Peter the Great
Page 56
Leaving Ogilvie to conduct affairs at Narva, Peter rode south to Dorpat, which Sheremetev had been besieging since June with 23,000 men and forty-six cannon. He found Sheremetev's dispositions faulty—the Russian cannon were firing at the town's strongest bastions, which meant that all their shells were wasted. Peter quickly switched the artillery to the most vulnerable wall, and a breach was made. Russian troops entered the town, and on July 13 the Swedish garrison surrendered, five weeks after the
siege began, but only ten days after the Tsar had arrived to take command.
The fall of Dorpat sealed Narva's doom. Peter hurried back with Sheremetev's troops to make a combined Russian force of 45,000 men and 150 cannon. On July 30, a heavy bombardment began, continuing for ten days and lashing the fortress with more than 4,600 shells. When the wall of one of the bastions crumbled, Peter offered generous terms to Arvid Horn, the Swedish commander, as prescribed by the protocol of war. Foolishly, Horn refused, making matters worse by using insulting language about the Tsar. The assault began on August 9, and although the Swedes fought fiercely, within an hour soldiers of the Preobrazhensky Guards had entered and seized a major bastion. Immediately afterward, waves of Russian infrantry poured over the walls and swept through the town. Now, too late, Horn saw that resistance was futile and tried to capitulate by beating a drum for parley with his own hands. No one listened. Russian soldiers filled the streets, slaughtering men, women and children in a mindless torrent of violence. Two hours later, when Peter rode into Narva with Ogilvie, he found the streets slippery with blood and Swedish soldiers "butchered in heaps"; of a garrison of 4,500, only 1,800 were still alive. The Tsar ordered a trumpeter to ride through the town sounding the cease-fire in every street, but many Russians still would not stop. Angrily, Peter himself slashed down one Russian soldier who refused to obey orders. Stalking into the town hall to confront the frightened town councilors, Peter threw his bloody sword on the table before them and said disdainfully, "Do not be afraid. This is Russian, not Swedish blood." But the Tsar was furious with Horn. When the enemy commander, whose wife had been killed in the assault, was brought before him, Peter demanded to know why he had not surrendered according to the rules once the first bastion had been crumbled and thus prevented all this unnecessary slaughter.
The victory at Narva had great psychological as well as strategic importance. Not only did it secure St. Petersburg from the west, but it vindicated the Russian disgrace on the same site four years before. It proved that Peter's army was no longer merely a mass of half-trained peasants. Ogilvie said that he considered the infantry better than any German infantry, and told Charles Whitworth, the English minister, that "he never saw any nation go better to work with their cannon and mortars." Peter wrote happily about the victory to Augustus, to Romodanovsky and to Apraxin. Four months later, when the Tsar returned to Moscow, the streets reverberated to the tramp of another Russian victory parade. Peter passed under seven triumphal arches at the head of his troops, while fifty-four enemy battle flags and 160 Swedish officer prisoners followed in his train.
Peter's Baltic victories meant little to Charles. He fully expected that when the time came he would scatter Peter's army easily and retake all former Swedish territory now in Russian hands. Far more disturbing to him was the fact that his own victories in Poland had not yet proved politically decisive. Augustus continued unwilling to concede defeat and give up the Polish throne, and the Polish Diet was still not prepared to force him to this action. Instead of an end, the victory over Augustus at Klissow was only the beginning of years of warfare in Poland, with the Swedish-Saxon struggle seesawing back and forth across the immensity of the Polish plain. The huge country with its eight million inhabitants was simply too vast for the Swedish or the Saxon army, neither of which ever numbered much more than 20,000 men, to exercise control over more than that region in which it happened to be at the moment.
Despite the political frustrations for Charles, the years in Poland, 1702-1706, were a time of great military glory, of heroic exploits, of enhancing the legend. In the autumn of 1702, for example, following the Battle of Klissow, Charles with only 300 Swedes rode up to the gates of Cracow and, from his horse, shouted loudly, "Open the gate!" The commander of the garrison opened the gate slightly and stuck out his head to see who was shouting. Charles instantly struck him in the face with his riding crop, the Swedes behind him pushed open the gate and the cowed defenders surrendered without firing a shot.
Inevitably, the war in Poland was hard on the Poles. On entering the country, Charles had promised to demand only those contributions absolutely essential to his army, but he kept this promise for merely three months. After Polish troops fought with King Augustus at Klissow, Charles resolved to take revenge by seeing that the Swedish army was wholly supported by the land. From Cracow, the Swedes extracted 130,000 thalers, 10,000 pairs of shoes, 10,000 pounds of tobacco. 160,000 pounds of meat and 60,000 pounds of bread within three weeks. As the war dragged on, Charles' instructions to his generals became more implacable: "The Poles must either be annihilated or forced to join us."
Near Cracow, Charles suffered an accident that left him with a limp for the rest of his life. He was observing cavalry exercises when his horse stumbled over a tent rope and fell on top of its rider, breaking the King's left leg above the knee. The thigh bone did not set perfectly, and one leg became slightly shorter than the other. It was several months before the King could ride again, and when the army moved north from Cracow in October, Charles was carried on a stretcher.
Year after year, the battles and victories piled up, yet final victory never seemed closer. Meanwhile came news of other victories, Russian victories, along the Baltic: the siege and fall of Schliisselburg, the capture of the length of the Neva River, the founding of a new city and port on the Gulf of Finland, the destruction of the Swedish flotillas on Lake Ladoga and Lake Peipus, terrible devastation of the Swedish granary province of Livonia and the seizure of whole populations of Swedish subjects, the fall of Dorpat and Narva. This grim sequence was accompanied by a stream of desperate pleas from Charles' subjects: the despairing cries of the people of the Baltic provinces, the advice and pleas of the Swedish Parliament, the unanimous request of the army generals, even the appeal of his sister Hedwig Sophia. All begged the King to give up his campaign in Poland and march north to rescue the Baltic provinces. "For Sweden, these events have a much more important significance than who occupies the Polish throne," said Piper.
Charles' reaction was the same to everyone: "Even if I should have to remain here fifty years, 1 would not leave this country until Augustus is dethroned." "Believe that I would give Augustus peace immediately if I could trust his word," he said to Piper. "But as soon as peace is made and we are on our march toward Muscovy, he would accept Russian money and attack us in the back and then our task would be even more difficult than it is now."
In 1704, events in Poland began to turn in Charles' favor. He seized the fortress town of Thorn with 5,000 Saxon soldiers inside it. With Augustus greatly weakened, the Polish Diet accepted Charles' thesis that Poland would be a battlefield as long as Augustus remained on the Polish throne, and in February 1704 it formally deposed him. Charles' original candidate for the throne, James Sobieski, son of the famous Polish King Jan Sobieski, had foresightedly been kidnapped by Augustus' agents and imprisoned in a castle in Saxony, so Charles chose instead a twenty-seven-year-old Polish nobleman, Stanislaus Leszczynski, whose qualifications included a modest intelligence and a sturdy allegiance to King Charles XII.
Stanislaus' election was shamelessly rigged. A rump session of the Polish Diet was rounded up by Swedish soldiery and convened on July 2, 1704, in a field near Warsaw. During the proceedings, 100 Swedish soldiers were stationed at a musket shot's distance to "protect" the electors and "to teach them to speak the right language." Charles' candidate was proclaimed King Stanislaus I of Poland.
Now that Augustus was displaced—Charles' sole objective in inva
ding Poland—Swedes and Poles alike hoped that the King would at last turn his attention toward Russia. But Charles was not ready to leave Poland. Because the Pope had opposed Stanislaus, threatening to excommunicate anyone who participated in the election of this protege1 of a Protestant monarch, and because so few of the great Polish magnates had been present at the election, the new king had at best a shaky grip on his realm. Charles resolved to remain at the side of his puppet monarch until Stanislaus was properly crowned. More than a year later, on September 24, 1705, Stanislaus was crowned in a manner which, like the Diet's proclamation of his election, provided arguments to those who said that his sovereignty was illegitimate. The new king was crowned not in Cracow, the traditional coronation site of Polish kings, but in Warsaw, because that was where Charles and his Swedish army were. The crown placed on Stanislaus' head was not the historic crown of Poland—still in the possession of Augustus, who had not accepted his dethronement—but a new one which, along with a new scepter and new regalia, had been paid for by Charles. The Swedish King was present at the ceremony incognito, so as not to detract from the attention to be paid his new ally. But the coronation of this puppet sovereign fooled no one. Stanislaus' wife, now Queen of Poland, felt so insecure in her husband's turbulent kingdom that she chose to live in Swedish Pomerania.
Nevertheless, with a new king friendly to Sweden on the Polish throne, Charles believed that he had achieved his second objective. Soon after the coronation, he and Stanislaus signed an anti-Russian alliance between Sweden and Poland. Then, as if to release his long-pent-up feelings about Russia and relieve the huge weight of guilt which had fallen on him for failing to heed his subjects' appeals, Charles suddenly struck. On December 29, 1705, the King broke his camp in the open fields near Warsaw and marched rapidly eastward over the frozen bogs and rivers toward Grodno, where Peter's main army was massed behind the River Neman. This lunge at Grodno was not the long-awaited Swedish invasion of Russia. Charles had not done the planning or assembled the equipment and provisions for an epic march to Moscow. Nor, with Augustus still in the field and unwilling to accept his own dethronement, was Poland completely secure at Charles' rear. Thus, Charles did not take the entire army with him; Rehnskjold was left behind with 10,000 men to watch the Saxons. But with the 20,000 men who marched behind him, Charles meant to provoke a winter battle. At long last, the Tsar was to see the glint of Swedish bayonets and his soldiers were to feel the bite of Swedish steel.
* * *
After the capture of Dorpat and Narva in the summer of 1704, Peter had spent the winter in Moscow and then gone to Voronezh in March to work in the shipyards. In May 1705, he set out to join the army, but was stricken by illness and recuperated for a month at Fedor Golovin's house. In June, he reached the army at Polotsk on the Dvina, where it could be moved into Livonia, Lithuania or Poland as events required—an army which was developing into a formidable fighting force. There were 40,000 infantrymen, properly uniformed and well equipped with muskets and grenades. The cavalry and dragoons, 20,000 strong, were plentifully equipped with muskets, pistols and swords. The artillery was standardized and numerous. Like the Swedes, the Russian army had developed a form of highly mobile gun firing a three-pound shell which would accompany infantry and cavalry to give immediate artillery support.
The problem with the army now was at the top, in the structure of command, where there was friction and jealousy between the Russian and foreign generals. The army's excellent training and overall discipline were due to Ogilvie who had taken command at the second siege of Narva and had been made the second field marshal (Sheremetev was the first) in the Russian army. Ogilvie's concern for the soldiers had made him popular with the men, but he was not well liked by the Russian officers; he did not speak Russian and was forced to deal with them through an interpreter. He had particular trouble with Sheremetev, Menshikov and Repnin. The last two were his subordinates and served under him, but Sheremetev, technically his equal in rank, was often offended. Peter, seeking a solution, first tried putting all the cavalry under Sheremetev and the infantry under Ogilvie. Sheremetev felt humiliated and complained to Peter. "I have received your letter," the Tsar replied, "and from it see how distressed you are, for which I am indeed sorry, because it is unnecessary; this was done not in any way to cause you humiliation, but to provide more effective organization. . . . However, because of your distress I have called a halt to this reorganization and ordered the old arrangement to stand until I arrive."
Peter next tried to solve the problem by splitting up the army, sending Sheremetev with eight regiments of dragoons and three of infantry—10,000 men in all—to operate in the Baltic region while Ogilvie remained in command of the main army in Lithuania. Only July 16, Sheremetev attacked Lewenhaupt, the commander of Swedish forces in Livonia, and the Russians were badly defeated. Peter wrote angrily to Sheremetev, blaming the defeat on the "inadequate training of the dragoons about which I have spoken many times." Three days later, remorseful for the harsh tone of his earlier letter, he wrote again to cheer Sheremetev up: "Do not be sad about the misfortune you have had, for constant success has brought many people to ruin. Forget it and try to encourage your men."
As it happened, just at this time came news of the trouble in Astrachan, and Sheremetev and his mounted regiment were dispatched a thousand miles across Russia to deal with the revolt. With the overall strength of the army thus weakened, Peter canceled further operations and ordered the main army into winter quarters at Grodno, on the east bank of the River Neman. Nothing was expected from Charles XII until spring.
Unfortunately, even with Sheremetev gone, the friction between Peter's generals continued. Nominally, Ogilvie, as field marshal, was commander-in-chief and Menshikov and Repnin were his subordinates. Although Menshikov already possessed a growing military reputation because of his successes on the Neva, it was not his military experience but his personal relationship to the Tsar which made him ostreperous and insubordinate. Because he was Peter's closest friend, he refused to accept the lesser military role. Often he invoked, his special relationship with the Tsar to overrule the more experienced Ogilvie, saying simply, "His Majesty would not like that. He would prefer to do it this way. I know that." Further, Menshikov arranged that all of Ogilvie's letters to the Tsar should pass through his hands. Some of these he simply pocketed, later explaining to Peter that the Field Marshal was reporting news which the Tsar already knew from Menshikov himself.
This command structure, already complicated, was further confused in November 1705 when Augustus joined the Russian army. The King-Elector's fortunes were at a low ebb. Poland was now completely occupied by the troops of Charles and the newly crowned Stanislaus, and the deposed Augustus had had to make his way by a lengthy circuitous route through Hungary, using a false name and a disguise. Nevertheless, Peter still considered him King of Poland and, in deference to this rank, granted him overall command of the army at Grodno. Ogilvie kept the senior military command. Menshikov commanded the cavalry, and both Repnin and Carl Evald Ronne, an experienced German cavalry officer, were present as subordinate commanders. It was a situation ripe for disaster.
Charles' march to the east was rapid. The distance from the Vistula to the Neman was 180 miles. Charles covered this ground over frozen roads and rivers in only two weeks and appeared with his vanguard before Grodno on January 15, 1706. The King crossed the river with 600 grenadiers, but, seeing that the fortress was too strong for a sudden assault, he turned and made a temporary camp four miles away. When the main Swedish army of 20,000 men arrived, Charles moved fifty miles above Grodno where he could find better provisions and forage. There he made a permanent camp, waiting to see what the Russians would do. As Charles saw it, either they could come out and fight or they could wait inside their fortress and eventually starve.
With Charles nearby, the Russian commanders held a council of war presided over by Augustus. There was no question of simply marching out to attack. Although they outnumbered the
Swedes by almost two to one, Peter still was far from ready to risk his carefully constructed army even at these odds and had flatly forbidden Ogilvie to offer battle in the open field. Nevertheless, Ogilvie thought his force strong enough to remain and accept a siege, and this was the course he urged. The others disagreed: if the Swedes surrounded the fortress of Grodno, the army would be cut off from Russia and nullified as a protector of the Russian frontier; and although the fortifications were strong and the artillery numerous, they had not provisioned for a long siege. They urged retreat. Ogilvie was aghast, pointing to the size of the army and the superiority of the artillery. If they retreated, they would have to sacrifice the cannon, which could not be hauled without horses across the snow. They would leave the houses and barracks of a town for the bitter cold of open roads where many would perish. The Swedes would certainly pursue, and the field battle which Peter had forbidden would take place. Worse for Ogilvie would be the disgrace. A professional soldier commanding an army twice as strong as an enemy, he would abandon a strong fortress with a tremendous superiority in artillery. What would Europe say?
Augustus, caught between these opposing viewpoints and unwilling to take ultimate responsibility, dispatched an urgent messenger to Peter pleading for "an immediate, categoric and definite decision" from the Tsar. Before that decision could come, however, Augustus himself slipped out of Grodno. With Charles' departure from Warsaw, he glimpsed a chance to reoccupy the Polish capital. Taking four regiments of dragoons, he departed hastily, promising Ogilvie that he would return in three weeks bringing the entire Saxon army. Then, with a combined Russian-Polish-Saxon force of 60,000 men, they would deal with Charles' 20,000 Swedes.