Peter the Great (56 page)

"You cannot think that I would begin an unjust war against the King of Sweden and break an eternal peace which I have just promised to preserve." Knipercrona begged the Tsar to forgive his wife. Peter embraced the Ambassador affectionately and swore that if the King of Poland captured Riga from Sweden, "I will tear it from his hands." Thoroughly convinced, Knipercrona reported in his dispatch to Stockholm that the Tsar had no thought of aggression against Sweden.*

The spring passed, then June, then July, and still no word came from Constantinople. On July 15, Peter received a Saxon envoy, Major General Baron Langen. Augustus, who finally had joined his army before Riga, begged the Tsar to begin military operations. Reported Langen: "The Tsar sent his ministers out of the room, and, with tears in his eyes, said to me in broken Dutch how grieved he was at the delay in concluding a peace with Turkey. . . . [He said that] he had ordered his ambassador to conclude a peace or truce in the quickest possible time even to his own loss, in order to have his hands free to aid his allies with all his forces." Finally, on August 8, news from Constantinople arrived. The thirty-year armistice had been signed on July 3, and Ukraintsev's messenger, traveling by the fastest means, reached Moscow with the news thirty-six days later.

Free at last to act, Peter moved with great speed. On the evening of the day Ukraintsev's dispatch arrived, the temporary peace with Turkey was celebrated in Moscow with an extraordinary display of fireworks. The following morning, war with Sweden was declared in the manner of the old Muscovite tsars, from the Bedchamber Porch in the Kremlin. "The Great Tsar has directed," the proclamation went, "that for the many wrongs of the Swedish king, and especially because during the Tsar's journey through Riga he suffered obstacles and unpleasantness at the hands of the people of Riga, his soldiers shall march in war on the Swedish towns." The proclaimed objectives of the war were the provinces of Ingria and Karelia, "which by the Grace of God and according to law have always belonged to Russia and were lost during the Time of Troubles." That same day, Peter dispatched a handwritten letter to Augustus informing him of what had happened and saying, "We hope, by the help of God, that Your Majesty will not see other than profit."

*Then, as now, morality played a peripheral role in war and diplomacy. Most states seized whatever territories or colonies they could. In Peter's view, these coastal regions were ancient Russian lands; now was simply the best time to reclaim them. Similarly, Peter's simultaneous negotiations with the Swedes and the Saxons were nothing to be ashamed of in that day. Similar characters were acted out routinely in London, Paris. Vienna and Constantinople.

* * *

Thus began the Great Northern War, or, as Voltaire called it, "The Famous War of the North." For twenty years, two youthful sovereigns, Peter and Charles, would wrestle for supremacy in a conflict that would settle the fate of both their empires. In the early years, 1700 to 1709, Peter would be on the defensive, preparing himself, his army and his state for the hour when the Swedish battering ram would be pointed toward his backward kingdom. In these years, amidst the storms of war, Russia would continue her transformation. Reforms would be made not as a result of careful planning and methodical execution, but rather as desperate, hurried measures dictated by the need to stave off a relentless enemy. Later, after Poltava, the tide would turn, but both sovereigns would fight on, the one enmeshed and distracted by largely useless alliances, the other burning to avenge his defeat and restore his crumbling empire.

23

LET THE CANNON DECIDE

Peter
of Russia and Charles of Sweden, Frederick of Denmark, Augustus of Poland, Louis of France, William of England, Leopold of Austria and most of the other kings and princes of the era eventually submitted their differences to the decision of war. War was the final arbiter between nations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as, indeed, it has been in the twentieth. Dynastic rivalries, the drawing of frontiers, possession of cities, fortresses, trade routes and colonies, and ultimately the destinies of kingdoms and empires all were decided by war. The axion was succinctly put by one of Louis XIV's young officers: "There is no judge more equitable than cannon. They go directly to the goal and they are not corruptible."

For fifty years, through the second half of the seventeenth century, the armies of France were the most powerful and most admired in Europe. Its forces were overwhelmingly the largest on the continent. In peacetime, it kept a standing army of 150,000, and expanded this to 400,000 in time of war. During the War of the Spanish Succession, eight large French armies, each commanded by a marshal of France, campaigned simultaneously in the Low Countries, on the Rhine, in Italy and in Spain. Thanks to the King and Louvois, France's soldiers were the best trained, the best equipped and the best supplied in Europe. Thanks to generals such as Turenne, Cond6 and Vendome, they were overall also the most successful. The Duke of Marlborough's shattering defeat of Marshal Tallard at Blenheim (the Duke was aided by his companion-in-arms, Prince Eugene of Savoy) was the first great defeat of the French army since the Middle Ages.

Throughout this period, the size, firepower and destructiveness of all armies was growing rapidly. As energetic finance ministers enlarged the tax base for the support of armies, increasing numbers of troops could be put into the field. In the first half of the seventeenth century, a European battle might see as few as 25,000 troops involved on
both
sides. In 1644, at Marston Moor, the decisive battle of the English Civil War, Cromwell pitted 8,000 men against an equal number under King Charles I. Sixty-five years later, at Malplaquet, Marlborough led 110,000 allied troops against 80,000 Frenchmen. At the peak of its strength, Sweden, with a home population of a million and a half, supported an army of 110,000. Peter, even after dismissing the disorganized, irregular mass of feudal soldiery he inherited from Sophia and Golitsyn, eventually raised and trained a completely new army of 220,000.

Although, as wars dragged on, conscription became necessary to fill the ranks, most armies in this period were made up of professional soldiers. Many of these, both officers and men, were foreign mercenaries—in that time, a soldier could join any army he liked as long as he did not fight against his own king. Frequently, kings and princes who were at peace rented out whole regiments to warring neighbors. Thus, Swiss, Scots and Irish regiments served in the French army; Danish and Prussian regiments in the Dutch army; and the Hapsburg Imperial army contained men from all the German states. Individual officers changed sides as often as modern executives change jobs, nor did their past or future employers bear them ill-will for their actions. As a twenty-four-year-old colonel, Marlborough served under Marshal Turenne against the Dutch and was personally praised at a great parade by Louis XIV himself. Later, in command of a predominantly Dutch army, Marlborough almost toppled the Sun King from his throne. For a while, both before and after Peter came to the throne, most of the senior officers in the Russian army were foreigners; without them, the Tsar could have fielded little more than a mob.

Customarily, these professional soldiers conducted warfare by accepted rules. There was a seasonal rhythm to war which was rarely broken: summer and autumn were for campaigning and battles; winter and spring were for rest, recruiting and replenishment. In the main, these rules were dictated by the weather, the crops and the state of the roads. Every year, the armies waited until the spring thaw had melted the snows and enough fresh green grass had sprouted to nourish the horses of the cavalry and baggage trains. In May and June, once the mud had dried to dust, long columns of men and wagons began to move. The generals had until October to maneuver, besiege and offer battle; by November, when the first frost appeared, the armies began going into winter quarters. These rules were almost religiously observed in Western Europe. Through ten consecutive years of campaigning on the continent, Marlborough regularly left the army in November and returned to London until spring. In the same months, senior French officers returned to Paris or Versailles. A long-vanished aspect of those civilized wars was the issuance of passports to prominent officers to travel through hostile territory on the shortest routes for winter leave. Common soldiers, of course, did not enjoy these priviliges. There was no question of home leave for them until the war was over. If they were fortunate, they were confined to billets in town through the coldest months. All too often, however, they were crowded into winter encampments of huts and hovels, prey to frostbite, disease and hunger. In the spring, the gaps chewed through their ranks by pestilence would be filled by fresh consignments of recruits.

On the march, an army of .this period moved slowly, even when its passage was unopposed; few armies could move faster than ten miles a day, while the average daily march was five. Marlborough's historic march from the Low Countries up the Rhine to Bavaria before the Battle of Blenheim was considered a "lightning stroke" at the time—250 miles in five weeks. The limiting factor usually was the artillery. The horses struggling to pull the cumbersome, heavy cannon, whose wheels fearsomely rutted the roads for those that followed, simply could not move faster.

Armies marched in long columns, battalion after battalion, a screen of cavalry riding in front and on the flanks, the carts, carriages and gun caissons trundling along in the rear. Normally, an army marched at sunrise
and camped in mid-afterno
on. Making a new camp every night required almost as much effort as the day's march. Tents were erected in lines, baggage unpacked, cooking fires lit, water provided for men and animals, and the horses set to grazing. If the enemy was nearby, each camp had to be placed on suitable ground and prepared with temporary earthworks and wooden palisades as a potential strongpoint able to resist attack. Then, after an exhausted sleep, the men were roused, and in the pre-dawn darkness all this had to be dismantled and packed into wagons for the next day's march.

Not everything, of course, could be carried in wagons. An army of 50,000 to 100,000 men could maintain itself only by marching through fertile countryside which could supply many of its wants, or by having additional supplies brought to it by water. In Western Europe, the great rivers were the railways of war. In Russia, where the rivers flow north and south and the war between Russia and Sweden was east-west, rivers were of little value, and the consequent dependence on wagon trains and local foraging was far greater.

In Western Europe, most campaigns proceeded in a leisurely manner. Sieges were popular and much preferred to the greater risks and nasty surprises of open-field battle. Siege warfare was conducted with exquisite, almost mathematical precision; on each side, at any given moment the commander knew exactly where matters stood and what was going to happen next. Louis XIV was devoted to siege warfare; there was no risk of losing the great army which he had so carefully and expensively built. Also, it enabled him to participate safely in the Game of Mars. Besides, in Louis de Vauban, the Sun King possessed the greatest master of fortification and siege operations in the history of warfare. On behalf of his master, Vauban personally laid siege to fifty towns without failure, and his own fortresses were the models for the age. Sometimes purely military bastions, sometimes large fortified towns or cities, they covered and protected the frontiers of France like an interlocking web. Carefully adapted to the particular terrain, each was a work not only of supreme utility but also of art. They tended to be shaped like a gigantic star, with each rampart built so as to be protected by flanking enfilade fire from cannon or at least musketry at right angles. Each salient was a self-contained fort, with its own artillery and garrison, its own sally ports for sudden sorties by the defenders. Around these great stone ramparts ran a tracery of ditches, twenty feet deep and forty feet wide, also faced with stone—bleak and desolate places for attacking infantry to find itself. When they were built, France's armies were on the offensive, and these fortresses, their great doors decorated with gilt fleur-de-lis and opening onto buildings of severe splendor, were intended not as static defense points but as pivots on which French armies could maneuver. Later, as Marlborough's armies were battering their way toward Paris and Versailles, Vauban's fortresses saved the Sun King his throne.

Louis himself paid credit to his servant: "A town defended by

Vauban is a town impregnable; a town besieged by Vauban is a town taken."* Under Vauban's direction, sieges became formal theatrical spectacles, immaculately staged and timed. Once the fortress was surrounded, Vauban began a series of trenches which zigzagged ever nearer to the fortress walls. Calculating the angles with mathematical precision, Vauban placed the trenches so that defending fire from the fortress walls could scarcely touch the infantry in the trenches digging their way ever closer. Meanwhile, the besieger's artillery fired day and night at the ramparts, silencing defending cannon, smashing holes in the parapets. When the moment of assault came, the attacking infantry stormed out of the trenches and across the ditches (which they had filled with portable fascines of tightly bound brush) and through the breaches in the pulverized walls. Few sieges, however, reached this climax. In the rigorous etiquette which governed both sides, once the defender knew that it was mathematically certain that his fortress would fall, he was free to surrender with honor; neither his own government nor the besieger expected anything less. But if, in a burst of unreasoning passion, the defender refused to surrender and the assaila
nt was forced to go to the exp
ense in time and lives of taking the city by storm, then, once taken, the entire city was given up to rape, sack and flames.