Karl, who ignored human needs and human weaknesses, forced his men to march and work as if it had been midsummer and they well fed.
Two thousand of them dropped dead of cold in their tracks.
The rest were soon reduced to a state bordering on misery.
There was no replenishing their clothes, half were without coats, half without boots or shoes; they had to clothe themselves in skins as best they might, and suffer and die as best they might, for the mad King tolerated no murmur, and such was his authority and the awe and respect that his very name inspired that his troops endured what perhaps no other general had induced men to endure before. Such food as kept them alive was provided by Mazeppa, who alone prevented them from perishing miserably.
The old Prince of the Cossacks had remained faithful to Karl despite the offers Peter made to him to induce him to return to his allegiance. The Czar, not wishing to appear inferior to his enemy in spirit or daring, advanced into the Ukraine, regardless of the frozen country and tempests of snow.
He did not, however, attack the King of Sweden, but merely harassed him by small raids on his camp, thinking that hardships and cold would have reduced them to extremity before succor could reach them.
News from Stockholm finally came to the isolated army.
Karl learnt that his sister, the Duchess of Holstein-Gottorp, was dead of the small-pox. This gentlewoman was but a faint memory to the King; it was eight years since this terrible and bloody war had been undertaken to replace her husband on his throne.
Karl had almost forgotten Stockholm; almost forgotten the cause of the war; the young Duke was dead, and had but a small place in the stern King’s mind, compared to the vast designs that had grown out of his quarrel.
Not till the first day of February did the snow permit the Swedes to move, and then it was amid terrible weather that Karl advanced on Poltava, a fort full of supplies that Peter held across the Moscow route.