When Charles heard that the Russians were swarming on the outskirts of Gadyach, his combative instincts were aroused. In vain, his generals advised him to remain where he was and let the troops in Gadyach beat off any Russian assault. Despite their advice and the fearful cold, on December 19 Charles ordered the entire army to march. He himself set out first with the Guards, hoping to catch the Russians by surprise as he had at Narva. Peter, learning that Charles' army was on the march, ordered his troops to maintain their positions near Gadyach until the Swedes were close, and then to withdraw. The Russians actually held until the Swedish advance guard was only half a mile away, and then, as planned, they simply melted away, retreating to Lebedin, where the Tsar had his headquarters. Meanwhile, once the Swedes were gone, Hallart's men stormed into Romny, occupying it without difficulty, just as Peter had anticipated.
Now, as Peter had hoped, with the Swedish army strung out on the road between Gadyach and Romny, an enemy worse than Russia swept down on Charles and his soldiers. All over Europe, the winter that year was the worst in memory. In Sweden and Norway, elk and stags froze to death in the forests. The Baltic was choked and often solid with ice, and heavily laden wagons passed from Denmark across the sound to Sweden. The canals of Venice, the estuary of the Tagus in Portugal, even the Rhone were sheeted with ice. The Seine froze at Paris so that horses and wagons could pass across. Even the ocean froze in the bays and inlets along the Atlantic coast. Rabbits froze in their burrows, squirrels and birds fell dead from the trees, farm animals died rigid in the fields. At Versailles, wine froze in the cellars and glazed with ice on the tables. The courtiers put fashion aside, layered themselves in heavy clothes and huddled around the great chimneys where logs blazed day and night, trying to warm the icy rooms. "People are dying of the cold like flies. The windmill sails are frozen in their sockets, no corn can be ground, and thus many people are dying of starvation," wrote Louis XIV's sister-in-law, the Princess Palatine. In the vast, empty, windswept, unprotected spaces of the Ukraine, the cold was even more intense. Through this icy hell, the ragged, freezing Swedish army was marching to the relief of a garrison which was no longer even in danger.
The futility of the effort was compounded by a cruel fate which awaited the army at Gadyach. The Swedes struggled forward, arriving at evening, hoping to reach shelter and warmth. But they found that the only entrance to the town was a single, narrow gate, which soon was jammed and blocked by a mass of men, horses and wagons. Most of the Swedes had to spend one night, and some two or three nights, camped outside the town in the open air. The suffering was extreme. Sentries froze to death at their posts. Frostbite furtively stole noses, ears, fingers and toes. Sledgeloads of frostbitten men and long lines of wagons, some of whose passengers were already dead, crawled slowly through the narrow gate into the town. "The cold was beyond description, some hundred men of the regiment being injured by the freezing away of their private parts or by loss of feet, hands, noses, besides ninety men who froze to death," wrote a young Swedish officer who participated. "With my own eyes, I beheld dragoons and cavalrymen sitting upon their horses stone-dead with their reins in their hands in so tight a grip that they could not be loosened until the fingers were cut off."
Inside the town, nearly every house became a hospital. The patients were crowded onto benches near a fire or laid side by side on the foor covered by a layer of straw. Amid the stench of gangrene, the surgeons worked, crudely lopping off frozen limbs, adding to the piles of amputated fingers, hands and other parts accumulating on the floor. The carnage inflicted on the Swedish army during the nights among the snowdrifts under the open sky was more terrible than any which might have come from the battle Charles had sought. Over 3,000 Swedes froze to death, and few escaped being maimed in some way by frostbite. Out of ignorance, most refused to rub their frozen extremities with snow in the manner of the Cossacks. Charles himself was caught by frostbite on the nose and cheeks and his face began to
turn
white, but he quickly followed Mazeppa's advice and restored himself by rubbing his face with snow.
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, however, 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 e
nough. 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."