Peter the Great (84 page)

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 t
urn south. General Anders Lager
crona'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.

Meanwhile, Charles followed with the main army. He reached Krivchev on the Sozh on September 19, and his troops crossed on bridges built by Lagercrona's advance party and moved southward into a tract of primeval forest between the Sozh and the Iput. Men and horses, enfeebled by weeks of hunger, stumbled, fell and died. Dysentery was raging in the Swedish ranks and the toll was high. "Tis thought we have lost more in this ramble than if we had given the enemy a battle," wrote Jefferyes. On emerging from the woods, the army was heading in the direction of Mglin when Charles learned that Lagercrona had proceeded directly south, and that Mglin and Pochep therefore were presumably unoccupied. Seeing the danger, Charles hastily picked a second advance guard, the fittest of the exhausted men who stumbled from the woods behind him, and, with himself at their head, set off to seize the two positions. After enormous exertions he arrived at Kotenistchi, a village about six miles short of the town of Mglin, where he discovered that Mglin was filled with Russian troops. Peter, in establishing a defensive position on the Smolensk road, had left a
detachment under General Nicholas Ifland to guard Severia, and this force had already occupied both Mglin and Pochep. Charles' small detachment might have attacked Mglin, but to dislodge an enemy from a fortified town he needed cannon, and his cannon were far away. Lagercrona's force had six cannon, but Lagercrona was nowhere to be seen. Thus, having lost the race to bar the gates, Charles halted his men, who were too fatigued to move farther anyway. Charles now realized that Lagercrona's mistake might provide a new opportunity to seize Severia, for, having turned south, Lagercrona was heading directly for Starodub, the capital and main road junction of the province. If Lagercrona occupied Starodub, the failure to take Mglin and Pochep would be more than compensated for. Messengers were sent racing after Lagercrona to instruct him to occupy the town.

In fact, Lagercrona had already reached Starodub, but had not captured it. He was embarrassed and irritated to find that he had taken the wrong road and was beneath the walls of the wrong town, but he refused to accept his colonels' urgent pleas that he occupy Starodub. He had been given orders first to seize Mglin and Pochep and
then
to occupy Starodub, and he meant to do things in exactly that sequence. Although he was camped beneath the walls of Starodub, he denied his men permission to enter the town even to find food and shelter, and the next day Ifland's Russian troops secured the town. When Charles heard what had happened, he burst out, "Lagercrona must be mad!"

Charles realized that he was now in serious difficulty. Starodub as well as Mglin and Pochep were in enemy hands. As the last detachments of the army emerged from the forest and joined the troops before Mglin, Charles, moving among them, saw that they were in no shape to attack Ifland. The men were hungry, eating roots and berries to supplement their rations. There, on October 7, the King learned of Lewenhaupt's defeat. The news reached the Russian in Mglin first, and the Swedes camped nearby heard the firing of Russian guns in celebration of the Tsar's victory. On October 11, the remnants of Lewenhaupt's force began to arrive in camp. The wagons, of course, were gone, and instead of 12,500 fresh Swedish faces, Lewenhaupt brought half that number, gray with fatigue, hunger and defeat.

Severia was lost; Sheremetev's army was pouring into the province through the open Pochep pass; the Kalmuck's were ranging across the province, ravaging and burning. Charles had no choice; he must continue south. On October 11, the King broke camp and marched south toward the River Desna, which forms the boundary between the Russian province of Severia and the Ukraine.

The fertile Ukraine, rich in cattle and grain, offered Charles what the Swedish army needed: refuge, rest and potential reinforcement. Here, if Charles could persuade the Cossack Hetman Mazeppa to join his cause, the Swedish army could winter in security. Here he might obtain thousands of Cossack horsemen who would make up the losses of the year's campaign. And Baturin, Mazeppa's capital, was stocked with gunpowder. For all these reasons, on the day after news of Lewenhaupt's defeat had been received, Charles sent an express courier to Mazeppa to ask for winter quarters. It was taken for granted that Mazeppa would reply positively: For many months, Mazeppa had been actively and secretly negotiating a Swedish alliance.

To speed his crossing of the Desna into the Ukraine, Charles dispatched an advance guard under Kreutz to secure the town of Novgorod-Seversky and its bridge across the river. Kreutz marched day and night, arriving on October 22, but he was too late: The Russians had been there first and the bridge was destroyed. Now, for the first time, the Russians were gaining the upper hand. They had excellent reconnaisance; they seemed to know which way the Swedes would move, and themselves got there first. It was worrying, even ominous. But still the Swedes marched hopefully and confidently toward, in Jefferyes' words, "a country flowing with milk and honey," the homeland of General Ivan Mazeppa, Hetman of the Ukrainian Cossacks.