Peter the Great

by Robert K. Massie

  The cold reached its peak at Christmas, normally the most festive time in the Swedish church calendar. During these days, Charles rode from regiment to regiment inspecting the men crowded twenty and thirty into small cabins. All church services and sermons, including one on Christmas Day itself, were canceled to avoid calling the men out into the open. Instead, simple morning and evening prayer services for each group were led by an ordinary soldier. Two days after Christmas, the cold was at its worst. The third day, it was a little warmer, and by December 30 the men began to move outside again. Charles consoled himself with the assumption that if the winter had been hard on his own men, it must have been equally hard on the Russians. In fact, although Peter's troops had also suffered, they were in general more warmly clothed and their losses were comparatively lighter.

  Astonishingly, despite the widespread suffering and partial destruction of his army, Charles could not suppress the impulse to attack which had allowed the army to be lured to Gadyach in the first place. "Although Earth, Sky, and Air were now against us," exclaimed the young Prince Max of Wurttemberg, "the king's designs had to be accomplished." The loss of Romny to Hallart grated on him, and he wished to regain the initiative. On top of a hill only eight miles from Gadyach there was a small, fortified Cossack village called Veprik. Charles disliked having a Russian position so close, and decided to take it. But Veprik had been strongly garrisoned by Peter with 1,100 Russians and several hundred loyal Cossacks, the whole commanded by an English officer of Peter's army. On taking command, this energetic officer had raised the level of the village walls by piling baskets filled with earth on top of them. These earth ramparts had then been made even more difficult to climb by pouring water over the surface, which, when the temperature plunged, made them palisades of solid ice. The village gates were blocked in similar fashion with cartloads of dung covered with a layer of water. Thus ingeniously prepared, the English officer was undismayed when Charles arrived on January 7 and demanded his immediate surrender. When the King threatened to hang the Englishman and all his garrison from the walls, the commander calmly refused and, instead, prepared his men to receive an assault. Knowing that the Swedish officers would be out in front leading their men up his ice-covered ramparts, he ordered his soldiers to aim especially at the Swedes who came first.

  Charles' assault force consisted of six of his depleted infantry battalions and two dragoon regiments, a total of 3,000 men for what seemed a simple operation. He would sweep the walls clear of defenders with artillery, and then three columns of infantry would storm over the walls and into the town. The attack was begun with great resolution by the Swedish veterans. Under the roar of cannon, the three assault columns approached the walls carrying ladders. But the artillery failed. The guns were too few and the fire too sparse. The defenders were able to maintain their places on the walls and shoot down many of the men carrying the ladders before they could be put in place. When the remaining ladders were in position and the infantry began to mount them, the walls were found to be too slippery and the ladders too short. Cossack and Russian marksmen poked their barrels over the top, shooting first, as instructed, at the Swedish officers. Other Russians threw logs, boiling water and even hot porridge down on the assailants.

  Although Swedish bodies were piling up at the foot of Veprik's ice ramparts, Charles refused to admit that he could be held off by such a "hovel." Once again, the attack was launched, and again it was beaten off with heavy casualties. Rehnskjold, who had been in the middle of the action, was hit by splinters from an exploding grenade and received a wound in the chest from which he never completely recovered. Still the fort was holding out when darkness forced the Swedes to abandon the attack. Luckily for Charles, the commander of the garrison did not know how heavily the Swedes had suffered and, fearing that his men could not withstand a third assault, sent a messenger after dark to arrange a surrender on honorable terms. Charles agreed, and the garrison marched out, surrendering 1,500 men and four cannon. But Charles' losses had been severe. In two hours on a short winter afternoon, 400 Swedes had died and 800 had been wounded— more than a third of the attacking force and a serious drain on the dwindling strength of the Swedish army. The town was taken, but no major advantage had been gained.

  From mid-January to mid-February, the Swedish army once again was on the move. Charles was mounting a limited offensive, moving generally eastward across the frozen streams and untrodden snows. Peter watched uneasily; Kharkov, the major city of the eastern Ukraine, was less than a hundred miles from the Swedish vanguard. Worse from the Tsar's point of view, the King might be marching toward the precious dockyards at Voronezh on the Don. To protect this place on which so much effort had been lavished was worth any sacrifice, even a major battle. Accordingly, as the Swedes began to lap around his southern flank, Sheremetev, with the main Russian army, began shifting southward. His course lay parallel to and west of the Swedes, constantly interposing him between the invader and the shipyards. Meanwhile, Menshikov and the bulk of the Russian horsemen, both cavalry and dragoons, slipped south of the Swedish advance, screening Charles from the Vorskla and standing ready to oppose any Swedish crossing of the river.

  On January 29, Charles struck at Menshikov. As the Prince was finishing dinner in Oposhnya on the Vorskla, there was a sudden alarm and Charles burst in on him with five cavalry regiments. It was the kind of action which the King loved, a repeat of the dashing sortie at the Grodno bridge the year before. Charles, sword in hand, was riding with the Drabants as they attacked. Menshikov himself escaped, but his seven dragoon regiments were chased out of town and pursued until the Swedes were finally stopped by deep snow. When Charles gave the order to withdraw, he had inflicted 400 casualties at the cost of only two men killed.

  Throughout this offensive, Charles ravaged and destroyed. He was applying the tactics which Peter had taught him: to shield his army by laying down a belt of devastation through which enemy penetration would be painful and difficult. By mid-February, Charles had turned southeast toward Kharkov, and on the 13th he reached Kolomak on a small river of the same name. This was the most easterly point, the deepest penetration, of the Swedish invasion of Russia. Just then, however, Charles' month-long offensive was halted by a new factor: another great turn in the Russian weather. The intense cold suddenly gave way to sweeping thaw. Crashing thunderstorms and a torrential downpour were followed by a rapid melting of masses of snow. Rivers and streams overflowed, the Swedish soldiers sank in the mud, and water and melted snow poured in over their boot tops. Further military operations were paralyzed, and Charles had no choice but to order a withdrawal. With great effort, artillery and wagons were dragged through the mire. On the 19th, the Swedes were back at Oposhnya on the Vorskla. By the middle of March, the thaw was over and the ground hard and passable again. Taking advantage of the moment, the Swedes with all their baggage and most of their Cossack allies moved even farther south to new positions between the Pysol and the Vorskla, both tributaries of the Dnieper. There, the regiments were strung out along a forty-mile north-south line along the west bank of the Vorskla. Near die southern end of this line lay the town of Poltava, still strongly held by a Russian garrison. In this freshly occupied, relatively untouched region, the Swedish army waited through the rest of March and April. Behind them to the north, the land of milk and honey was now a ruined earth of plundered towns and burned villages.

  Charles was able to inspect and assess the damage inflicted on the army during the winter. The situation was alarming. Frostbite, fever and battle casualties had taken a heavy toll, shoes and boots were worn through, uniforms were frayed and ragged. There was enough to eat, but the entire Swedish artillery now consisted of only thirty-four cannon, and the powder was wet and deteriorated. "The campaign is so difficult and our condition so pitiful," Count Piper wrote to his wife, "that such great misery cannot be described and is beyond belief." A little later, he wrote, "The army is in an indescribably pitiful state."

  Charles, howev
er, seemed determined not to notice. On April 11, he wrote to Stanislaus, "I and the army are in very good condition. The enemy has been beaten and put to flight in all the engagements." His determination to remain positive, to stiffen morale and encourage optimism is illustrated by a meeting with a wounded young officer, Ensign Gustav Piper of the Guards. Piper had resisted the surgeon's desire to amputate both his legs, but had nevertheless lost some toes and both heels. Crippled and unable to walk, he was traveling in one of the baggage wagons when the King came up.

  I saw His Majesty King Charles XII a great way off, with a suite of some fifty horsemen, riding along a column of wagons; and since I lay unclothed in nought but a white undershirt, bedded in an ammunition wagon with half the lid open to shade me from the sun and admit fresh air, I thought it not decent to see the King in such a posture. Therefore, I turned about with by back to the opening and feigned sleep. But His Majesty came straight forward along the line of wagons, he came at last to mine and inquired who I was. The colonel replied, "This is the unfortunate Ensign Piper of the Guards, whose feet were frostbitten." His Majesty then rode up close beside the wagon, inquiring of the groom, "Is he asleep?" The groom answered, "I don't know. He was awake but now." And the King staying beside the wagon, I thought it not fitting to keep my back to him and so turned. He asked me, "How is it with you?" I replied, "Ill enough. Your Majesty, for I cannot stand upon either foot." His Majesty asked, "Have you lost part of your feet?" I told him that my heels and toes were gone, and to this he said, "A trifle. A trifle," and resting his own leg upon the pommel of his saddle, he pointed to half the sole, saying, "I have seen men who lost this much of their foot and when they had stuffed their boot [to support the missing part], they walked as well as before." Turning then to the colonel, His Majesty asked, "What does the surgeon say?" The colonel answered, "He believes he may do something for the feet." His Majesty said: "Perhaps he will run again?" The colonel replied, "He may thank his God if he can so much as walk; he must not think of running." And as His Majesty rode away, he said to the colonel, who afterward told me, "He is to be pitied, for he is so young."

  Charles himself was then twenty-six.

  The declining state of the Swedish army and its exposed position on the steppe led Count Piper and Charles' officers to a single urgent conclusion: The King must withdraw from the Ukraine, retreat across the Dnieper in the direction of Poland, seeking reinforcement from the armies of Stanislaus and Krassow in Poland. Thus augmented, he might renew his invasion of Russia, although many wondered whether further pursuit of the elusive and dangerous Tsar would ever bring the decisive, overwhelming triumph to which the King obsessively committed himself.

  Charles flatly refused to give up his campaign and to retreat, saying that a withdrawal would look like a flight and only make Peter bolder. Instead, he told his dismayed senior advisors that he intended to remain where he was and press on in his duel with the Tsar. He admitted that, in its diminished state, his Swedish army alone, even with Mazeppa's men, was now too small to reach Moscow unaided. Accordingly, while holding his advanced position, he would seek reinforcements. Already in December, he had ordered Krassow in Poland to join with Stanislaus' Polish royal army, and to march from Poland to Kiev and then eastward to unite with the main army. Further, he hoped to recruit additional allies among the Cossacks of the Ukraine. Mazeppa had assured him that many of these people would willingly join the Swedish King once his army came near enough to offer them protection from the Tsar's retribution. Finally, the grandest dream of all: Charles hoped to persuade the Crimean Tatars and perhaps their overlords, the Ottoman Turks, to break the armistice signed in 1700 and join with him in a mighty coalition. With himself as its commander, and with his Swedish veterans as its steely core, a vast allied army would march irresistably on Moscow from the south. Then, with the King in the Kremlin, Russia would be carved up and each of the invading parties—Swedes, Cossacks, Tatars and Turks—would take that slice which it found most desirable. But none of this was possible, Charles insisted, unless the army remained where it was to provide the nucleus and launching point for this next phase of his great enterprise.

  According to Mazeppa, Charles' closest and most immediate source of new allies lay among the Zaporozhsky Cossacks, a wild people who lived on a cluster of thirteen fortified islands below the rapids of the Dnieper River. They formed a fellowship of river brigands, owing allegiance to no one except their Hetman, Konstantin Gordeenko and, among the Cossacks, they were reputed to be the fiercest warriors. When the Tatars and the Turks had impinged upon their grazing grounds and constructed river forts to block their boats, they had fought the Tatars and the Turks. Now it was the Russians who were closing in on them, curtailing their freedom; therefore, now they would fight the Russians. Mazeppa, who had been negotiating with Gordeenko, was aware of their inclination to do so, and the shift of the Swedish army south to the region of Poltava was partly intended to encourage the Zaporozhsky to believe that it was safe to declare against Tsar Peter.

  On March 28, Gordeenko and 6,000 of his men joined the Swedes, manifesting their new allegiance by attacking a small force of Russian dragoons which garrisoned the town of Perevoluchna, and important crossroads where the Vorskla flows into the broad Dnieper. Once Perevoluchna was taken, the Zaporozhsky Cossacks moved their entire fleet of boats north and moored them in rows along the shore. These boats, capable of carrying 3,000 men in a single trip, were more important to Charles than the additional horsemen, for the Dnieper was wide and swift, there were no bridges and only on such boats could the armies of Krassow and Stanislaus be transported across once they came to join him.

  On March 30, Gordeenko arrived at Charles' headquarters to formalize his bargain with the King of Sweden. A treaty, to which Charles, Mazeppa and Gordeenko all were signatories, bound the King not to make peace with Peter until full independence of both the Ukrainian and the Zaporozhsky Cossacks had been obtained. Charles also promised to move his army out of the Ukraine, ending its use as a battlefield, as soon as militarily possible. For their part, the two Cossack leaders agreed to fight beside the King and to persuade other Cossack and Ukrainian people to join against the Tsar. Eventually, their appeals did bring an additional 15,000 unarmed Ukrainian recruits into the Swedish camp, but as neither Charles nor the Cossack Hetmen had any surplus muskets with which to arm these peasants, they effected almost no increase in the King's combat potential. Charles' puritanical nature also suffered from their presence, for the new recruits brought their women with them, and soon the camps of the Swedish battalions were swarming and overrun with "the wanton sluts" of the Zaporozhsky Cossacks.

  Far worse for Charles were the results of a sudden, brilliant stroke on Peter's part which, within two weeks of Charles' treaty with the Zaporozhsky Cossacks, obliterated its major advantage. Peter had been well aware of the danger of Gordeenko's defecting, and had never counted on his loyalty. Accordingly, he ordered Colonel Yakovlev to embark a force of 2,000 Russian troops in barges at Kiev and set off down the river toward Perevoluchna and the Zaporozhe Sech. While the Hetman Gordeenko and his followers were still with Charles, negotiating terms, Yakovlev's force arrived and destroyed the Cossacks at Perevoluchna. A few weeks later, the same Russian force stormed ashore on the Zaporozhsky Cossack's island base. The town was taken and razed, many Cossacks were killed and others captured and executed as traitors. This victory had several significant effects. The strength of the once-feared band of Cossacks was diminished. And, as in the case of the destruction of Mazeppa's capital at Baturin, Peter had demonstrated the terrible cost of alliance with his enemy. It not only quieted the rest of the Cossacks, but gave all the border peoples food for thought. Finally, the Russian victory had purely military value for Peter. Having taken Perevoluchna and the Sech, Yakovlev's men put every Cossack boat on the river to the torch. At one stroke, Charles' floating bridge across the Dnieper was destroyed.

  * * *

  Even the loss of the boats and of the pro
spect of additional Cossack soldiers would not have mattered had Charles been successful in reaching agreement with a more powerful ally, the fiery Russophobe Khan of the Crimean Tatars, Devlet Gerey. For nine years, the restless Khan had been held in check by Peter's armistice in 1700 with the Khan's overlord, the Sultan. But Devlet's hatred of the Russians had not softened, and as Charles' army had seemed to be marching on Moscow, he had anxiously urged the Porte in Constantinople to seize the opportunity. In the spring of 1709, in response to an invitation from Count Piper, the eager Khan sent two Tatar colonels to the Swedish camp to open negotiations, the agreement, of course, being subject to final approval from Constantinople. Devlet's terms included the demand that Charles pledge not to make peace with Peter until all Tatar, as well as Swedish, objectives had been achieved. Normally, Charles would never have considered such a commitment, but, torn between the weakness of his own army and his obsession to finish Peter, he began to negotiate. Just at that moment arrived the news of the destruction of the Sech. Disturbed, the Khan's representatives withdrew to consult with their master.