Peter the Great (63 page)

News of the Battle of Narva made a sensational impression throughout Europe. Accounts of the brilliant victory and glowing praise of Sweden's youthful monarch rippled westward. There was satisfaction in some quarters at Peter's humiliation and much snickering at the Tsar's "flight" on the eve of battle. A medallion struck by Charles showing a man with Peter's face running away caused much amusement. Leibniz, who earlier had shown interest in Russia, now expressed his sympathy with Sweden and expressed his wish that its "young king reign in Moscow and as far as the River Amur."

Although Rehnskjold's "ripe dispositions" and seasoned command had played an indispensable part in the successful outcome, it is also true that without the King's "firm, immovable resolution" to attack there would have been no victory at Narva. Certainly, Charles himself fully accepted the popular estimate of himself as an invincible warrior. He was exuberant—almost intoxicated with victory—when he rode over the battlefield with Axel Sparre, chattering excitedly like an adolescent boy. "But there is no pleasure in fighting with the Russians," he said disdainfully, "for they will not stand like other men but run away at once. If the river had been frozen, we should hardly have killed one of them. The best joke was when the Russians got upon the bridge and it broke under them. It was just like Pharaoh in the Red Sea. Everywhere you could see men's heads and horses' heads and legs sticking up out of the water, and our soldiers shot at them like wild ducks."

From that moment on, war became the great object of Charles'
life. And in this sense, while Narva was the King's first great victory, it was also the first step toward his doom. A victory so easily won helped persuade Charles that he was unconquerable. Narva, added to the dramatic success of the descent on Zealand, began the legend of Charles XII—which he himself accepted— that with a handful of men he could rout vast armies. Narva also instilled in Charles a dangerous contempt for Peter and for Russia. The ease with which he had overwhelmed Peter's army convinced him that Russians were worthless as soldiers and that he could afford to turn his back on them for as long as he liked. Years later, in the summer dust of the Ukraine, the King of Sweden would pay dearly for these moments, of exaltation on the snow-covered battlefield of Narva.

26

"WE MUST NOT LOSE OUR HEADS'

Peter
had not gone many miles from Narva when news of the battle overtook him. Stunned by the swiftness and magnitude of the disaster, he also understood that a far greater danger lay ahead: If Charles decided to follow up his victory and march all the way to Moscow, nothing could prevent him.

One of Peter's qualities was that when confronted with disaster he did not despair. Failure only spurred him forward; obstacles served as challenges to stimulate new effort. Whether his resilience, perseverance and determination were grounded in stubbornness, arrogance, patriotism or wisdom did not matter—he had suffered a crushing, humiliating defeat, but there were no recriminations. He kept his composure and vowed to continue. Two weeks after the battle, he wrote to Boris Sheremetev, "We must not lose our heads in misfortune. I order the work we have undertaken to go on. We do not lack men; the rivers and marshes are frozen. I will hear no excuses."

The nine years between Narva and Poltava were desperate years for Peter. He never knew how much time he had remaining. Often sick and stretched on his bed with fever, plagued by revolts among the Bashkirs and Don Cossacks behind his back, he nevertheless hurled his colossal energy into preparing Russia. He played recklessly, staking everything, impoverishing his Treasury and his people, distributing huge subsidies to keep Augustus, his one remaining ally, in the field. And always he was haunted by the knowledge that Charles might rise one morning and decide to turn his shining, invincible bayonets against Russia.

Years later, after Poltava, Peter was able to see all this in perspective. His calm, Olympian tone is that of a man looking back from the pinnacle of victory. But there is in his words an accurate assessment of the influence of Narva on himself, on the development of the Russian army and on Russia itself:

Our army was vanquished by the Swedes—that is incontestable. But one should remember what sort of army it was. The Lefort regiment was the only old one. The two regiments of Guards had been present' at the two assaults of Azov, but they had never seen any field fighting, especially with regular troops. The other regiments consisted—even to some of the colonels—of raw recruits, both officers and soldiers. Besides that, there was the great famine because, on account of the late season of the year, the roads were so muddy that the transport of provisions had to be stopped. In brief, it was like child's play [for the Swedes). One cannot, then, be surprised that against such an old, disciplined and experienced army, these untried pupils got the worst of it. The victory, then, was indeed a sad and severe blow to us. It seemed to rob us of all hope for the future, and to come from the wrath of God. But now, when we think of it rightly, we ascribe it rather to the goodness of God than to his anger; for if we had conquered then, when we knew as little of war as of government, this piece of luck might have had unfortunate consequences. . . . That we lived through this disaster, or rather this good fortune, forced us to be industrious, laborious and experienced.

The defeated Russian army which had retreated from Narva under the gaze of the victorious King of Sweden straggled into Novgorod. Lacking cannon, powder, tents, baggage and, in many cases, muskets, the men were little more than a disorganized mob. Fortunately, one division of the army, that which Prince Nikita Repnin had mustered along the Volga, had not reached Narva in time to participate in the debacle, and Peter ordered Repnin to march to Novgorod and use his troops as a cadre to discipline the beaten regiments streaming into the city. Three weeks later, when the stragglers had been counted, Repnin reported to Peter that 22,967 of them had been formed into fresh regiments. Adding Repnin's own force of 10,834 men, this gave Peter an army of nearly 34,000 men. In addition, 10,000 Cossacks were on the way from the Ukraine. Peter's Own first command on reaching Moscow was to instruct Prince Boris Golitsyn to raise ten new regiments of dragoons of 1,000 men each.

As commander-in-chief of the rebuilding army, Peter appointed Boyar Boris Sheremetev, who represented an unusual mixture of old and new in Peter's Russia. Twenty years older than the Tsar and a descendant of one of the nation's oldest families, Sheremetev had nevertheless been a youthful rebel against traditional Muscovite ways; once, as a young man, he was denied his father's blessing because he appeared before him with a shaven chin. Unlike most Russian noblemen, Sheremetev had traveled abroad and enjoyed the experience. In 1686, Sophia sent him on missions to King Jan Sobieski of Poland and to the Emperor Leopold in Vienna. In 1697, at forty-five, he went abroad again, this time as a private traveler on a kind of twenty-month sabbatical from his army duties. He traveled to Vienna, Rome, Venice and Malta, and called on the Emperor, the Pope, the Doge and the Grand Master of the Knights of St. John, who made him a Knight and awarded him a Maltese Cross. Returning to Russia, Sheremetev wore his Cross so proudly that other, envious Russians took to asking snidely whether the boyar had become "the envoy of Malta." Sheremetev bore such comments serenely; Whitworth, the new English ambassador, called him "the politest man in the country."

Peter was pleased by Sheremetev's interest in Europe, but it was as a soldier rather than a diplomat that he used the boyar. Sheremetev's uncle had been commander-in-chief of the Russian army under Tsar Alexis until he was captured by the Tatars and forced to spend thirty years in captivity in the Crimea. Sheremetev himself had fought against both Poles and Tatars. In 1695 and 1696, when Peter attacked Azov, he conducted diversionary campaigns farther west that resulted in the capture of Tatar fortresses along the lower Dnieper. As a commander, Sheremetev was competent but cautious. He could be trusted to obey Peter's standing orders never to risk the army unless the odds were heavily in his favor.

While Sheremetev's new army was being assembled and re-equipped, Peter ordered the immediate construction of fortifications at Novgorod, Pskov and the Pechersk Monastery near Pskov. Women and children were harnessed along with men. Church services were halted so that the priests and monks could join the common people in moving earth. Houses and churches were pulled down to make way for the new ramparts. To set an example, Peter himself labored on the first entrenchments at Novgorod. When he left, he entrusted the effort to Lieutenant Colonel Shenshin, but Shenshin, thinking the Tsar had gone for good, quickly stopped his own manual labor. Peter returned and, discovering this, had him whipped in front of the rampart and sent him to Smolensk as a common soldier.

But Peter realized that, over the longer run, his army needed to be completely reformed as a permanent, professional body, based on a standard conscription term of twenty-five years. Even so, the first appearance of the new army in the field brought faint praise from a Russian observer in 1701:

A great number are called to serve and if they are examined closely the only result is a feeling of shame. The infantry are armed with bad muskets and do not know how to use them. They fight with their sidearms, with lances, and halberds and even these are blunt. For every foreigner killed there are three, four and even more Russians killed. As for the cavalry, we are ashamed to look at them ourselves, let alone show them to the foreigner. [They consist of] sickly, ancient horses, blunt sabers, puny, badly dressed men who do not know how to wield their weapons. There are some noblemen who do not know how to charge an arquebus, let alone hit their target. They care nothing about killing the enemy, but think only how to return to their homes. They pray that God will send them a light wound so as not to suffer much, for which they will receive a reward from the sovereign. In battle they hide in thickets; whole companies take cover in a forest or a valley and I have even heard noblemen say, "Pray God we may serve our sovereign without drawing our swords from their scabbards."

To
remedy these conditions, Peter ordered a complete overhaul in army training, with new standards of discipline and new tactics based on European models. The effort had to start from the very beginning with the creation of new training manuals, the only infantry manuals previously available in Russia being dated 1647—and these had been copied from a German manual of 1615! Peter wanted emphasis placed on training for battle; he had no use for splendidly precise parade-ground formations with soldiers who "play fencing master with their muskets and march as if they were dancing." Neither did he care for the elaborate uniforms of Western soldiers, who looked like "dressed-up dolls." His new army would be dressed in simple green cloth as fast as Russian mills could turn it out. Where possible, his soldiers would wear boots and belts and three-cornered hats. Most important, however, was that they be equipped with modern weapons. Fortunately, while in England, Peter had bought between 30,000 and 40,000 modem flintlocks with new ring bayonets, which were distributed and were used as models for a homemade version. Production at first was low—6,000 in 1701—but by 1706 Russia was producing 30,000 flintlocks a year, and by 1711, 40,000.

Modem tactics were emphasized. The men were taught to fire on command by platoons and how to use the new bayonets. The cavalry was trained to move only on command, to wheel by squadron, to attack with swords and withdraw in an orderly fashion rather than abandon the field like a fleeing herd. Finally, Peter labored to infuse a new spirit into the army: It was to fight not in "the interests of His Tsarish Majesty" but—as Peter wrote the order in his own hand—in "the interests of the Russian state."

Slowly, despite innumerable difficulties, frequent desertions, much jealousy and quarreling among officers, the new army was forged. The most serious problem in terms of equipment lay with the artillery. Almost all the cannon of the Russian army, both heavy siege mortars and field artillery, had been lost at Narva and it was necessary to start from zero. Vinius, the director of the Post Office, was placed in charge, with the title Inspector of Artillery, and given sweeping powers. All Peter cared about was action. "For God's sake," he wrote to Vinius, "speed the artillery." The old man found that there was no time to mine and refine new metals; the new cannon would have to be cast from some more readily available materials. Peter gave the command: "From the whole of Tsardom, in leading towns, from churches and monasteries, a proportion of the bells are to be collected for guns and mortars." It was near-sacrilege, for the bells were almost as holy as the churches themselves and each played a familiar, timeworn part in people's lives. Nevertheless, by June 1701 one quarter of all the church bells in Russia were lowered from their towers, melted down and recast as cannon. Vinius had trouble with the iron founders who cast the guns, glowing red hot in the fires. They drank too much and even the knout could not force them to hurry. But behind Vinius loomed the wrath of the Tsar. "Tell the burgomasters and show them this letter," Peter wrote to Vinius, "that if through their delays the gun carriages are not ready, they will pay not only with money but with their heads."

In spite of the difficulty in finding workmen and suitable alloys for his iron, Vinius performed miracles. In May 1701, he sent twenty new cannon to the army at Novgorod, seventy-six following soon after. By the end of the year, he had produced more than 300 new guns as well as founding a school where 250 boys were learning to become cannon makers and artillerymen. Peter was pleased. "It is good work," he wrote, "and necessary, for time is like death." In 1702, despite the old man's age, Peter sent Vinius to Siberia to seek out new sources of iron and copper. Between 1701 and 1704, seven new ironworks were developed beyond the Urals, producing an ore which the English ambassador reported to be "admirably good, better than that of Sweden." The Russian artillery continued to grow, and cannon cast in the Urals began to fire at the Swedes. By 1705, the English ambassador