorance of the capture of Nienschantz, had ventured close to the town, took possession of them, and murdered their crews. The victor's letters to his friends are full of the wildest and most childish delight, and there was, we must admit, some reason for this joy. He had reconquered the historic estuary, through which, in the ninth century, the first Varegs had passed southward, toward Grecian skies. On the 16th of the following May wooden houses began to rise on one of the neighboring islets. These houses were to multiply, to grow into palaces, and finally to be known as St. Petersburg.
Peter's conquests and newly founded cities disturbed Charles XII but little. "Let him build towns; there will be all the more for us to take!" Peter and his army had so far, where Charles was concerned, had to do only with small detachments of troops, scattered apart and thus foredoomed to destruction. The Russians took advantage of this fact to pursue their successes, strengthening and intrenching themselves both in Ingria and Livonia. In July, 1704, Peter was present at the taking of Derpt. In August he had his revenge for his disaster at Narva, and carried the town after a murderous assault. Already in November, 1703, a longed-for guest had appeared in the mouth of the Neva, a foreign trading-vessel laden with brandy and salt. Menshikoff, the Governor of Piterburg, entertained the captain at a banquet, and presented him with five hundred florins for himself, and thirty crowns for each of his sailors.
Meanwhile Charles XII tarried in Poland, where Augustus' affairs were going from bad to worse. A diet convened at Warsaw in February, 1704, proclaimed his downfall. After the disappearance of James Sobieski, whose candidature was put a stop to by an ambuscade, into which the dethroned King lured the son of the deliverer of Vienna, Charles, who was all-powerful, put forward that of Stanislaus Lesczynski. Though he gave little thought just then to Russia and to the Russian sovereign, the Czar was beginning to be alarmed as to the consequences which the Swedish King's position in Poland and in Saxony might entail on himself. Charles was sure to end by retracing his steps, and an encounter between Sheremetief and Loewenhaupt, at Hemauerthorf in Courland (July 15, 1705), clearly proved that the Russian army, unless in the case of disproportionate numerical superiority over the enemy, was not yet capable of resisting well-commanded Swedish troops. On this occasion Sheremetief lost all his infantry and was himself severely wounded.
What then was Peter to do? He must work on, increase his resources, and add to his experience. If Sheremetief and his likes proved unequal to their task, he must find foreign generals and instructors, technical and other; he must keep patience, he must avoid all perilous encounters, he must negotiate, and try to obtain peace, even at the price of parting with some of the territory he had conquered. The years between 1705 and 1707 were busy ones for him.
A treaty of peace among his enemies took him by surprise and found him quite unprepared. He soon made good his mistakes, took a swift decision, and adopted the course which was infallibly to bring him final victory. He evacuated Poland, retired backward, and, pushing forward the preparations which Charles' long stay in Saxony had permitted him to carry on with great activity, he resolved that the battle should be fought on his ground, and at his chosen time. He took fresh patience, he resolved to wait, to wear out his adversary, to draw back steadily and leave nothing but a void behind him. Thus he would force the enemy to advance across the desert plains he had deliberately devastated, and run the terrible risk, which had always driven back the ancient foes of his country, whether Turks, Tartars, or Poles—a winter sojourn in the heart of Russia. This was to be the final round of the great fight. The Czar, as he expressed it, was to set ten Russians against every Swede, and time and space and cold and hunger were to be his backers.
Charles, the most taciturn general who ever lived, never revealed the secret inspiration which drove him to play his adversary's game, by marching afresh on Grodno. During 1707 he seemed to give the law to Europe, from his camp in Saxony. France, which had been vanquished at Blenheim and Ramillies, turned a pleading glance toward him, and the leader of the victorious allies, Marlborough himself, solicited his help.
Charles may have had an idea of making Grodno his base for a spring attack on the Czar's new conquests in the North. This supposition would seem to have been the one accepted by Peter, if we may judge by the orders given, just at this time, to insure the safety of Livonia and Ingria, by completing their devastation; and these very orders may have induced the King of Sweden to abandon his original design, in favor of another, the wisdom of which is still contested by experts, but which, it cannot be denied, was of noble proportions. Charles, too, had found an ally to set against those natural ones with which Russia had furnished the Czar, and he had found him within the borders of the Czar's country. The name of this ally was Mazeppa.
The stormy career of the famous hetman, so dramatic, both from the historic and domestic point of view—from that adventure with the pan Falbowski, so naively related by Pasek, down to the romance with Matrena Kotchoubey, which colored the last and tragic incidents of his existence—is so well known that I will not narrate it here, even in the concisest form. Little Russia was then passing through a painful crisis—the consequence of Shmielnicki's efforts at emancipation, which had been warped and perverted by Russian intervention. The Polish lords, who formerly oppressed the country, had been replaced by the Cossacks, who not only ground down the native population, but railed at and quarrelled with their own chief. The hetmans and the irregular troops were at open war, the first striving to increase their authority and make their power hereditary, the others defending their ancient democratic constitution.
The Swedish war increased Mazeppa's difficulties. He found himself taken at a disadvantage between the claims of the Czar, who would fain have his Cossacks on every battle-field in Poland, Russia, and Livonia, and the resistance of the Cossacks themselves, who desired to remain in their own country. Being himself of noble Polish birth, brought up by the Jesuits, having served King John Casimir of Poland, and sworn allegiance to the Sultan, he saw no reason for sacrificing his interests, much less his life, for Peter's benefit. The approach of Charles XII made him fear he might, like his predecessor Nalevaiko, be deserted by his own followers, and given up to the Poles.
The appearance of Charles on the Russian frontier forced him to a definite resolution, and, in the spring of 1708, his emissaries appeared at Radoshkovitse, southeast of Grodno, where Charles had established his head-quarters. The King of Sweden's idea, at that decisive moment, would seem to have been to take advantage of the hetman's friendly inclination, to find his way into the heart of Russia, using the rich Southern Provinces as his base, to stir up, with Mazeppa's help, the Don Cossacks, the Astrakhan Tartars, and, it may have been, the Turks themselves, and thus attack the Muscovite power in the rear. Then Peter would have been forced back upon his last intrenchments, at Moscow or elsewhere, while General Luebecker, who was in Finland with fourteen thousand men, fell on Ingria and on St. Petersburg, and Leszcynski's Polish partisans, with General Krassow's Swedes, held Poland.
It was a mighty plan, indeed, but at the very outset it was sharply checked. Mazeppa insisted on certain conditions, and these conditions Charles thought too heavy. The hetman agreed that Poland should take the Ukraine and White Russia, and that the Swedes should have the fortresses of Mglin, Starodoub, and Novgorod-Sievierski, but he himself insisted on being apportioned Polotsk, Vitebsk, and the whole of Courland, to be held in fief. Thus the negotiations were delayed. Meanwhile Charles, perceiving that he was not strong enough to make a forward movement, made up his mind to send for Loewenhaupt, who was in Livonia, and who was to bring him sixteen thousand men and various stores. But the Swedish hero had not reckoned fairly with distance and with time. Many precious days, the best of the season, fled by before his orders could be obeyed. And, for the first time, he showed signs of uncertainty and irresolution which were all too quickly communicated to those under his command. Loewenhaupt grew slower than usual. Luebecker slackened his activity, and Mazeppa began to play his double game again: prudently preparing his Cossacks to revolt, in the name of the ancient customs, national privileges, and church laws, which Peter's reforms had infringed; fortifying his own residence at Batourin, and accumulating immense stores there, but still continuing to pay court to the Czar, wearing the German dress, flattering the sovereign's despotic taste by suggesting plans which would have annihilated the last vestiges of local independence, and accepting gifts sent him by Menshikoff.
And so the summer passed away. A winter campaign became inevitable, and the abyss which Peter's unerring eye had scanned began to gape.
It was not till June that Charles XII left Radoshkovitse, and marched eastward to Borisov, where he crossed the Berezina. Menshikoff and Sheremetief made an attempt to stop him, on July 3d, as he was crossing a small river called the Bibitch, near Holovtchin. A night manoeuvre, and a wild bayonet charge, led by the King himself, carried him once more to victory. The town of Mohilef opened its gates to the Swedes, but there Charles was forced to stay, and lose more time yet waiting for Loewenhaupt. He marched again, early in August, in a southerly direction, and his soldiers soon found themselves in the grip of one of Peter's allies. They were driven to support themselves by gathering ears of corn, which they ground between two stones. Sickness began to thin their ranks. Their three doctors, so the fierce troopers said, were "brandy, garlic, and death"! Loewenhaupt had reached Shklof, and was separated from the invading army by two streams, the Soja and the Dnieper, between which Peter had taken up his position. The Swedish general, after having successfully passed the Dnieper, was met at Liesna, on October 9th, by a force three times as large as his own, and Peter was able, on the following day, to report a complete victory to his friends: "8500 men dead on the field, without mentioning those the Kalmucks have hunted into the forest, and 700 prisoners!" According to this reckoning, Loewenhaupt, who could not have brought more than 11,000 troops into action, should have been left without a man; as a matter of fact, he reached Charles with 6700, after a flank march which all military experts consider a marvel. But, not being able to find a bridge across the Soja, he was forced to abandon his artillery and all his baggage, and he led his starving troops into a famine-stricken camp.
There was bad news, too, from Ingria, where Luebecker had also been defeated, losing all his baggage and three thousand first-class troops. Charles grew so disconcerted that he is reported to have confessed to Gyllenkrook, his quartermaster-general, that he was all at sea, and no longer had any definite plan. On October 22d he reached Mokoshin on the Desna, on the borders of the Ukraine, where he had expected to meet Mazeppa. But the old leader broke his appointment. He still desired to temporize and was loath to take any decisive resolution. He was driven to take one at last, by the Cossacks about him, who were alarmed at the idea of the Russians following the Swedes into the Ukraine. It would be far better, so they thought, to join the latter against the former. One of these Cossacks, Voinarovski, who had been sent by the hetman to Menshikoff, had returned with most terrifying news. He had overheard the German officers on the favorite's staff, speaking of Mazeppa and his followers, say: "God pity those poor wretches; to-morrow they will all be in chains!" Mazeppa, when he heard this report, "raged like a whirlwind," hurried to Batourin to give the alarm, and then crossed the Desna and joined the Swedish army.
It was too late. The popular sentiment, on which both he and Charles had reckoned to promote an insurrectionary movement, confused by the tergiversations and the ambiguous actions of the hetman, had quite gone astray and lost all consistency. All Mazeppa could reckon upon was a body of two thousand faithful troops; not enough even to defend Batourin, which Menshikoff snatched from him a few days later—thus depriving the Swedish army of its last chance of revictualling. When the fortresses of Starodoub and Novgorod-Sievierski closed their gates against him, the whole of the Ukraine slipped from the grasp of the turncoat chief and his new allies. His effigy was first hung and then dragged through the streets of Glouhof in Peter's presence; another hetman, Skoropadski, was appointed in his place, and then came winter—a cruel winter, during which the very birds died of cold.
By the beginning of 1709 Charles' effective strength had dwindled to nearly twenty thousand men. The Russians did not dare to attack him as yet, but they gathered round him in an ever-narrowing circle. They carried his advanced posts, they cut his lines of communication. The King of Sweden, to get himself mere elbow-room, was driven to begin his campaign in the month of January. He lost one thousand men and forty-eight officers in taking the paltry town of Wespjik (January 6th). By this time the game, in Mazeppa's view, was already lost, and he made an attempt to turn his coat again; offering to betray Charles into Peter's hands if Peter would restore him his office. The bargain was struck, but a letter from the old traitor, addressed to Leszcynski, chanced to fall into the Czar's hands, and made him draw back, in the conviction that Mazeppa was utterly unreliable.
In March, the near approach of the Swedish army, then advancing on Poltava, induced the Zaporoje Cossacks to join it. But the movement was a very partial one, and Peter soon put it down, by means of a series of military executions, mercilessly carried out by Menshikoff, and of various manifestoes against the foreign heretics, "who deny the doctrines of the true religion, and spit on the picture of the Blessed Virgin." The capture of Poltava thus became the last hope of Charles and his army. If they could not seize the town, they must all die of hunger.
The fortifications of the place were weak, but the besieging army was sorely changed from that which had fought under the walls of Narva. It had spent too long a time in fat quarters, in Saxony and Poland, to be fit to endure this terrible campaign. Like the Russian army at Narva, it was sapped by demoralization before it was called on to do any serious fighting. Even among the Swedish staff, and in the King's intimate circle, all confidence in his genius and his lucky star had disappeared.
His best generals, Rehnskold and Gyllenkrook, his chancellor Piper, and Mazeppa himself were against any prolongation of the siege, which promised to be a long one. "If God were to send down one of his angels," he said, "to induce me to follow your advice, I would not listen to him!" An ineradicable illusion, the fruit of the too easy victories of his early career, prompted him to undervalue the forces opposed to him. He knew, and would acknowledge, nothing of that new Russia, the mighty upstanding colossus, which Peter had at last succeeded in raising up in his path. According to some authorities, Mazeppa, in his desire to replace Batourin by Poltava, as his own personal appanage, encouraged him in this fatal resolution. But it may well have been that retreat had already become impossible.
It was long before Peter made up his mind to intervene; he was still distrustful of himself, desperately eager to increase his own resources, and with them his chances of victory. On his enemy's side, everything contributed to this result. By the end of June all the Swedish ammunition was exhausted, the invaders could use none of their artillery and hardly any of their fire-arms, and were reduced to fighting with cold steel. On the very eve of the decisive struggle, they were left without a leader. During a reconnaissance on the banks of the Vorskla, which ran between the hostile armies, Charles, always rash and apt to expose himself unnecessarily, was struck by a bullet. "It is only in the foot," he said, smiling, and continued his examination of the ground. But, when he returned to camp he fainted, and Peter, reckoning on the moral effect of the accident, at once resolved to cross the river. A report, as a matter of fact, ran through the Swedish camp that the King, convinced of the hopelessness of the situation, had deliberately sought death.
Yet ten more days passed by, in the expectation of an attack which the Russians did not dare to make. It was Charles who took action at last, informing his generals, on June 26th (July 7th) that he would give battle on the following morning. He himself was still in a very suffering condition, and made over the command to Rehnskold, a valiant soldier but a doubtful leader, for he did not possess the army's confidence, and, according to Lundblad, "hid his lack of knowledge and strategical powers under gloomy looks and a fierce expression." After the event, as was so commonly the case with vanquished generals, he was accused of treachery.
The truth would seem to be that Charles' obstinate reserve, and habit of never confiding his plans and military arrangements to any third person, had ended by gradually depriving his lieutenants of all power of independent action. In his presence they were bereft of speech and almost of ideas. All Rehnskold did was to rage and swear at everyone. Peter, meanwhile, neglected nothing likely to insure success. He even went so far as to dress the Novgorod regiment—one of his best—in the coarse cloth (siermiaga) generally reserved for newly joined recruits, in the hope of thus deceiving the enemy. This stratagem, however, completely failed. In the very beginning of the battle, Rehnskold fell on the regiment, and cut it to pieces.
The Russian centre was confided to Sheremetief, the right wing to General Ronne, the left to Menshikoff. Bruce commanded the artillery, and the Czar, as usual, retired modestly to the head of a single regiment. But this was a mere disguise; in real fact, he was everywhere, going hither and thither, in the forefront of the battle, and lavishing effort in every direction. A bullet passed through his hat, another is said to have struck him full on the breast. It was miraculously stopped by a golden cross, set with precious stones, given by the monks on Mount Athos to the Czar Feodor, and which his successor habitually wore. This cross, which certainly bears the mark of some projectile, is still preserved in the Ouspienski monastery, at Moscow.
The heroism and sovereign contempt of death betrayed by Charles were worthy of himself. Unable to sit a horse, he caused himself to be carried on a litter, which, when it was shattered by bullets, was replaced by another made of crossed lances. But he was nothing but a living standard, useless, though sublime. The once mighty military leader had utterly disappeared. The battle was but a wild conflict, in which the glorious remnants of one of the most splendid armies that had ever been brought together; unable to use its arms, leaderless, hopeless of victory, and soon overwhelmed and crushed by superior numbers, struggled for a space, with the sole object of remaining faithful to its king. At the end of two hours Charles himself left the field of battle. He had been lifted onto the back of an old horse which his father had formerly ridden, and which was called Brandklepper ("Run to the Fire"), because he was always saddled when a fire broke out in the city.
This charger followed the vanquished hero into Turkey, was taken by the Turks at Bender, sent back to the King, taken again at Stralsund in 1715, returned to its owner once more, and died in 1718—the same year as his master—at the age of forty-two. Poniatowski, the father of the future King of Poland, who was following the campaign as a volunteer—Charles had refused to take any Polish troops with him on account of their want of discipline—rallied one of Colonel Horn's squadrons to escort the King, and received seventeen bullets through his leather kaftan while covering the royal retreat. Field Marshal Rehnskold, Piper the chancellor, with all his subordinates, over one hundred fifty officers, and two thousand soldiers fell into the victor's hands.
The Russians' joy was so extreme that they forgot to pursue the retreating enemy. Their first impulse was to sit down and banquet. Peter invited the more important prisoners to his own table, and toasted the health of his "masters in the art of war." The Swedes, who still numbered thirteen thousand men, had time to pause for a moment in their own camp, where Charles summoned Loewenhaupt, and, for the first time in his life, was heard to ask for advice—"What was to be done?" The general counselled him to burn all wagons, mount his infantry soldiers on the draught-horses and beat a retreat toward the Dnieper. On June 30th the Russians came up with the Swedish army at Perevolotchna, on the banks of the river, and, the soldiers refusing to fight again, Loewenhaupt capitulated; but the King had time to cross to the other side. Two boats lashed together carried his carriage, a few officers, and the war-chests which he had filled in Saxony. Mazeppa contrived to find a boat for himself, and loaded it with two barrels of gold.
At Kiev, whither Peter proceeded from Poltava, a solemn thanksgiving was offered up in the church of St. Sophia, and a Little Russia monk, Feofan Prokopovitch, celebrated the recent victory in a fine flight of eloquence: "When our neighbors hear of what has happened, they will say it was not into a foreign country that the Swedish army and the Swedish power ventured, but rather into some mighty sea! They have fallen in and disappeared, even as lead is swallowed up in water!"
The Sweden of Gustavus Adolphus had indeed disappeared. Charles XII was ere long to be a mere knight-errant at Bender. The Cossack independence, too, was a thing of the past. Its last and all too untrustworthy representative was to die in Turkey before many months were out—of despair, according to Russian testimony—of poison voluntarily swallowed, according to Swedish historians. The poison story has a touch of likelihood about it, for Peter certainly proposed to exchange Mazeppa's person for that of the chancellor Piper. The cause of the Leszcynski, too, was dead. It was to be put forward again by France, but for the benefit of France alone; and with the Leszcynski cause, Poland itself had passed away and lay a lifeless corpse on which the vultures were soon to settle.
Out of all these ruins rose the Russian power, its northern hegemony, and its new European position, which henceforth were daily to increase and reach immense, immoderate proportions. Europe played a special part in the festivities which graced the return of the victors to Moscow, a few months later. European ideas, traditions, and forms appeared in the triumphal procession, and served as trappings for the trophies of victory. Peter, playing the part of Hercules, and conquering a Swedish Juno, in a cortège in which Mars figured, attended by furies and by fauns, was a fit symbol of the alliance of Russia with the Graeco-Latin civilization of the West. Old Muscovy—Eastern and Asiatic—was numbered with the dead.