Voltaire's history of Charles XII, king of Sweden · Voltaire
BOOK II
Charles received all these prisoners with as charming and engaging a manner as if he were feting them in his own Court. He only put the general officers under a guard; all the under officers and soldiers were disarmed and taken to the river Narva, where they were provided with boats to convey them to their own country. In the meantime night came on, and the right wing of the Russian force was still fighting. The Swedes had not lost 1,500 men; 18,000 Russians had been killed in their entrenchments, many had been drowned, many had crossed the river; but still there remained enough to entirely exterminate the Swedes. But it is not the number lost, but the panic of survivors which spells defeat in war. The King made haste to seize the enemy’s artillery before nightfall. He took up an advantageous position between their camp and the town, and there got some hours’ sleep on the ground, wrapped in his cloak, waiting till at daybreak he could fall on the enemy’s left wing, which was not yet completely routed. At two o’clock in the morning General Wade, who was in command of that wing, having heard of the King’s gracious reception of the other generals and his sending home of the subalterns and soldiers, asked the same favour of him. The conqueror sent him word that he need only approach at the head of his troops and surrender his arms and standards. Soon the general appeared with his Russians, to the number of about 30,000. Soldiers and officers marched bare-headed in front of less than 7,000 Swedes. As the soldiers passed before him they threw down their muskets and swords; the officers surrendered their ensigns and colours.
He let the whole band cross the river without keeping one single prisoner. Had he put them under guard the number of prisoners would have been at least five times that of the conquerors. He then victoriously entered Narva, attended by the Duke of Croy and the other Russian officers; he ordered their swords to be restored to them, and when he heard that they wanted money, because the tradesmen of Narva refused to trust them, he sent the Duke of Croy 1,000 ducats, and 500 to every Russian officer, who were full of admiration for this treatment, which they had never conceived possible. An account of the victory was at once drawn up to send to Stockholm, and to the allies, but the King erased with his own hands whatever redounded too much to his own credit or to the discredit of the Czar. His modesty could not hinder them from striking several medals to commemorate the event at Stockholm. One of these represented him, on one face, standing on a pedestal, to which a Russian, Dane and Pole were chained; and on the reverse a Hercules, armed with a club, trampling a Cerberus, and the inscription, “Tres uno contudit ictu.”
“O thou, our perpetual consolation in all our adversities, great Saint Nicholas, of infinite power, how have we offended thee in our sacrifices, our genuflections, our bowings, our thanksgivings, that thou hast thus forsaken us? We have implored thine assistance against these terrible, insolent, savage, dreadful, invincible destroyers, when, like lions and bears who have lost their young, they have fallen upon us, terrified us, wounded us, slain us by thousands, who are thy people. As it is impossible that this should have happened without sorcery and witchcraft, we beseech thee, O great Nicholas, to be our champion and standard-bearer, to deliver us from this band of sorcerers, and to drive them from our coasts with the reward they deserve.” While the Russians were thus complaining of their defeat to St. Nicholas, Charles XII returned thanks to God, and prepared himself for fresh victories. The King of Poland fully expected that his enemy, who had conquered the Danes and Russians, would next turn his arms against him. He made a firmer alliance with the Czar, and the two princes arranged an interview at which they could agree on some policy. They met at Brizen, a small town in Lithuania, without any of the formalities which only delay business, and for which they were in no humour under the circumstances. The princes of the North met with a familiarity which is not yet the fashion in the south of Europe. Peter and Augustus passed fifteen days together in pleasures which passed all bounds; for the Czar, who had set himself to reform his kingdom, could not restrain his own dangerous inclination to riotous living.
The King of Poland promised to furnish the Czar with 50,000 German troops, which were to be hired from several princes, and which the Czar was to pay. He, on the other hand, was to send 50,000 Russians to Poland to be trained in the art of war, and was also to pay the King of Poland 3,000,000 rixdollars within two years. Had this treaty been carried out it might have been fatal to the King of Sweden. It was a ready and sure way of making good soldiers of the Russians, and might perhaps have forged irons for half Europe. Charles XII set himself to prevent the King of Poland from getting the benefit of this treaty. After passing the winter in Narva, he marched into Livonia, to the very town of Riga which King Augustus had failed to take. The Saxon troops were posted along the river Dwina, which is very broad at this spot, and their task was to dispute the passage with Charles, who lay on the other bank. The Saxons were not then commanded by their Prince, who was at that time ill; but their leader was Marshal Stenau, who was general; under him commanded Prince Ferdinand, Duke of Courland, and the same Patkul, who, after having maintained his rights on paper, defended his country against Charles sword in hand at the peril of his life.
The King of Sweden had great boats made, after a new model, so that the sides were far higher than ordinary, and could be let down and drawn up like a drawbridge. When raised they protected the troops they carried, and when let down they formed a bridge to land by. He also employed another artifice. Having noticed that the wind blew straight from the north, where his troops lay, to the south, where his enemies were encamped, he fired a large heap of wet straw, which spread a thick smoke over the river and prevented the Saxons from seeing his troops, or guessing at his actions. Under cover of this cloud he sent out boats filled with smoking straw, so that the cloud increased, and being right in the enemy’s face, prevented them from knowing whether the King had started on the passage or not. Meanwhile, he himself led the execution of his scheme; and when he was in the middle of the river, “Well,” he said, “the Dwina is going to be as kind to us as the sea of Copenhagen; take my word for it, General, we shall beat them.” He got to the other side in a quarter of an hour, and was vexed to see three people leap to shore before him. He had his cannon landed at once, and drew up his line without any opposition from the enemy, who were blinded by the smoke. When the wind dispersed the smoke the Saxons saw the King of Sweden already on his march against them.
Marshal Stenau lost not a moment, but at the first appearance of the Swedes fell furiously upon them with the best part of his horse. The violent shock coming upon the Swedes just as they were forming, threw them into disorder. They gave way, were broken, and pursued up to the river. The King of Sweden rallied them instantly in the midst of the stream, with as much ease as if he were holding a review. Then his troops, marching in closer formation than before, beat back Marshal Stenau, and advanced into the plain. Stenau felt that his men were beginning to waver, and, like a skilful commander, drew them off into a dry place flanked by a marsh, and a wood where his artillery were posted. The advantage of their position, and the time they had to recover their spirits, restored the Swedes’ courage. Charles attacked at once with 15,000 men, while the Duke had about 12,000. The battle was hard fought and bloody; the Duke had two horses killed under him; he three times penetrated into the centre of the King’s guards, but at last, having been unhorsed by a musket blow, his army fell into confusion, and he disputed the field no longer. His cuirassiers carried him off from the thick of the battle with difficulty, all bruised, and half dead, from the horses’ feet, as they were trampling him.
After the victory the King of Sweden hastened to Mittau, the capital of Courland, and took it. All the towns of the Duchy surrendered at discretion; it was rather a triumphal passage than a conquest. He passed rapidly on to Lithuania, and conquered wherever he passed. And he acknowledged that it was a great satisfaction to him to enter in triumph the town of Birzen, where the King of Poland and the Czar had plotted his ruin. It was here that he planned to dethrone the King of Poland by the agency of the Poles themselves. When one day he was at table, quite absorbed in the thought of his enterprise, and observing his usual rule of abstinence in the midst of a profound silence, appearing engrossed in his great plans, a German colonel, who was present, said loud enough for the King to hear, that the meals which the Czar and the King of Poland had made in the same place were very different from these. “Yes,” said the King, rising, “and I shall the more easily disturb their digestions.” In fact, using a little diplomacy to assist his arms, he did not delay to prepare for the event about which he had been busy thinking. The Government of Poland is an almost exact image of the old Celtic and Gothic Government, which has been altered almost everywhere else. It is the only state which has retained the name “republic,” with the royal dignity.
Every nobleman has the right to vote at the election of the king, and to stand for election himself. These fine privileges have corresponding abuses; the throne is almost always put up for sale, and as a Pole is seldom rich enough to buy it, it is often sold to foreigners. The nobility defend their liberty against the king, and tyrannize over the rest of the nation. The body of the people are slaves; such is the fate of mankind, that the great majority are, in some way or another, kept under by the minority. There the peasant does not sow his crops for himself but for his lord, to whom he and his land and his very work belong, and who can sell him, or cut his throat as if he were a beast of the field. A lord is answerable to none but himself. Judgment can only be given against him for a criminal action by an assembly of the whole nation. Nor can he be arrested until after his condemnation, so that he is hardly ever punished. Many among them are poor, in which case they let themselves out to the richer, and do the basest duties for a salary. They would rather serve their equals than engage in trade, and while taking care of their masters’ horses they call themselves electors of kings and destroyers of tyrants.
Whoever saw a King of Poland in the pomp of his majesty, would think him the most absolute prince in Europe; yet he is certainly the least so. The Poles really make with him the same contract which is supposed to exist between a sovereign and his subjects. The King of Poland at the moment of his consecration, and when he swears to keep the “pacta conventa,” releases his subjects from their oath of allegiance if he should break the laws of the republic. He nominates to all public offices, and confers all honours. Nothing is hereditary in Poland, except estates and noble rank. The sons of a count or of a king have no claim to the dignities of their father. But there is this great difference between the king and a republic, that he cannot deprive of any office after having conferred it, and that the republic may depose him if he breaks the constitution.
The nobility, jealous of their liberty, often sell their votes and seldom their affections. They have scarcely elected a king before they fear his ambition and make plots against him. The great men whose fortunes he has made, and whom he cannot degrade, often become his enemies instead of remaining his favourites; and those who are attached to the Court, become objects of hatred to the rest of the nobility. This makes the existence of two parties the rule among them; a condition which is inevitable, and even a necessity, in countries where they will have kings and at the same time preserve their liberty. What concerns the nation is regulated by the States-General, which they call Diets. These Diets are by the law of the kingdom to be held alternately in Poland and Lithuania. The deputies do business there with sword in hand, like the old Sarmatæ, from whom they are descended; and sometimes too in a state of intoxication, a vice to which the Sarmatæ were strangers. Every nobleman deputed to these States-General has the right the Roman tribunes had of vetoing the laws of the Senate. One nobleman, by saying “I protest,” can put a stop to the unanimous resolutions of all the rest; and if he leaves the place where the Diet is held they are obliged to separate.
To the disorders arising from this law they apply a remedy still more dangerous. There are almost always two factions in Poland; as unanimity in the Diet is almost impossible, each party forms confederacies, in which decisions are made by the majority’s votes, without regard to the minority. These assemblies, which are unconstitutional but authorized by precedent, are held in the king’s name, though often without his consent and against his interests, much in the same way as the League in France made use of Henry III’s name to undermine his power, or as the Parliament in England, which executed Charles I, began by putting the King’s name at the head of all the Acts they passed to destroy him. When the troubles are ended, then it is the function of the General Diets to annul the acts of these cabals; any Diet can also repeal the acts of its predecessors, because one king can abolish the laws of his predecessors, or his own laws.
The nobility which makes the laws for the State is also its defence. They muster on horseback on great occasions, and can make a corps of more than 100,000 men. This great body, called “Pospolite,” moves with difficulty, and is ill-governed. Difficulties of provisions and forage make it impossible for them to keep together long; they lack discipline, experience and obedience, but their strong love of liberty makes them always formidable. They may be conquered, dispersed, or even kept for a time in bonds, but they soon shake off the yoke; they compare themselves to reeds, which a storm will bend to the ground, and which will rise when the wind drops. It is for this reason that they have no fortified towns--they themselves are to be the only bulwarks of the State; they never let their king build fortresses, lest he should use them rather for their oppression than for their defence; their country is quite open, except for two or three frontier towns, and if in any of their wars, civil or foreign, they resolve to sustain a siege, they are obliged to hastily raise earth fortifications, repair old half-ruined walls, and enlarge the half-choked ditches; then the town is taken before the entrenchments are finished. The Pospolite is not always on horses to guard the country; they only form by order of the Diet, or, in times of great danger, by that of the king.
The ordinary protection of Poland is in the hands of a force which the State is obliged to support. It is composed of two bodies independent of each other under two different generals. The two generals are independent of each other, and though they are nominated by the king, are responsible to the State alone and have supreme authority over their troops. The colonels are absolute masters of their regiments, and it is their affair to get them what sustenance they can, and to pay them; but as they are seldom paid themselves, they ravage the country, and ruin the farmers to satisfy their own rapacity, and that of their soldiers. The Polish lords appear in these armies with more magnificence than in civil life, and their tents are finer than their houses. The cavalry, which makes up two-thirds of the army, is almost entirely composed of noblemen, and is remarkable for the gracefulness of the horses and the richness of the accoutrements. Their men-at-arms especially, who are called either hussars or pancernes, are always attended by several valets, who lead their horses, which have ornamented bridles with plates of silver and silver nails, embroidered saddles, saddle-bows and gilt stirrups, sometimes made of massive silver, with saddle-cloth trailing in the fashion of the Turks, whose magnificence the Poles imitate as nearly as possible.
But though the cavalry is so gorgeous the foot are wretched, ill-clad, ill-armed, without uniform clothes or anything regular; at least that is how they were up to 1710. These foot-soldiers, who are like wandering Tartars, bear hunger, cold, fatigue, and all the hardship of war with incredible endurance. The characteristics of the ancient Sarmatæ, their ancestors, can still be seen in the Poles; the same lack of discipline, the same fury in assault, the same readiness to run away and to return to the field, the same mad fury of slaughter when they are victorious. The King of Poland at first consoled himself with the idea that these two armies would fight for him, that the Polish Pospolite would arm at his orders, and that all these forces, united with his Saxon subjects and his Russian allies, would make up a multitude before whom the small Swedish force would not dare to appear. But he saw himself suddenly deprived of this means of succour through the very pains which he had taken to have them all at once. Accustomed in his hereditary dominions to absolute power, he was perhaps too confident that he could govern Poland like Saxony.
The beginning of his reign raised malcontents, his very first acts irritated the party which was opposed to his election, and alienated almost all the rest. The Poles resented the fact that their towns were filled with Saxon garrisons and their frontiers with troops. The nation, far more anxious to maintain their own liberties than to attack their neighbours, did not consider the king’s attack on Sweden and his invasion of Livonia as advantageous to the State. It is difficult to deceive a free nation concerning its interests. The Poles saw that if this war, undertaken against their wishes, was unsuccessful, their country, unprotected on every side, would fall a prey to the King of Sweden, and that if it succeeded they would be subdued by their own king, who as soon as he was master of Livonia as well as Saxony would be able to hem in Poland between these two countries. In the face of this alternative, of either being enslaved by the king whom they had elected, or of having their land ravaged by Charles who was justly enraged, they raised a great outcry against a war which they believed was rather declared against themselves than against Sweden. They regarded the Saxons and the Russians as the instruments of their bondage. And when the King of Sweden had overcome all that opposed him, and was advancing with a victorious army into the heart of Lithuania, they opposed the King violently, and with the more freedom because they were in misery.
Lithuania was then divided into two parties, that of the Princess Sapieha, and that of Oginski. These two factions had begun by private quarrels, and degenerated into civil war. The King of Sweden was on the side of the Princess Sapieha; and Oginski, ill supported by the Saxons, found his party almost destroyed. The Lithuanian army, which these troubles and lack of money was reducing to a small number, was partly dispersed by the conqueror. The few who sided with the King of Poland were small bodies of wandering troops, who lived by spoil. So that Augustus found nothing in Lithuania but the weakness of his own party, the hate of his subjects, and a foreign army led by an offended, victorious and implacable king. There was certainly an army in Poland, but instead of 38,000 men, the number prescribed by law, there were not 18,000. Then it was not only ill-armed and ill-paid, but the generals were undecided on any course of action. The King’s best course was to command the nobility to follow him; but he dare not run the risk of a refusal, which would increase his weakness by disclosing it.
In this state of trouble and uncertainty, all the counts and dukes demanded a Parliament of the King, just as in England, in times of crisis, the different bodies of the State present addresses to the King beseeching him to call a Parliament. Augustus was more in need of an army than of a Parliament where the actions of kings are criticized. But he was forced to call one, that he might not provoke the nation irretrievably. A Diet was therefore summoned to meet at Warsaw, on the 2nd of December, 1701. He soon saw that Charles XII had as much influence in the Assembly as he had himself. The party of the Sapieha, the Lubomirski, and their friends, Count Leczinski, treasurer of the crown, who owed his fortune to King Augustus, and above all the partisans of the Sobieski, were all secretly for the King of Sweden. The most influential of them, and the most dangerous enemy that the King of Poland had, was Cardinal Radjouski, archbishop of Gnesna, primate of the kingdom and president of the Diet; his conduct was full of duplicity and artifice, and he was entirely dominated by an ambitious woman whom the Swedes called Madame la Cardinale, and who never ceased to urge him to intrigue and faction. King John Sobieski, Augustus’s predecessor, had first made him archbishop of Varmia and vice-chancellor of the kingdom. By favour of the same Prince, the Bishop got a Cardinal’s hat; this dignity soon opened his way to the primacy, and thus uniting in his person all that impresses people, he was able to undertake great enterprises with impunity.
On the death of John he exerted his interest to place Jacques Sobieski on the throne; but the great hate they bore the father, great as he was, led to the rejection of the son. Then the Cardinal-Primate united with the Abbé Polignac, ambassador from France, to give the crown to the Prince of Conti, who actually was elected. But the money and the troops of the Saxons got the better of him. At last he allowed himself to be drawn into the party which crowned the Elector of Saxony, and waited impatiently for a chance of sowing dissension between the nation and the new king. The victories of Charles XII, protector of Prince James Sobiesky, the civil war in Lithuania, the general dissatisfaction of all his people with King Augustus, made the Cardinal-Primate hope that the time had come when he might send Augustus back into Saxony, and open the way to the throne for Prince John. This Prince, who had formerly been the innocent object of the Poles’ hatred, was beginning to be their idol, in proportion as King Augustus lost their favour; but he dare not even conceive such a revolution, of which the Cardinal had insensibly laid the foundations.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.