33
GOLOVCHIN AND LESNAYA
The stage was set for a new campaign. The two armies lay opposite each other in widely dispersed encampments. The main Swedish army with Charles was in the triangle Grodno-Vilna-Minsk. Here the King had twelve regiments of infantry and sixteen regiments of cavalry and dragoons, a total of some 35,000 men; in addition, smaller Swedish armies were available on the Baltic. Lewenhaupt’s 12,000 men at Riga had already been given orders to join the main army, and a separate Swedish force of 14,000 under Lybecker had been ordered to march from Finland down the Karelian Isthmus toward St. Petersburg. If completely successful, this force would take Peter’s new capital; if not, it would at least provide a diversion which would occupy the Tsar’s concern and resources. Finally, there were 8,000 Swedish troops in Poland under General Krassow; if Poland remained calm, they could move eastward to reinforce Charles. All told, across the entire battlefront, Charles disposed of 70,000 men.
Peter’s forces were substantially larger. The main Russian army assigned by the Tsar to protect both Pskov and Moscow and commanded by Sheremetev and Menshikov was ranged in a wide arc around the triangular Swedish camp from Polotsk and Vitebsk in the north down to Mogilev and Bykhov in the south. The infantry was pulled well back and stood between the Dvina and the Dnieper. Out in front, large cavalry detachments under Goltz straddled the main Minsk-Smolensk road and patrolled along the Berezina to absorb the first shock of the Swedish advance. Farther south, another force guarded the Berezina River crossing of the southern road from Minsk to Mogilev. Altogether, in this arc Peter had twenty-six regiments of infantry and thirty-three regiments of dragoons, a total of about 57,500 men. In addition, Apraxin, whose assignment was to defend St. Petersburg, commanded 24,500 men. At Dorpat, between the Baltic and the central fronts, a third Russian force of 16,000 men was stationed under General Bauer, whose mission was to cover the Swedish army under Lewenhaupt at Riga. These forces were prepared to respond to a variety of Swedish moves. If Charles marched toward Pskov and St. Petersburg, Menshikov and Sheremetev would shift the main Russian army north to oppose him; if the King moved directly toward Moscow, the Russian generals would fight him on the Berezina and the Dnieper. Bauer’s movements were tied to Lewenhaupt’s: if Lewenhaupt marched north toward St. Petersburg, Bauer would go north to reinforce Apraxin; if Lewenhaupt moved south to join the King, Bauer would shift south to bolster Sheremetev. A separate Russian force of 12,000 men under Prince Michael Golitsyn was posted near Kiev to cover the approaches to the Ukraine. At this time, that seemed the least likely direction in which the Swedes would march.
The Russian forces outnumbered the Swedes 110,000 to 70,000 (or, effectively 62,000, as Krassow’s force was too far away to be of use). Disparity in numbers meant little except for the fact that in a protracted campaign the Russians could replace losses more easily than the Swedes. At Narva, the odds against Sweden had been four to one. Here they were only five to three.
By June 6, the fresh grass had pushed its way several inches above the earth and Charles decided to move. The three-month camp at Radoshkovichi was broken and the regiments converged on Minsk, the mustering point on the main Warsaw-Smolensk-Moscow highway. From Minsk, the road went east to Borisov on the Berezina River, a crossing which the Russians were prepared to defend.
At a pair of military conferences on April 26 and June 13, Sheremetev and Menshikov had decided to make their first stand against the Swedes on the Berezina. Peter was not present at either of these meetings, but he had strongly endorsed their decision to hold this river line. In May, the Russian army, its divisions commanded by Menshikov, Sheremetev, Hallart, Repnin and Goltz, moved out of its own winter quarters and took positions along a forty-mile front east of the river. Not knowing exactly where the King would strike, the Russian dispositions were kept fluid, but at the most obvious point—the crossing at Borisov—8,000 Russians under Goltz were well dug in.
Knowing this, Charles again chose to turn the flank of this enemy front, this time from the south. On June 16, after nine days’ marching, the army reached the Berezina River at Berezina-Sapezhinskaya. A screening force of Cossacks and Russian dragoons retreated, Swedish engineers constructed two bridges, and the army crossed the Berezina. The success of Charles’ maneuver left Minsk fifty miles to the rear and meant that the King now was leaving forever the Polish-Lithuanian area in which he had lived and campaigned the previous eight years.
Menshikov and Sheremetev were much chagrined by the relative ease with which they had been out-maneuvered, and they could guess what the Tsar’s reaction to their failure would be. In a military conference at Mogilev on June 23, they agreed that they must still make a serious effort to defend the region west of the Dnieper and protect the towns of Mogilev and Shklov. Orders went out to all divisions of the army to assemble on the west bank of the River Babich, a tributary of the Drut. A battle would be offered; not a risk-everything, life-or-death battle, but a battle that would extract payment from the invaders.
Charles now thought of turning north to catch Goltz and his force guarding the Borisov crossing in the rear, but his scouts reported that the Russian army as a whole was moving south and gathering behind the River Babich near a village called Golovchin. This time the King decided not to avoid his foe. The army marched toward Golovchin. The weather became worse. Rain fell unceasingly and the earth was a sea of mud. Every few yards, the Russians cut trees to fall across the road and block the advance. Jefferyes wrote to London: “I cannot on this occasion pass by the praises due to the Swedish troops, for whether I consider the great hardship which they have been obliged to undergo by forcing their way through places almost impassable, and by wading through morasses up to their middle, or I consider their patience in suffering hunger and thirst, they being for the most part reduced to bread and water, I must conclude they are as good subjects as any prince in Europe can boast of.”
On June 30, the King himself arrived at Golovchin, which lay in front of the swampy and shallow Babich. He found the Russian army drawn up in strong positions across the river in a line extending for six miles along the Babich’s rain-swollen marshy banks. It took several days for a substantial part of the Swedish army to come up, while across the river the Russian forces also were being continually reinforced by fresh arrivals of infantry and cavalry. Meantime, Charles examined the terrain and worked out a plan of battle, and his Swedish veterans grew restless. The river was shallow and easily fordable—why didn’t they just go and scatter the Russian rabble? Charles understood that it might not be so easy. The Russians were dug into strong positions behind ditches and trenches with chevaux de frise placed in front. Their army was divided into two central divisions: to the north, thirteen regiments of infantry and ten regiments of cavalry under Sheremetev and Menshikov; to the south, nine regiments of infantry and three dragoon regiments under Repnin. The two divisions were separated in the center by a marshy, wooded area through which a tributary stream ran down into the Babich. Farther along on either flank were still more Russian troops: to the north of Sheremetev, beyond a deeper and more extensive swamp, was more Russian infantry and cavalry under Hallart; to the south of Repnin was Goltz with ten regiments of dragoons numbering 10,000 men, plus Cossack and Kalmuck cavalry.
In fact, the Russians, after repeated experience of being outflanked, had spread themselves thin to prevent it happening again, and Charles determined to use the over-extension of his opponents’ line to his own advantage. While his forces were assembling, he marched detachments of troops up and down the bank, feinting here and there, encouraging the Russians to keep their forces strong on the outer wings. In this way, Hallart’s Russian corps was kept far to the north and never entered the subsequent battle at all.
But this time there was not to be a flanking movement. Charles had detected the most vulnerable point in the long Russian line: It lay in the center, between the two divisions commanded by Sheremetev and Repnin, in the area of the tributary and marsh. If Charles attacked at this point, the marsh would prevent or hinder one Russian division from coming to assist the other. The King decided that the blow would fall on Repnin, south of the marsh. In the assault, he personally would lead the infantry against Repnin’s Russian infantry. Rehnskjold would lead the cavalry which would grapple with Goltz’s horsemen.
By July 3, Charles had assembled 20,000 men, more than half his total force, and at midnight his regiments were alerted and ordered to prepare for battle. That night, the river and the opposite bank were concealed by a thick mist rising from the stream, and behind this natural screen Charles quietly brought up artillery, rolling it efficiently into previously chosen sites. By two a.m., he had placed eight of his heaviest cannon in position to fire at close range directly across the stream. At daybreak, as the sun’s first rays were filtering through the mist, the Swedish artillery suddenly thundered at the surprised Russians and Charles plunged into the river at the head of 7,000 Swedes.
The water reached to their chests, sometimes their shoulders, and Russian fire was heavy, but, holding their weapons aloft, the Swedes advanced calmly and steadily as they had been trained to do. As soon as they climbed the opposite bank, the troops halted to regroup. Charles walked along the lines, calmly dressing the ranks, and then led them forward through the marsh. The going was difficult, and the Russians, to Charles’ surprise, did not break and run, but stayed to fight, firing at the Swedes from thirty to forty paces, retiring more or less in order, reloading and running forward to fire again at the oncoming Swedish line. They were not willing, however, to stand and grapple with the Swedish infantry in a clash of cold steel, and although their firing took its toll, it had little effect on the steady advance of the Swedish veterans.
As the Swedes, maintaining ranks, recognized the Russian pattern, they began to fall in with it themselves. The Swedish lines halted to load, and those whose weapons would fire fired back at the Russians. This exchange was unique in the battles of Charles XII. Wrote Jefferyes, “The battle grew so hot that in a whole hour’s time nothing was heard but the continual firing of musketry on both sides.”
By seven a.m., Repnin began to understand that he was taking the full force of the Swedish attack. On his plea, 1,200 men of Goltz’s Russian dragoons advanced from the south, trying to assist the hard-pressed Russian infantry by riding down the Swedish infantry on its right flank. Charles was saved by Rehnskjold, who, waiting across the stream with the still uncommitted Swedish cavalry, saw the movement of the Russian horse. With four squadrons—600 men—of the Guards cavalry, he galloped across the river and engaged the Russian cavalry before it could fall on the Swedish infantry. The impact between the opposing horsemen was bloody as the Swedes repeatedly repulsed a force twice their number. Gradually, as additional squadrons of Swedish cavalry crossed the river and rode into the fray, the Russians were forced to check their attack and retire into the woods.
Meanwhile, the failure of the Russian cavalry to break through and attack the Swedish infantry left the Russian infantry alone to cope with Charles’ assault. The Swedish advance continued implacably as fresh Swedish infantry crossed the river and, as Charles had known it would, this furious, concentrated pressure on a single section of the Russian line finally forced it to break. Repnin’s forces fell back, rallied, wavered and finally broke. The Russian left wing abandoned its camp and its artillery, dispersed into company-sized units and retreated through the woods.
It was now eight a.m. Charles’ sudden, determined attack had defeated Repnin’s division, but Sheremetev’s division to the north, on the opposite side of the marsh, remained uninvolved. At first, hearing the firing and seeing the Swedes crossing to attack Repnin, Sheremetev had attempted to send troops to assist his colleague, but, as Charles had anticipated, the morass made this difficult, and when Charles turned to meet Sheremetev, he found it was not necessary. The Russian Field Marshal, mindful of Peter’s admonition not to risk everything, was already in retreat toward Mogilev and the Dnieper.
The Battle of Golovchin was the first serious engagement between Russian and Swedish troops since Charles had begun his long march from Saxony almost a year before. By the classical definition of victory, the Swedes had won. They had attacked and gained a strong position. The Swedish cavalry had fought brilliantly and repulsed a much larger Russian force. The King had been in the thick of the fight, performing with great personal bravery, and had remained untouched. The Russians had once again retreated. The road to the Dnieper lay open. All the legends were intact.
Yet, there were factors which were not displeasing to Peter, who arrived late and heard about the battle in Gorky from Menshikov. Although worried that his army had been forced to abandon another river line, he took solace in the fact that only one third of the Russian forces present had actually been engaged, and that these regiments had taken the whole weight of the famous Swedish attack led by the King of Sweden himself. Through four hours of heavy fighting, they had not collapsed, but had retreated in good order, fighting every step, and when they finally abandoned the field, it was not as a disorderly mob but in units which could be reassembled to fight again. The Russian casualties were 977 dead and 675 wounded, the Swedes had 267 dead and over 1,000 wounded. But there was an important difference. Peter’s losses could be replaced; when one of Charles’ soldiers fell, the King’s army was permanently decreased by one.
Peter ordered investigations into which regiments had stood and which had broken; he was angry at certain officers, and there were punishments. Repnin was court-martialed and temporarily relieved of his command. Four days after the battle, a conference was held at Shklov and it was decided not to attempt to defend Mogilev on the Dnieper but to fall back farther to Gorky along the road to Smolensk. But not before the Cossacks and Kalmucks had done their terrible work. The region had been doomed by the Tsar’s order, and Charles’ victorious army would advance through utterly barren lands.
Although Charles, too, was pleased and the news went back to Stockholm and spread through Europe that Sweden had won another victory, the King was aware of a change in his Russian adversaries. The Battle of Golovchin opened his eyes to the fact that the Russian army was no longer the same disorderly mob which had fled at Narva. Here, in a battle in which the numbers of men actually engaged were almost equal, the Russians had fought well. Jefferyes admitted, “The Muscovites have learned their lesson much better and have made great improvements in military affairs and if their soldiers had shown but half the courage their officers did (which for the most part are foreigners) they had probably been too hard for us in the late action.”
Along the road to Mogilev, the Swedish army advanced between smoldering houses and barns. On July 9, the army reached the town on the River Dnieper, then the frontier of Russia itself. Without a shot being fired, the King sent troops across, although the main body remained on the western bank. Everyone assumed that the halt would be only temporary, a brief rest while supplies were gathered for the final stage of the march. The campaign was now practically over. All the great river barriers had been crossed. Smolensk was 100 miles to the northeast, and 200 miles beyond Smolensk lay Moscow.
At Mogilev, Charles sent detachments across the Dnieper, laid bridges across the river and then—to the surprise of both the Swedish army and the watching Russian patrols—failed to cross. For an entire month—from July 9 to August 5—the 35,000 men of the Swedish army waited on the western bank of the Dnieper for Lewenhaupt’s force from Riga to join them. Count Adam Ludwig Lewenhaupt, General of Infantry, whose pedantic scholarship had prompted Charles to dub him “the little Latin colonel,” was a meticulous, melancholy man, overly sensitive to the opinions of those around him, finding rivals and plots on every side, but was nevertheless a brave and skillful officer with rare devotion to orders. No matter how small the formation of infantry he commanded, no matter how large or well entrenched the opposing enemy force, if Lewenhaupt had explicit orders, he would dress ranks and advance with absolute serenity into murderous enemy fire. His tragedy—and Charles’ mistake—was that he was given a command which called for a wide latitude of personal initiative and improvisation.
Lewenhaupt was military governor of Courland and what remained of the Swedish Baltic provinces. In and around the fortress city of Riga, he commanded 12,500 troops. In March, when he visited Charles at Radoshkovichi, the King had given him simple, uncomplicated orders: He was to use his troops at Riga to collect supplies, gather a huge wagon train, load it with enough food and ammunition to last his own men for three months and the entire army for six weeks, and then escort this wagon train through the Lithuanian countryside to join the main army. His wagons would replenish the army for the final phase of the march on Moscow, while his soldiers would substantially augment the King’s combat strength. Although the route chosen from Riga to Mogilev was 400 miles, it was calculated that if he left early in June, he would complete the journey in two months.
These assumptions were wrong. Lewenhaupt returned to Riga early in May and set about collecting supplies, but the sheer task of assembling 2,000 wagons and 8,000 horses to pull them, as well as the supplies themselves, delayed him. On June 3, as Charles’ army was preparing to break camp at Radoshkovichi, Lewenhaupt received orders to leave Riga for the Berezina River, but he reported that he could not possibly start before the end of the month. And, indeed, not until the last days of June were the long supply column and its escort of 7,500 infantry and 5,000 cavalry on the road. Lewenhaupt himself remained in Riga another month and did not join his command until July 29, when, according to the original plan, it should have been approaching its junction with the main army. In fact, his men had crawled only 150 miles and still were to the north of Vilna, while Charles’ main army had moved on to Mogilev, over 250 miles away.
For Peter, the news that Lewenhaupt’s army was leaving Livonia and Courland and moving south, away from the Baltic, was cause for enormous relief. It indicated with reasonable certainty that the Swedish King’s ultimate objective was not St. Petersburg, that there would be no combined attack on the Neva by Lewenhaupt from the south and Lybecker from Finland. And with Lewenhaupt out of the picture, Apraxin had enough men to deal with whatever Lybecker might attempt. Accordingly, General Bauer’s Russian force of 16,000 men—whose mission had been to watch Lewenhaupt—was now ordered to move south.
Charles’ plans now hinged on Lewenhaupt. Critics have blamed Lewenhaupt harshly for his excessive delays, but he could not control the weather. Moving his heavy supply wagons with their great wheels churning in the mud proved almost impossible in the rain, although fascines of brush, branches and wooden boards were laid down. Lewenhaupt was even carrying a portable bridge, the pride of his engineering corps, held together with flexible strips of leather which became so sodden that thirty-two men had to carry each section, and they could carry it only twenty paces before setting it down to rest. In a month, the army moved only 143 miles, an average of less than five miles a day. July stretched out into August and then into September, and still Lewenhaupt slowly rumbled and churned his way forward.
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, having never 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 them empty. The last of the Russian rear guard was just retreating, setting fire to villages and fields as it rode away.
Although this battle near Molyatychy was a minor action and Russian casualties were twice as heavy (700 Russians killed and 2,000 wounded to 300 Swedes killed and 500 wounded), Peter was elated. For the first time, Russian infantry had taken the initiative and a Swedish division had been isolated and attacked. The Russian troops had fought bravely, then successfully broken off the action and retreated in good order. Golitsyn received the Order of St. Andrew. To Apraxin, the Tsar wrote exuberantly: “I assure you that since I began to serve, I have never seen such fire or such orderly conduct on the part of our soldiers. The Swedish King himself has not seen such an action in the course of this war. O God, do not take your mercy from us for the future.”
Charles resumed his slow march to the north and on September 11, the Swedish army arrived at Tatarsk on the Russian border, the most northeastern point in Russia that he would reach. From here, the road went to Smolensk, but the view down that road was a grim one: Day and night, thehorizon glowed in a red haze. Charles had seen the devastation of Poland and the Lithuanian provinces adjacent to Russia, but he had not believed that the Tsar would wreak the same policy on his own Russian lands. The sight gave Charles pause. No matter how stubbornly he pursued the foe, he could never catch up. His soldiers drew up in line of battle only to find themselves standing in ranks facing an empty wilderness. And every day the supplies of food collected at Mogilev were running lower. The food itself was wretched, and although the King refused to eat any food better than his common soldiers were eating, the hired German soldiers and even some of the Swedish veterans were grumbling. Always they marched over charred ground. Always the clouds of smoke from burning villages and smoldering fields hung on the horizon, sometimes so thick that it dimmed the sun. And always the trailing squadrons of Kalmucks and Cossacks waited pitilessly to cut down stragglers. Mournfully, Jefferyes reported, “We are now forced to live off what we find buried [by peasants] under the ground, but should a sudden frost deprive us of that expedient, instead of a formidable army, I fear His Majesty would bring into Russia a parcel of starved beggars.”
The key was Lewenhaupt. Had the main Swedish army possessed the supplies he was bringing, it might have pierced through the devastated regions ahead and reached the more fertile region near Moscow. At Swedish headquarters, while the King and his officers stared eastward at the smoke of burning villages, they also looked anxiously over their shoulders. Where was Lewenhaupt?
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 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 was 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 it 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 him 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, Hetman of the Ukrainian Cossacks, loyal to Moscow for twenty-one years, had betrayed the Tsar and allied himself with Charles.