It was in mid-November, 1700, that the czar heard that the Swedish king had landed an army of about thirty-two thousand men, and was coming to the relief of Narva. Not content with his great force, Peter hurried forward a second army of thirty thousand men, proposing to enclose King Charles between these two hordes and hoping thus to annihilate him. He reckoned without his host. Charles landed at Pernow and made a forced march to Reval, followed by his cavalry, fourteen thousand strong, but with only four thousand foot soldiers.
Marching, in his usual ardent manner, in the van of his army, he did not wait for the rear, making his way onward by nearly impassable roads and coming before the outposts of the supplementary Russian army with only eight thousand men. With apparently utter indifference to the vast disproportion in numbers, the Swedish firebrand rushed forward, the Russians, not dreaming of such mad temerity, being sure that he had his whole army behind him.
The advance guard of the Russians, five thousand strong, was posted in a rocky pass where a body of a hundred resolute men might have checked the progress of an army, yet it fled in dismay before the onset of the Swedes. The twenty thousand men behind them shared their panic and joined in their flight, terror and confusion pervading the whole army. In two days' time Charles carried all their posts, winning what might have been claimed as three distinct victories, yet not delaying an hour in his advance. Having thus disposed of the army sent to intercept him, Charles marched with all speed to Narva, leaving his main army still far in the rear. With his eight thousand men, exhausted with their long march and their hard fight, he suddenly appeared before the czar's great force of sixty or eighty thousand men and one hundred and fifty cannon.
Giving his weary men scarcely any time for rest, Charles advanced against the Russians with the impetuosity which had so far marked his career. A general warned him that the danger was very great.
"What!" he replied. "Do you not think that with my eight thousand brave Swedes I may easily beat eighty thousand Russians?"
Whether the general believed so or not, he did not venture any further remonstrances, and, at the signal of two musket shots and the war-cry of "With the aid of God!" the king and his handful of men marched forwards. It was now about mid-day on the 20th of November, 1700.
A breach being made with their cannon in the Russian works, Charles led his men on with fixed bayonets, a furious snow-fall behind them driving full in the face of the enemy and making their position a very difficult one. After an engagement of three hours the entrenchments were stormed on all sides, the right wing of the Russians fleeing to the Narva and crowding the bridge with its retreating hosts. So dense was the mass that the bridge gave way beneath them, precipitating them into the stream, in which eighteen thousand of the panic-stricken wretches were drowned. The left wing then broke and fled in utter confusion, so many prisoners being taken that the best the captor could do was to disarm them and let them disperse where they would.
Thus ended this extraordinary battle, almost without a parallel in history and spreading the fame of the victor widely over Europe. For a boy little over eighteen years of age to achieve such a feat, defeating with eight thousand men an army of nearly a hundred thousand, raised him in men's minds to the level of the most famous conquerors. Unfortunately for himself, it redoubled his self-will and vanity, the adulation given him leading him into a course of wild and aimless invasion that brought upon him eventually misfortune and defeat and nearly ruined his kingdom.
Having disposed of two of the enemies who had plotted his destruction, in the following year Charles advanced against the third, King Augustus of Poland, led his victorious army into that kingdom, took Warsaw, its capital city, by storm, and in the battles of Klissov and Pultusk so thoroughly overthrew the forces of Augustus that he was forced to give up the throne of Poland and retire into his native dominion of Saxony, a Polish noble being proclaimed king in his place. The Swedish conqueror even pursued Augustus into Saxony, defeated his armies wherever met, and forced him at last to beg humbly for peace.
Such was the first era of the brilliant career of the young Swedish firebrand of war, who in four years had utterly overthrown his enemies and won a reputation for splendid military genius which placed him on a level, in the opinion of the military critics of the age, with Alexander the Great, whom he had taken as the model of his career.