The first possibility—one which most of the officers at Swedish headquarters in Saxony assumed the King would adopt—was to march to the Baltic to cleanse these former Swedish provinces of their Russian occupiers. Such a campaign would expiate the insult of their loss, seize the new city and port which Peter was building and drive the Russians back from the sea—a powerful blow at Peter, whose passion for salt water and St. Petersburg were well known. The military advantage of such a great sweep up the Baltic coast was that Charles would be advancing with the sea close to his left flank, providing his army with easy access to sea-borne supply and reinforcement from Sweden itself. In addition, the large army he was assembling would be further augmented by forces already stationed in those Baltic regions: almost 12,000 men under Lewenhaupt at Riga and 14,000 under Lybecker in Finland already poised for a blow at St. Petersburg. But there were negative aspects to a Baltic offensive. These Swedish provinces already had suffered terribly from seven years of war. The farms were burned, the fields in weeds, the towns almost depopulated by war and sickness. If these exhausted provinces once again became a battlefield, nothing would be left. More important than his feelings of compassion, Charles also realized that even if such a campaign were wholly successful, even with the entire coast recaptured and the flag of Sweden floating over the Peter and Paul Fortress he would not have achieved a decisive victory. Peter still would be Tsar in Moscow. Russian power would be driven back, but only temporarily. Sooner or later, this vigorous Tsar would reach for the sea again.
Thus, the march to the Baltic was rejected for something bolder: a strike directly at Moscow, Russia's heart. Charles had concluded that only by a deep thrust which could place him personally inside the Kremlin could he achieve a lasting peace for Sweden.
The Russians, of course, were not to be allowed to know this. To encourage the Tsar to believe that the objective was the Baltic, important subsidiary operations in that area were planned. Once Charles had begun to march eastward directly across Poland, and the Russians had begun to shift troops from the Baltic coast to Poland and Lithuania, the Swedish armies in the Baltic would take the offensive; the Finnish army under Lybecker would drive down th
e Karelian Isthmus toward Schlu
sselburg, the Neva and St.
Petersburg. Then, as the thrust of the main Swedish army drew Russian troops away from the force opposing Lewenhaupt near Riga, Charles would use those troops as the escort for a vast supply convoy which would move south from Riga to rendezvous with and resupply the main army for the last stage of its march to the Russian capital.
Meanwhile, in all those towns and villages of Saxony where Swedish regiments were stationed, military preparations were moving forward. Squads and platoons were mustered from the houses and barns where they had spent their idle months. Thousands of new recruits flocked to join the ranks, many of them German Protestants. Silesian Protestants, anxious to serve a monarch who supported their cause against Catholic domination, clustered so quickly about the recruiting booths that Swedish sergeants had only to pick and choose the best.
Augmented by these new volunteers, the army which on its entry into Saxony had numbered 19,000 had now risen to more than 32,000. In addition, 9,000 fresh recruits from Sweden were drilling in Swedish Pomerania, preparing to join the main army after it had entered Poland. There, the overall strength of Charles' army would reach 41,700 men, including 17,200 infantrymen, 8,500 cavalrymen and 16,000 dragoons. Many of the dragoons were newly recruited, although not necessarily experienced, Germans; as dragoons, they were in effect mounted infantrymen, prepared to fight either on foot or on horseback as circumstances dictated. Finally, there were the surgeons, chaplains, officers' servants, civil officials. Not part of the army proper and thus not counted were the hundreds of civilian wagoners, locally hired to drive cartloads of supplies and ammunition over specific sections of the road.
Adding to the 26,000 men under Lewenhaupt and Lybecker who waited at Charles' command in Lithuania and Finland, the grand total of the force preparing to march on Russia reached almost 70,000 men. And it was being drilled and honed into a formidable fighting machine. Foreign recruits were trained in Swedish battle drill, learned the signals of Swedish drums, and were taught to use Swedish weapons. The entire army was rearmed. The so-called "Charles XII sword," a lighter and more pointed model, was issued to replace the heavier, less wieldy weapon which the King had inherited from his father's reign. Most of the battalions already carried the modern flintlock muskets, and now the Swedish cavalry was also equipped with Flintlock pistols. Large supplies of gunpowder were procured for the campaign, but the emphasis remained, as always in the Swedish army, on the attack with cold steel.
The tailors of Saxony were busy stitching these proud and well-fed soldiers into new Swedish uniforms. The Swedish veterans who had been described as looking like gypsies when they marched into Saxony in their ragged, weather-beaten uniforms were now fitted into new boots and new blue-and-yellow uniforms with cloaks of dark blue or gray. In some regiments of cavalry, cloth breeches were replaced by elkskin, better adapted to long days in the saddle. New Bibles and hymnbooks were brought from Sweden, and medical supplies accumulated. Generous amounts of food were stockpiled and distributed between the regimental wagons. Swedish soldiers were accustomed to hearty rations: almost two pounds of bread and two pounds of meat a day, along with two and a half quarts of small beer, some peas or grain, salt, butter and a weekly issue of tobacco.
By mid-August, all was ready. Charles ordered all the women who had found their way into the Swedish camp to leave, and then attended a solemn prayer service for the army. And at four o'clock in the morning on August 27, 1707, Charles XII of Sweden rode out of Altranstadt at the beginning of his greatest adventure. Behind, in a stream of cheerful men and spirited horses, marched the largest and finest army ever commanded by a King of Sweden. As the long blue-and-yellow columns moved along the dusty Saxon roads in those late August days, they made an impressive sight. "To human eyes these brave, sturdy, well-trained, well-equipped fellows looked invincible," exulted one Swedish observer. "I cannot express how fine a show the Swedes make: broad, plump, sturdy fellows in blue-and-yellow uniforms," reported a Saxon. "All Germans must acknowledge that they are incomparable. And there had been a deal of grieving among the Leipzig women. They are not content to weep and cry out, but must swoon and fall down at parting.
...
It is the same in all the other small towns
...
for the freedom our Swedes have used in such matters is past belief. Some, nay all, are spoiled. Should they ever return home, I pity wives who are to welcome such pampered men; and were a girl my worst enemy, I would not counsel her to take one of these officers for a husband—no not though he were a colonel."
The first stage of the march, through Protestant Silesia, became more of a triumphal progress than the opening of an arduous campaign. The population, whose Protestant churches had been reopened thanks to Charles, regarded the King as their special savior. Crowds of people attended the daily open-air services in the army's encampments, hoping simply to catch a glimpse of their hero. The sight of Charles kneeling among his men made a
deep impression, and many young men wholly untrained as soldiers sought to accompany the army as if it had been a band of passing crusaders. Charles welcomed and even bathed in this wave of popular feeling, instructing his chaplains to choose only hymns which had been translated from German so that the population visiting the camp would recognize the music and be able to join in singing.
The campaign on which the King embarked would be a maximum test for his superb war machine. From the beginning, it was clear that this was to be an epic march. To take an army from deep in Germany in the heart of Europe eastward more than a thousand miles to Moscow required an audacity equal to Hannibal's or Alexander's. In Marlborough's famous march up the Rhine before the Battle of Blenheim, three years before, the Englishman had moved 250 miles from the Netherlands into Bavaria. But Marlborough's men had tramped through populated regions, staying close to the great river which carried his supply barges and which, had the situation begun to deteriorate, would have provided a watery avenue on which to embark and float downstream to their original base. Charles was setting out on a journey four times as long, across plains, swamps, forests and rivers, where the roads were few and the population scarce. If misfortune or disaster struck, there was no way to retreat except to walk.
Nevertheless, Charles' own attitude was more than confident; it was light-hearted. Even as the Swedish columns of infantry, cavalry, cannon and supply wagons were rippling along the Saxon roads, Charles, accompanied by only seven Swedish officers, rode incognito into Dresden to spend an afternoon with his former enemy, the Elector Augustus. Charles' visit was so sudden that he found the Elector still in his dressing gown. The two monarchs embraced, Augustus put on a coat, and together they went for an afternoon ride along the Elbe. It was a pleasant meeting between the two first cousins and Charles bore no personal ill-will against the man who had attacked him six years before and whose dethroning he had pursued so relentlessly for so many years across the plains of Poland. Now that Augustus was punished, Charles' attitude toward him was sunny. At the end of their ride, Charles inspected the famous Green Vault collection that had so fascinated Peter nine years before, and visited his aunt, Augustus' mother, the Dowager Electress of Saxony. It was the last time the King would see either his aunt or his cousin.*
*In fact, during Charles' thirty-six years of life, Augustus was the only man of kingly rank whom the King of Sweden would ever meet.
Despite these pleasant
ries, the Swedes around Charles worried about the King's reckless decision to ride into the capital of a former enemy accompanied by only seven men. Charles later put their fears aside, smiling and saying, "There was no danger. The army was on the march."
32
THE GREAT ROAD TO MOSCOW
That
Charles meant to march across Poland and invade Russia was no surprise to Peter. Charles had finished with Denmark and Poland; Russia was surely next. As early as January 1707, the Tsar had given orders to create a belt of devastation so that an advancing army would have difficulty living off the land. Into western Poland, which would be first to see the advancing Swedes, rode Cossacks and Kalmucks with instructions to lay waste the countryside. Polish towns were burned, bridges were broken and destroyed. Rawicz, which had been Charles' headquarters in 1705, was razed and its wells poisoned by the corpses of Poles who resisted.
Behind this shield of scorched earth, Peter worked tirelessly to expand and improve his army. New agents were sent out to bring in fresh recruits. Sometimes, potential soldiers were not easy to find and Peter needed help. A nobleman named Bezobrazov, for example, reported from his district of Bryansk that lately there had been a remarkable increase in the number of church servitors who might make excellent dragoons. Peter responded by enrolling all who could march or ride. A Swedish atrocity was used to help motivate the men. Forty-six Russian soldiers, taken prisoner by the Swedes, had had the first two fingers of their right hands cut off by their captors and had then been sent back to Russia. Peter was outraged at this cruelty perpetrated by a nation which "represents him and his people as barbarous and unchristian." Further, reported Whitworth, he meant to turn the act against the Swedes: "For he intended to put one of [the maimed soldiers] in every regiment, who might be a living remonstrance to their companions what usage they could expect from their merciless enemies in case they suffered themselves to be captured."
Preparing for the worst, the Tsar ordered new fortifications for
Moscow itself. In mid-June, the engineer Ivan Korchmin arrived in the city with instructions to put its defenses, especially those of the Kremlin, in good order. Despite these efforts, the city trembled at the prospect of a Swedish occupation. "Nobody spoke of anything except of flight or death," wrote Pleyer, the Austrian envoy in Moscow. "Many of the merchants, under pretext of going to the fair, took their wives and children to Archangel whither they had usually gone alone. The great foreign merchants and capitalists hastened to go to Hamburg with their families and property while the mechanics and artisans went into service. The foreigners, not only of Moscow but of all the neighboring towns, applied to their ministers for protection, as they feared not only the harshness and rapacity of the Swedes, but even more a general uprising and massacre in Moscow, where people are already embittered by the immeasurable increase of the taxes."
In the early summer of 1707, while the fortification of Moscow was proceeding and while Charles was making his final preparations in Saxony, Peter was in Warsaw. His two months in the Poland capital were not entirely voluntary; during most of his time there, he was once again in bed with fever. At the end of August, he received word that the Swedish King was finally marching east, and, soon after, the Tsar left Warsaw, traveling slowly through Poland and Lithuania, stopping to inspect fortifications and talk to troop commanders along the way.
A council of Russian commanders joined by Peter and Menshikov generally confirmed the Tsar's defensive strategy. They decided not to risk a battle in Poland, certainly not a big, classically conducted battle in the open field, as Peter thought his Russian infantry was still not ready and he adamantly refused to endanger the army without which Russia was helpless. Accordingly, the bulk of the infantry was withdrawn from Poland and placed under Sheremetev's command near Minsk.