Nemesis
At 11.00 on the hot summer’s morning of 8/19 July 1702 a
surprised Augustus II was informed at his headquarters in Kliszów, south of
Kielce, that the Swedish army which he had understood to be encamped five
kilometres to the north had appeared unexpectedly out of woods near the village
of Borczyn. After hurrying forward to confirm the report, he ordered the Saxon
army to deploy in a strong position on a small rise to the north of their
encampment. The Swedes were also surprised. Charles had persuaded his reluctant
advisers to march on the Saxons at nine o’clock having spent two hours drawn up
in battle order waiting for an attack which never materialised. He had not,
however, expected the Saxon position to be so strong: protected by an
impassible swamp it could not be outflanked on its left, while the stream which
ran through the boggy valley between the armies made a frontal assault a risky
proposition. Moreover, Charles was substantially outnumbered: the Swedish army
consisted of 8,000 foot, and 4,000 horse; with most of its artillery struggling
far to the rear on the dreadful roads it was supported by only four
three-pounder guns. It faced 9,000 Saxon cavalry, 7,500 Saxon foot, 6,000
Polish cavalry and forty-six guns. With no fortuitous snowstorms to be expected
from the clear July heavens, it looked as if the impetuous Charles would at
last receive his comeuppance. The startled Saxon officers, forced to abandon
their leisurely picnic, certainly thought so: as they dashed to take up their
positions, they ordered their servants to keep lunch warm. They would soon be
back.
If the servants heeded their masters, it was to no avail.
After a brief survey of the terrain, Charles ordered a daring manoeuvre which
decided the battle. Since the major weakness of the Saxon position lay on its
right, where Lubomirski’s Poles had just squeezed into line, he changed his
battle order, strengthening his left wing to mount a bold enveloping move.
After a Swedish charge was beaten back, the Swedes withstood two great
onslaughts by Lubomirski’s cavalry while the weakened centre and right beat
back a Saxon thrust across the marshy valley which now offered them a measure
of protection. When Lubomirski withdrew from the battlefield after his failed
assaults, the main Swedish force turned in on the exposed Saxon flank as the
Swedish right and centre advanced. The Saxons, hemmed in by the marshland to
their left and rear, fought with great determination, but were slowly crushed
between the Swedish pincers. By half past four, Charles was mounting a
triumphal entry to the Saxon camp as Augustus and the remnants of his army
squelched their way to safety through the evil-smelling bog. For the loss of
some 300 dead, including Charles’s brother-in-law Frederick of Holstein-Gottorp
– sliced in two by a Polish cannon-ball – and 500–800 wounded, the Swedes
killed some 2,000 Saxons and captured 1,000. Lunch would have to wait.
It is important to consider Narva in the context of what
happened at Kliszöw. For it was not just Russian armies which were unable to
deal with the Swedes. At Kliszów Charles routed a regular, numerically-superior
and experienced western army drawn up in a strong defensive position with a
substantial advantage in artillery. The Swedish army is often regarded as
western, and many of its officers had considerable experience of warfare in the
west, yet it did not fight as western armies were supposed to fight. Throughout
the seventeenth century, European armies had built their strategy and tactics
round firepower and fortifications. The improvements in firearms technology in
the second half of the seventeenth century, which saw the replacement of the
matchlock by the flintlock, the introduction of the bayonet, which enabled
armies to dispense with pikemen, and the increased discipline which could be
instilled into the new regular armies, ensured that gunpowder’s role was more
important than ever. The increased rate of fire made possible by flintlocks
meant that experienced infantry who had time to form up could no longer be
broken by cavalry, as Lubomirski’s hussars discovered at Kliszów, and were less
vulnerable on the march. The battlefield in the age of Marlborough and Eugene
was increasingly obscured by the acrid black smoke of gunpowder, as the
intricate geometrical patterns of Vauban’s fortifications twirled their way
round European cities.
Yet Charles obstinately refused to follow fashion. Even
though flintlock and bayonet were standard issue in Swedish armies – indeed the
Swedish bayonet was better fixed and hence superior to many western versions –
the pike was retained, not because Sweden was backward, but because pikemen,
who constituted about a third of each battalion, still had a role to play.
Charles had a healthy contempt for firepower, placing far greater trust in cold
steel. Each Swedish infantryman was armed with a sword, the design of which was
of great concern to Charles. Swedish infantry regulations, from those drawn up
by Magnus Stenbock at Lais in the winter of 1700–1, played down the role of
firepower and stressed the importance of infantry attack at the double. Salvos
were to be delivered as close as possible to the enemy, and attacks were to be
pressed home with maximum vigour: eyewitness accounts describe how the Swedish
foot charged at the run; even during its doomed attack against overwhelming
odds at Poltava, the weary infantry was running so fast it was ‘almost
leaping’. At Fraustadt (2/13 February 1706), most of the Swedish foot did not
even bother to fire a salvo as it attacked in one line, five ranks deep, with
pikemen between the second and third ranks; only the right wing loosed its
muskets. Elsewhere, the infantry pressed forward across the last hundred yards
through three artillery salvos and one musket volley, brushed aside the
bristling Spanish riders chained together in front of the Saxon ranks, and
plunged in at the run with sword, pike and bayonet. At Holowczyn (July 1708), which
Charles considered the best of his battles, ‘the King himself went from one
battalion to another, … ordering them above all things, instead of firing, to
use their pikes, their bayonets and their swords.’
It was not that Charles failed to appreciate the importance
of firepower: Swedish artillery and musket technology remained the equal of any
in Europe and he was perfectly capable of using artillery effectively where he
felt it appropriate, as at the forcing of the Dvina in July 1701, or to cover his
surprise crossing of the Vabich at Holowczyn which, despite Charles’s urgings,
was largely a bitter firefight. Yet Charles judged weapons in terms of
effectiveness not fashion. Although technology had certainly improved, the
profound limitations of contemporary firearms still shaped tactics. Flintlocks
might be better than matchlocks, but their rate of fire was still slow and
their reliability uncertain, especially in damp weather; battleplans
consequently tended to emphasise the defensive over the offensive. Charles,
however, believed in speed of movement and the seizure of the initiative; this
led him to downplay the role of the musket and of field artillery. For, if
cavalry was no longer capable of breaking ordered formations of infantry, a
disciplined, aggressive charge by well-drilled, motivated infantry with high
morale could achieve what cavalry could not. Even troops experienced in the
handling of firearms were vulnerable to a coordinated and rapid infantry
assault. At Fraustadt, where much of the Saxon army was composed of French,
Bavarian and Swiss mercenaries, each infantry platoon, firing in turn, should
in theory have been capable of unleashing five or six salvos in the time it
took the Swedes to approach. In practice they only managed one or two, since
they were ordered to wait until the Swedes were eighty paces away. If, as one
source suggests, some of the Saxons fired high, the damage inflicted would have
been minimal.
Swedish success was not dependent upon infantry alone.
Cavalry still played a central role on the battlefield, protecting the flanks
and preventing envelopment by the enemy. With the division of the
Commonwealth’s forces in what became a civil war, the Swedish cavalry were able
to play a more central role than had been possible in the 1650s. Backed by
substantial quantites of Polish medium and light cavalry, either recruited
directly into the Swedish army as Vallacker (Wallachian) regiments, or as part
of the pro-Leszczyński forces, Swedish cavalry enjoyed the freedom to roam widely.
On the battlefield, mounted on robust, powerful horses, they were direct and
devastating. According to Stenbock’s 1710 regulations, a cavalryman was to
charge ‘with sword in hand’, and never to ‘caracolle or use his carbine or
pistol’ in preference to his sword. The cavalry charged in closed wedge
formation, with knees locked together. It is a matter of some controversy as to
whether it was possible to maintain an attack in such close formation at high
speed; in part it depended on the terrain, but eyewitness reports make it clear
that Charles’s cavalry charged home at the gallop, even if they did not always
maintain close formation.
The superior Swedish cavalry proved decisive in several
battles, including Pułtusk (June 1703) and Ponitz (September 1704). At
Fraustadt, where Rehnskiöld was outnumbered nearly two to one (and nearly three
to one in infantry), he used his cavalry on both wings in a double envelopment
of Schulenburg’s force which was deliberately deployed in a position thought to
be impregnable to cavalry attack, with each wing resting on a village, and
battalions turned at right angles to offer flanking cover. The Swedish cavalry,
attacking at the gallop, drove off the Saxon horse on the wings and pressed in
on the allied centre as the infantry mounted a frontal assault against the
allied foot. The result was a massacre. Of some 18,000 Saxons and Russians,
7–8,000 were killed, including the Russians cut down in cold blood after
surrendering. Four-fifths of the allied army was killed or captured.
The spectacular results of these aggressive tactics
themselves played an important part in their success, since they ensured that
morale remained high. Faith in Charles’s powers as a general and a feeling of
superiority towards other armies took root. Belief in the king, trust in the
providential protection of a Lutheran God and the confidence which stemmed from
an unbroken run of success drove Sweden’s armies forward. Charles’s
oft-criticised insistence on leading from the front and exposing himself to
danger helped strengthen this belief: his preservation from harm, especially
given the mounting toll of men killed or wounded at his side, seemed to confirm
that he enjoyed divine protection.
Charles’s bravura tactics have endeared him to military
historians with a romantic streak; in the early twentieth century, when the
doctrine of attack à l’outrance was again fashionable, a team of historians in
the Swedish General Staff under Carl Bennedich sought to rescue Charles’s
military reputation from charges of impetuous rashness, for which he had been
condemned since his death. Bennedich saw in Charles’s generalship the
embodiment of the supreme military virtues. According to the General Staff, he
perfected the Swedish school of Erik XIV, Gustav Adolf, Charles X and Charles
XI. Throughout the work he is compared to Alexander the Great and Napoleon.
The General Staff had nothing but contempt for the linear
tactics of contemporary European armies. These led, it argued, to timid,
defensive battles in which the initiative was handed to the enemy. This
distinction between linear tactics and the war of movement and attack favoured
by Charles led them to blame the Poltava disaster on a group of officers, in
particular Lewenhaupt and Magnus Stenbock, who had served their apprenticeships
in western Europe, and who were allegedly proponents of the western school.
Lewenhaupt is criticised for his defensive posture at Gemauerthof (1705), which
was at least a Swedish victory, and Lesnaia (1708), when his lack of initiative
was supposedly to blame for his defeat and loss of the vital supply train. At
Poltava the bitter disagreements between generals of the Swedish school,
principally Rehnskiöld – who was in overall command – and those of the western
school – in particular Lewenhaupt, who led the infantry – were blamed for
fatally compromising Charles’s brilliant battle plan.
The General Staff account is tendentious and one-sided,
relying too much on over-interpretation of the self-serving exculpations of
Swedish generals granted too much time to ponder and quarrel over
responsibility for the Poltava debacle in their long years of Russian
captivity. The distinctions between linear and Caroline tactics are overdrawn,
relying too much on a theoretical approach to the study of war which rests on
questionable foundations. In their own way, Bennedich and his supporters were
the Swedish equivalent of Soviet historians who claimed that western methods
had little influence on the Russian military art, and explained Russian success
by a chauvinist, wholly mystical and utterly unscientific belief in the
invincibility of the Russian people. Nevertheless, despite the obvious
weaknesses in the General Staff’s account of Charles’s wars, it would be unwise
to reject their arguments entirely.
For all that west European tactics in the age of Marlborough
and Eugene were by no means as defensive as they were depicted by the General
Staff, Wernstedt goes too far in asserting that there were no substantial
differences between Swedish and western methods of waging war. There is an
abundance of contemporary evidence that western observers were nonplussed by
Swedish tactics. De Croy, who commanded the Russian army at Narva, told the
French envoy Guiscard that when the Swedish army approached the Russian
countervallation he assumed it was merely the advance guard, unable to believe
that Charles ‘would have dared to attack an army so well intrenched, and so
infinitely superior to his own’. Guiscard himself was so surprised that he
claimed to be unable to speak for several days, a condition as rare as it was
excruciating for a French diplomat, as Bengtsson drily observed. While Wrede,
serving with the Swedes, dismissed reports that the Russian army numbered
80,000, he still found it astonishing for 8,000 men to attack 40,000, protected
by extensive fieldworks, armed with 130 good artillery pieces and with such
copious supplies of ammunition. Magnus Stenbock, who had learned his trade in
Dutch and Imperial service, wrote that he had now seen war waged ‘in a
completely different way from that which I understand or have learnt.’ In 1701,
the Saxons defending the line of the Dvina were astonished when the Swedish
infantry charged at them through a hail of bullets with pike, bayonet and sword.
Charles’s aggressive instincts and his relative neglect of
firepower were quite distinctive. Yet the employment of such methods was not
due to quirks of character or inspirational genius, as is often alleged,
although Charles’s powerful and unusual temperament played a part. He was
nurtured in a military tradition which was already distinctive long before his
birth. His principal instructors, Magnus Stuart and Rehnskiöld, had fought
under Charles XI, and had themselves been instructed by those who had served
Charles X, including Erik Dahlberg and Rutger von Ascheberg. Stuart insisted
that his pupil study in depth the wars of Gustav Adolf and Charles X; as an
adult, Charles was able to recall their campaigns in detail, and made a special
tour of the site of the 1656 battle of Warsaw in 1702. Sweden’s famous ‘gå på’
(have at them) tactics may have reached their apotheosis under Charles XII; he
did not create them.
If even those hostile to Charles recognise his tactical
ability, he is widely accused of having little strategic grasp. The aggression
which, on the tactical level, brought such spectacular victories, it is argued,
was his greatest strategic weakness; some have even seen it as indicative of
mental imbalance: ‘[Charles’s] motives were largely aggressive. … Here was a
monarch … whose dedication to the practice of the martial arts and sciences at
times bordered on the near-insane.’ Russian historians have been particularly
critical. Leer argues that Charles was ‘no strategist’ and Tarle considers that
his Russian campaign was based on wholly unrealistic premises, claiming that
Charles’s own generals by 1708–9 were horrified by his strategic decisions.
Such arguments have been echoed by foreign historians of Russia, with Fuller
claiming that Charles was ‘deeply inferior’ to Peter as a strategist. Above all
he is criticised for the decision not to follow up Narva by pushing into Russia
to defeat Peter once and for all while he still had the chance; thereafter an
attack on Russia would be more difficult since the loss of Ingria, Kexholm,
Narva and Dorpat destroyed the land bridge between Finland and Livonia and
ensured that Peter could disrupt Swedish communications by land and, with his
new navy, by sea.
The Russian campaign of 1708–9 is usually presented as
definitive proof of Charles’s hubristic failure to take account of military
reality. Ignoring Peter’s peace offers and willingness to restore most of
Russia’s conquests in return for being allowed to keep St Petersburg, Charles
launched his attack. Instead of attempting to reconquer the lost territories,
or to invade via Pskov, so remaining close to his supply lines, he chose a
direct thrust at Moscow through Lithuania. Even worse, it is argued, was the
decision to turn south into the Ukraine without waiting for the provisions
being brought laboriously from Livonia by Lewenhaupt, which ensured their loss
at Lesnaia in September 1708 and condemned the Swedes to starve in the hideous
winter of 1708–9. By May 1709, the proud force of 33–36,000 Charles had led
into Russia had been reduced by at least a third, and it was short of food,
ammunition and gunpowder. Trapped at Poltava, it faced its nemesis 225
kilometres east of Kiev and over a thousand from Riga. The disaster, it seems,
was eminently avoidable.
There is no shortage of contemporary accounts to
substantiate such arguments. As early as the autumn of 1708, Whitworth’s cogent
summary of the situation anticipated many subsequent criticisms. He praised the
qualities of the Swedish armies, but suggested that Charles ‘seems to
undervalue all subordinate means of proceeding with success and to rely wholly
on the goodness of his army and justice of his cause, by which he has hitherto
carried on a prosperous war, contrary to all ordinary rules of acting’. He
concluded that if Charles had invaded Russia after Narva, Peter would probably
have been forced to make peace on any terms; once that opportunity was missed,
however, Peter was given the chance to train and discipline his new forces and,
‘by acting with whole armies against small detachments the soldiers became
inured to fire, and easily begun to taste the sweets of conquest’.30 In their
accounts of the campaign, several Swedish officers, in particular Gyllenkrook
and Lewenhaupt, stressed that they had disagreed with Charles over many of his
strategic decisions: Gyllenkrook, who had prepared the plan for a strike
through Livonia at Pskov, claimed that he ‘never advised’ an attack on Moscow,
but always sought to hinder it. Lewenhaupt criticised Charles for failing to
wait for the supply train when it was only a day’s ride away by courier; over
the siege of Poltava; and for the decision not to deploy artillery during the
battle. James Jeffreyes, an English agent attached to Charles’s army, wrote
immediately after Poltava:
Thus … you see a
victorious and numerous army destroy’d in less than two years time, much
because of the little regard they had for their enemy; but chiefly because the
King would not hearken to any advice that was given him by his Councillors, who
I can assure you were for carrying on this war after another method.
When Peter asked the captured Swedish generals after Poltava
to explain certain of Charles’s decisions which he found hard to comprehend,
Lewenhaupt remarked that the only reply they could make was that they did not
know.
While it would be foolish to deny that the headstrong,
intense Charles made mistakes, or bore a great deal of responsibility for what
happened at Poltava, hindsight has overly coloured judgments of his strategic
abilities. Concentration on the ill-fated Russian campaign unbalances many
accounts, while contemporary assessments cannot be regarded as objective: the
desire of Gyllenkrook and Lewenhaupt to clear themselves of responsibility for
Poltava and the shameful surrender at Perevolochna casts more than a shadow of
doubt over their accounts. One need not adopt the fervid hyperbole of the
Swedish General Staff to acknowledge that the Charles who lost Poltava was also
the Charles whose strategic grasp at the age of eighteen was sure enough for
him to play a significant role in planning the spectacular victory over three
powerful enemies in 1700. The brilliant campaigns of 1702–6 and the marshalling
of exiguous forces in defence of Sweden against the most powerful coalition it
ever faced between 1714 and 1718 suggest that those who dismiss his strategic
abilities as negligible are the ones whose judgment is clouded.
The invasion of Russia was undoubtedly a gamble, yet the
fact that it ended in disaster should not blind the historian to the reasons
for adopting it, nor to the misfortunes which played a part in its failure.
Russian historians frequently condemn Charles for his aggression, comparing him
to Napoleon and Hitler, whose presumption also brought their downfall. It was
the Russians, however, not the Swedes, who were the aggressors in the Great
Northern War, which Peter launched on the flimsiest of pretexts. Moreover,
Charles had good reason for rejecting Peter’s peace overtures. In 1706–8,
Peter’s reforms were by no means secure, the regular core of his army was still
small, and the Swedes were aware of the great upsurge in opposition to Peter
which had begun with the Astrakhan rising in 1705, and the widespread Cossack
discontent, which was to see Bulavin’s rising in 1707–8 and the defection of
Mazepa and significant numbers of Zaporozhians in late 1708. As Whitworth
remarked:
should this army come
to any considerable miscarriage, it would probably draw after it the ruin of
the whole empire, since I do not know where the Czar would be able to get another;
for the new raised regiments in Ingria and much more those, who are now
mustering up here and in the several garrisons on the frontiers, cannot deserve
the name of regular forces, not to mention the usual despondency of the
russians after any misfortunes, and their general discontent and inclinations
to a revolt.
Thus Charles is criticised for not invading Russia in
1700–1, and for invading in 1708–9. Yet conditions were far more favourable in
1708. Following the pleasant interlude in Saxony, the Swedish field army was
larger, more experienced and better-equipped than at any point since 1700. The
political situation in Poland-Lithuania was more favourable, and Saxony was out
of the war. Even if the Russian army had improved substantially since Narva,
the Swedes had good reason to believe that they were capable of defeating it if
they could force it to battle. Why should Charles make peace, and permit the
continued existence of a Russian bridgehead on the Gulf of Finland, thus giving
Peter time to stifle dissent at home and build up his navy and army? Charles
would have been naive to believe that Peter would be content with the cession
of St Petersburg alone; it was the Russians who would benefit most from a
suspension of hostilities. The only way to secure a lasting peace and long-term
security for the Baltic provinces was to destroy the Russian army and force
Peter to settle on Swedish terms. An invasion of Russia was the only way to
achieve that end.
Charles’s reign demonstrated once more the harsh realities
of Sweden’s strategic position, for all that it was better in 1700 than in 1655
or 1675. Sweden had a large, well-trained army which could be mobilised rapidly
and effectively; it had to be supplemented by further recruitment, but the
costs involved were not crippling. Although government income was largely
static in the years before the war, it had been possible to build up a small
reserve fund, amounting to roughly 1 million silver dalers in 1696, while
regimental cash reserves were nearly as great, at 900,000 silver dalers. Yet
although Sweden was better prepared for war than ever before, and was able to
raise new funds from extraordinary taxes, such as the tenth penny levied
between November 1699 and February 1700, and various expedients, the harsh
realities of its chronic shortage of specie soon became apparent: the costs of
mobilisation were reckoned in January 1700 at 6,374,141 silver dalers, while
extraordinary sources were estimated to be capable of producing only 1,514,001.
Hopes of raising loans in Holland and England at a maximum of 5 per cent
interest, were dashed, since Sweden could offer little as security apart from
customs tolls at Riga, Narva, Reval and Nyen. With Saxon and Russian armies
heading for Livonia, the Dutch and English were understandably reluctant to
risk their money, although a Dutch loan of 300,000 riksdalers was secured at 5
per cent in 1702. Sweden’s reserves underpinned the mobilisation of 1700, and
made possible Travendal and Narva, but they were rapidly exhausted, and were
utterly incapable of sustaining a long war: government credit was poor, and
loans from private individuals were difficult to raise, while the outbreak of
war brought a serious liquidity crisis for the new Bank of Sweden.
Thus Sweden, for all that Charles XI’s reforms had
transformed its military capacity, faced a familiar set of problems. It could
not long fight a defensive war. As had been the case in 1655, once it mobilised
its army, it was forced to carry the war into enemy territory, and the war
could only be sustained by fighting abroad. The indelningsverk performed well
in filling gaps in the ranks, but for all the meticulous preparations of the
excellent commissariat, once the troops were detached from the farms which
supported them in peacetime, the problems multiplied. They were already evident
when the army gathered in Scania, Sweden’s richest province; once it reached
Livonia, they only worsened. In the winter of 1700–1 it rapidly became clear
that if the army were to stay together it would have to leave the Baltic
provinces. One of the most important arguments against an attack on Pskov was
that even without taking into account the political problems following the
reduktion, Livonia, devastated by famine in the 1690s, was exhausted: to strike
at Pskov the army would have to retrace its steps northward across territories
which had already paid substantial contributions. The move south into Courland
in July 1701 was thus partly motivated by supply considerations. Courland was
small, however; by early 1702 it was exhausted, and the army was suffering:
after it entered Poland one observer noted the contrast between the half-naked
Swedish soldiers and the regiment of Sapieha foot which accompanied them,
smartly clad in green uniforms. Merely to support itself, the army had to move.
It was difficult to imagine that an invasion of Russia could be sustained from
an exhausted and politically unreliable supply-base, while the area round Pskov
was not known to flow with milk and honey.
The decision to move south was eminently sensible. For the
next six years, the Swedes supplied themselves without major difficulty.
Charles did not face the concerted resistance that had frustrated his
grandfather, he enjoyed substantial political support, and his army was
manifestly superior to all its opponents. Small Swedish detachments were still
vulnejable to attack, but the fact that they had significant support from
Augustus’s enemies meant that they could deploy Polish light cavalry of their
own to counter the threat and provide reconnaissance; Charles placed great
store on the recruitment of these Vallacker units, and there was an entire
regiment in the army which left Saxony in 1707. Swedish military dominance
ensured that Magnus Stenbock, director of the General War Commissariat, could
raise contributions from a wide area in a way which had not been possible in
the 1650s: when the palatinates of Ruthenia and Volhynia were the object of a
special expedition in the winter of 1702–3, he returned with six barrels of
gold and a considerable haul of supplies in kind at a cost of 68 killed or
missing and 36 horses. After the fall of Thorn in October 1703 there were for
the moment no Saxon troops in the Commonwealth. With the army stationed in
Warmia and Polish Prussia in the first half of 1704, the supply situation was
remarkably good. It remained so when the Swedes moved their headquarters to
Rawicz after the 1704 campaign, or when Volhynia was placed under contribution
in 1705.
There was a price to be paid, however, for the very
efficiency of the Swedish operation. Although marauding and looting were
punished severely by the military authorities, who made conspicuous efforts to
investigate Polish complaints against Swedish soldiers, there is reason to doubt
Hatton’s indulgent assessment of their behaviour. Even in pro-Swedish areas,
the very efficiency with which they collected contributions provoked hostile
reactions from those subject to constant requisitions. Given that this was a
civil war, and that Swedish control was never absolute, communities could be
faced by successive demands from Swedish, Saxon and Polish forces: in December
1705 the villagers of Ilewo wrote to Thorn Council, their landlords, that,
having been forced to pay contributions in cash and kind to support the Saxon
garrison in 1703, they had then been placed under contributions by the Swedes,
and had since faced Sapieha exactions. In such circumstances, the demands of
even the best-behaved troops were resented, and local officials were deluged
with requests for the waiving of rent payments to take account of the demands
of the military, which were often heavy: of 217 rams inventoried in the village
of Gremboczyn in 1703, the Swedes took 100; by the end of the year, after
deaths, other exactions and wastage, there were only 44 left.
Such demands did little for Leszczyński’s hopes of winning
support; furthermore, if they had the advantage over Gustav Adolf and Charles X
that they were not bottled up in one corner of the Commonwealth, but could
occupy new areas when their supply-base became exhausted, this meant that they
spread their unpopularity over a steadily widening area. Their exactions
inevitably provoked resistance; where they met it, they behaved with striking
ruthlessness. Hatton’s picture of the Swedish soldier ‘of peasant stock and a
smallholder himself in peacetime’ cheerfully chopping wood and helping round
the farms on which he was billeted is not a complete fantasy, but it scarcely
characterises the normal relationship between the Swedes and the local
population. Charles believed it was good practice to deal ‘harshly and
brusquely’ with Poles. When Wojnicz failed to pay its allotted contributions in
October 1702, he ordered its division into quarters, each of which was plundered
by a detachment of 100 men, before the town was burnt. The properties of
Augustus’s supporters were treated with startling ruthlessness: Charles ordered
Stenbock to ruin the estates of general Brandt, one of Augustus’s commanders,
‘as best thou can’. On Charles’s direct orders villages were burned, fields
were laid waste, cattle were driven off to feed the army and any who objected
were put to the sword. The harsh behaviour of the Swedes towards the local
population during the Russian campaign of 1707–9 had its clear antecedents in
Poland. At the very least, it ensured that potential supporters would think
twice before abandoning the Sandomierz Confederation.
Swedish strategy was not entirely driven by considerations
of supply. There were good military reasons for Charles’s desire for a war of
movement. Confident of the superiority of his army, he sought battle, as had
Chodkiewicz or Żółkiewski before him. Charles’s forces were too small to
scatter around in garrisons, and he pursued Batory’s policy of demolishing
fortifications instead of manning them. After the fall of Thorn in 1703,
Charles ordered the razing of its walls, behind which a Saxon garrison of 6,000
had mouldered away. Charles could not afford to be so profligate with his army
or waste too much time on irrelevant siege operations: when the Swedes captured
Lwów in 1704, they spent five days on Charles’s orders blowing up the best of
the 160 ‘fine large guns’ which had fallen into their hands. Charles had no use
for them; Swedish military dominance was not dependent upon control of
fortresses.
