Two precious months, July 8 to September 15, the best campaigning days of midsummer, passed while Charles waited. It was not that the supplies themselves were urgently needed yet, but Charles felt that he could not move too far ahead of Lewenhaupt lest the Russian army slip into the gap between the two Swedish armies and catch the smaller force exposed and unsupported. At first, the King had hoped to rendezvous with Lewenhaupt at Mogilev on the Dnieper before the main army crossed the river, and from reports of the lumbering supply column's progress, Charles, pacing impatiently, believed that it must arrive by August 15. But that date came and went and Lewenhaupt still had not appeared. Meanwhile, the army was stagnant and restless. The Golovchin wounded were well again, but the countryside around Mogilev had been eaten bare as thousands of horses grazed the pastureland.
Charles decided that offensive operations must be resumed: not the bold, deep thrust at Moscow that he had planned, but something closer to the Dnieper which would perhaps provoke a battle with the Russians and still, somehow, cover Lewenhaupt. He began a series of maneuvers, marching short distances each day, changing direction—first south, then north—hoping to confuse the Tsar and catch part of his army off guard.
Between August 5 and 9, the Swedish army at last crossed the Dnieper and began moving southeast toward the southern flank of the position Peter had taken on the Smolensk road. On August 21, Charles' army reached Cherikov on the Sozh River to find Menshikov's cavalry already in position on the opposite bank and the mass of the Russian infantry coming closer. With the two opposing armies now in close proximity, their patrols were in constant contact and there were frequent skirmishes. On August 30, a battle of sorts took place. It was not the battle that Charles had hoped for or even expected. The King had camped his army along a branch of the stream Chornyaya Natopa, which bordered a marsh. Roos, commanding the rear guard, was camped on the edge of a marsh three miles away. The marsh was difficult but not impassable, and the Tsar and his officers had quickly learned the lesson of Golovchin: that a marsh could be crossed. At dawn on August 30, 9,000 Russian infantry and 4,000 dragoons commanded by Prince Michael Golitsyn crossed the marsh in a dense morning mist and attacked Roos' camp. The Swedes were taken by surprise, never having before been subjected to a Russian infantry attack. Two hours of fierce hand-to-hand combat ensued before reinforcements from the main Swedish camp arrived and the Russians withdrew, fading back across the marsh. When Charles heard the firing, he assumed that Peter desired a major battle, and the following day the entire Swedish army was drawn up in battle formation. But no attack came, and when Rehnskjold's cavalry reconnoitered the silent Russian positions, he found.
With every day that passed, the problem facing Charles grew more acute. The army was poised, ready for the last great thrust that would end the war, yet it couldn't move forward without Lewenhaupt because the Tsar had scorched the earth bare in the regions ahead. And because of the lack of food, it couldn't simply stand where it was. This left two choices, the first being to retreat to the Dnieper and wait for Lewenhaupt there. Charles rejected this idea. To retrace his steps was repugnant to him—it would confirm publicly that the entire summer campaign had been a failure. Although uncertain as to Lewenhaupt's exact position, Charles believed that he was approaching and that, despite the delays, the rendezvous would soon take place. The second alternative was bolder and therefore more to Charles' liking: a march south, away from Smolensk and Moscow, into the Russian province of Severia. This would maintain the momentum of the Swedish offensive and, at the same time, bring the army into a rich area still untouched by Peter's ravaging, where the fields were just being harvested. Replenished in Severia and reinforced by Lewenhaupt, Charles could then march on Moscow.
After prolonged discussions with Rehnskjold and Piper at Tatarsk, Charles decided to take this course. Once decided, it was urgent that the move be made swiftly and secretly to ensure that the Swedes would arrive in Severia before the Russians. The Swedes had the advantage: Charles was nearer and had the more direct route. If he turned his back on the Russians now and marched rapidly south, he would leave them behind and get there first. Thus, at Tatarsk, new orders were issued to the Swedish army. A special mobile vanguard of 2,000 infantry and 1,000 cavalry—the best of the Guards and other elite regiments—was issued two weeks' rations so it could move rapidly and not have to waste time foraging. Placed under the command of General Anders Lagercrona, it was ordered to hurry by forced marches and seize the towns and river crossings which would open Severia to the Swedes and block it to the Russians. Lagercrona was informed of the overall plan and knew that the objective of the operation was the seizure of the provincial capital, Starodub. The distance from Tatarsk to Starodub as the crow flies was 125 miles. That same night, three separate couriers were dispatched to Lewenhaupt telling him of the change of plan and ordering him to change the direction of his march toward Starodub. The three couriers were sent at intervals during the night to ensure the arrival of at least one.
On the early morning of September 15, the march to the south began, a march fateful in the life of Charles XII and in the history of Peter and of Russia. The advance on Moscow was turned aside—as it happened, for good. Charles' decision at Tatarsk also marked a turn in Sweden's fortunes. In the previous fall and winter, he had marched halfway across Europe, brilliantly maneuvering his enemy out of a series of formidable river barriers. Yet in the summer of 1708, Charles' strategic planning had gone badly awry: he had allowed himself to be chained to the arrival of Lewenhaupt and the supplies. Lewenhaupt had not arrived, and the summer and the advance on Moscow had both been lost. Nevertheless, in September 1708, when Charles stood at Tatarsk and decided to turn south, he still held the initiative. His army was intact. He turned toward Severia with optimism and hope that, if the Moscow campaign had failed, the setback was only temporary.
In fact he was on the brink of a series of disasters which for him would end in ruin.
The first consequence of Charles' move fell on Lewenhaupt. On September 15, the day Charles broke camp at Tatarsk and marched south, Lewenhaupt was still thirty miles west of the Dnieper. Charles' position at that moment was sixty miles east of the river. Peter immediately saw his opportunity: The ninety-mile gap left the wagon train exposed. The Tsar dispatched his main force southward with Sheremetev to shadow Charles, but he held aside ten battalions of his best infantry, including the Preobrazhensky and the Semyonovsky Guards. Mounting these infantrymen on horseback and supplementing them with ten regiments of dragoons and cavalry, he created a new, highly mobile "flying corps" of 11,625 men of which he took personal command. With Menshikov at his side, Peter rode directly west to intercept Lewenhaupt. Although the Tsar did not know Lewenhaupt's strength, reports reaching Russian headquarters placed it at around 8,000. Actually, it as 12,500. As a precaution, Peter ordered an additional 3,000 dragoons under Bauer to ride west to join his force. Thus, 14,625 Russians were moving to intercept 12,500 Swedes.
Meanwhile, Lewenhaupt's weary column, still lumbering forward after three months on the road, finally reached the Dnieper on September 18. Here, Lewenhaupt received the King's three messengers commanding him to cross the river and turn south toward the new rendezvous point, Starodub. For three days, the tired soldiers trundled their wagons across the river. As the last companies were crossing on the 23rd, Lewenhaupt became aware that a Russian force was moving against him; red-coated Russian cavalry began appearing on the fringes of the forest. Doggedly, he hurried on, making for the town of Propoisk on the River Sozh. Once across that stream, he would have a fair chance of reaching the main army intact.
It became a race. Lewenhaupt was desperately trying to reach Propoisk, but the muddy roads bogged his heavy wagons. On the morning of the 27th, the leading Russian cavalry caught up, and skirmishing with the Swedish rear guard began. Realizing that a major action was imminent, Lewenhaupt faced a choice: He could either leave his rear guard to hold off his pursuers as long as possible, sacrificing them if
necessary, while pushing his main force and the baggage wagons forward in an effort to reach the Sozh, or he could halt his flight, stand and, with his whole force, fight. Being Lewenhaupt, he chose the second course. He sent the wagons ahead and brought the main body of his infantry and cavalry back down the road, drew them up in battle formation and awaited a Russian attack. There they stood through the morning and early afternoon of the 27th. Late in the afternoon, when it became clear that no Russian attack was coming, Lewenhaupt dissolved his battle line and fell back several miles along the road, then again drew up in line. His men stood in formation through the night.
The following morning, the 28th, when no attack had yet come, the Swedes again fell back, their columns skirmishing with the Russian horsemen who were all around them. They arrived at the village of Lesnaya, a short day's march from Propoisk. Now, the loss of time—almost the entire day of the 27th—revealed its importance. But for this fruitless day, the main body might have reached and crossed the Sozh to safety.
Nevertheless with the Russians clustered thickly around him, Lewenhaupt realized that he could not reach the river, and that he would have to fight. He sent 3,000 cavalrymen ahead to Propoisk to secure the river crossing and with the remaining 9,500 prepared for battle. He ordered a weeding out of the wagon train: colonels could keep four wagons, majors three, and so on.
On the opposite side, Peter dismounted his troops, dragoons and mounted infantry alike, and deployed them on the edges of the forest with Menshikov commanding the left wing with eight regiments, and Peter himself commanding the Preobrazhensky and Semyonovsky Guards and three dragoon regiments on the right wing. At one p.m. on the 28th, the battle began. It raged all afternoon, and, in Peter's words, "all day it was impossible to see where victory would lie." At one point, when Menshikov's troops were wavering, Peter reinforced them with the Semyonovsky Guards whose desperate counterattack restored the crumbling
Russian line. Soon after four p.m., Bauer arrived with his 3,000 dragoons to bolster the Russians, but this was balanced on the Swedish side by the return of the 3,000 cavalrymen who had been sent ahead to secure the ford and then been recalled. The battle continued until nightfall, when a sudden snowstorm, unusual for this early in autumn, obscured the combatants and brought the fighting to a halt. Although his lines were unbroken, Lewenhaupt ordered a retreat and the wagons burned. Like bonfires on wheels, the cartloads of supplies so laboriously pulled from Riga through 500 miles of mud and rain-soaked forest blazed through the night. The brass-and-iron cannon were lifted from their carriages and buried in pits dug in the earth to prevent the Russians from finding and capturing them. In the eerie light of the blazing wagons, confusion took hold and Swedish discipline disintegrated. Soldiers began plundering the wagons of officers' possessions and brandy. Units lost cohesion and stragglers stumbled off into the forest. Some of the infantry rode off on the horses freed from wagon yokes to Propoisk to cross the river to safety. When the surviving regiments arrived at Propoisk at dawn, they found the bridges burned. The few remaining wagons could not cross and they, too, were burned on the riverbank. At this point, a swarm of pursuing Cossacks and Kalmucks caught part of the disorderly Swedish mass on the riverbank and killed another 500 Swedes.
Morning broke over a Swedish disaster. The battle and the chaos of the night had cut Lewenhaupt's force in half. Of 2,000 cavalry, 1,393 remained; of 2,500 dragoons, 1,749 still were present; but of 8,000 infantry, only 3,451 remained. The total loss was 6,307 men; of these, over 3,000 were taken prisoner. Others wandered off into the forest alone or in small bands. Many died or were eventually captured. A thousand actually found their way back across Lithuania to Riga. All the supplies, clothes, food, ammunition, medicines which Charles so desperately needed were lost. On the Russian side, 1,111 were killed and 2,856 wounded. Each side had approximately 12,000 engaged; the Russians lost about one third, but the Swedes lost half.
Lewenhaupt led the bedraggled Swedish survivors—6,000 in all, now mounted on the wagon horses—down the road toward Severia. Peter, busy claiming the battlefield, did not pursue him, and ten days later Lewenhaupt finally joined the King. But what a disparity between what was expected and what arrived! Instead of a huge train of supplies to nourish the army, and 12,500 troops to reinforce it, Lewenhaupt brought 6,000 exhausted, nearly starving men, without artillery or supplies, straggling into camp. The cavalry units were kept together, but the infantry regiments were so shattered that they could no longer be maintained. They were disbanded, and the men used as replacements to fill gaps in the regiments of the main army.
On seeing the new arrivals, fresh gloom spread over the Swedish camp. The Battle of Lesnaya gave further evidence of the new fighting quality of the Russian army. The two sides had been almost equal in numbers, and the Swedes had lost. Nevertheless, Charles reacted to the defeat with equanimity. He did not criticize Lewenhaupt either for the slowness of his march or for the defeat. In fact, the King realized that he himself shared the blame: Having waited too long for Lewenhaupt, in the end he had not waited long enough.
On the Russian side, there was jubilation. The Russians believed that the Swedish force had been somewhat larger than their own— thus, that they had not only triumphed, but had triumphed against numerical odds. Peter, writing later, saw the importance in terms of the self-confidence of his men: "This victory may be called our first, for we have never had one like it over regular troops and then with numbers inferior to those of the enemy. Truly, it was the cause of all the subsequent good fortune of Russia and it put heart into our men, and was the mother of the Battle of Poltava."
For Peter, all these actions were stages in his larger effort to create an effective Russian army. Even when his troops were defeated, he was vitally interested in how they had behaved under fire and if they had retreated in good order. From the battlefield of Lesnaya, he wrote to his friends and even to Augustus. He sent descriptions and diagrams of the battle to the Tsarevich in Moscow with instructions that they be printed, both in Russian and in Dutch: The news of his victory over the supposedly invincible Swedes was to be circulated not only in Russia, but across Europe. After the battle, Peter led the "flying corps" to Smolensk, where he staged a triumphal parade, marching to the thunder of cannon salutes, with Swedish prisoners and captured colors following in his train.
Peter was still in Smolensk in mid-October when more good news arrived from the north. As one part of his overall strategy, Charles had planned that Lybecker's force of 14,000 men in Finland should attack St. Petersburg. Although the attack was intended to be diversionary, drawing the Tsar's attention and army away from the main Swedish attack on Moscow, Charles naturally hoped that Lybecker might succeed in capturing the new city at the mouth of the Neva.
Lybecker began his march down the Karelian Isthmus and on August 29, he succeeded in reaching and crossing the Neva River above St. Petersburg. Here, however, false information planted by Apraxin convinced him that the fortifications of the city were too strong, and rather than attacking, Lybecker continued his march in an arc south and west of the city through the Ingrian countryside. Again, Peter's grim order to destroy the landscape bore fruit; the Swedes soon exhausted their own provisions and, unable to find anything on the land, began killing their own horses for food. Without cannon, Lybecker could not attack walled cities, and he wandered aimlessly through Ingria, finally reaching the coast near Narva, where a Swedish naval squadron took the soldiers but not the horses aboard. Six thousand animals were either killed or hamstrung to prevent the Russians from using them, and the Swedish squadron returned to Vyborg in Finland. Lybecker's force had thus made a complete circle of Peter's city with no achievement other than the loss of 3,000 Swedish soldiers. Even as a diversionary tactic, the expedition failed: not a single Russian soldier in the main army facing Charles was transferred north.
Peter remained in Smolensk for three weeks before starting off to rejoin Sheremetev and the army. He found high spirits at Russian headquarters, as
news of the victory at Lesnaya and of Apraxin's success in Ingria had filled both officers and men with excitement and growing confidence.
It was at this point that fortune, which had not been kind to Russia in the early years of war but which now seemed to be swinging fast in the Tsar's direction, once again reversed itself and gave the jubilant Peter what seemed a staggering blow. On October 27, with Charles' army deep inside Severia and marching rapidly toward the Ukraine, Peter received an urgent message from Menshikov: Mazeppa, Herman of the Ukrainian Cossacks, loyal to Moscow for twenty-one years, had betrayed the Tsar and allied himself with Charles.
34
MAZEPPA
Mazeppa's defection is better understood in the light of Charles' decision in mid-September to turn south. General Anders Lagercrona's vanguard of 3,000 men and six cannon had been sent ahead to seize the crossings on the Sozh and Iput rivers and to march on the fortified town of Mglin and the pass at Pochep. These two positions were vital to Charles: If his army was to seize Severia and its capital, Starodub, intact before the Russians could arrive, it was essential to occupy these two sites—in effect, the gates to the province—and close them in Peter's face.
Lagercrona's mobile force set out with maps prepared by the Swedish quartermaster staff. Before reaching the Iput, however, it encountered other, unmarked roads whch seemed better and more direct than those indicated on their Swedish maps, and Lagercrona took them. But instead of heading southeast toward Mglin and Pochep, he was heading directly south for Starodub itself. He would miss the two gateway points he was supposed to seize, and the gates themselves would be left open.
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