In this pre-invasion period of tentative peace offers by Peter and rejections by Charles, one specific and irreconcilable difference between them became clear to alclass="underline" St. Petersburg. Peter would give up anything to keep the site which gave him access to the sea. Charles would give up nothing without first coming to grips with the Russian army. Therefore, on behalf of St. Petersburg—still scarcely more than a collection of log houses, an earth-walled fortress and a primitive shipyard—the war continued.
In fact, negotiation made no sense to Charles. At the pinnacle of success, with Europe paying court at his door, with a superbly trained, victorious army ready for action, with a grand strategy faithfully adhered to and successfully pursued up to this point, why should he be willing to cede Swedish territory to an enemy? It would be dishonorable and humiliating for him to give up provinces still formally Swedish by solemn treaty between his Grandfather, Charles X, and Tsar Alexis—territories now temporarily occupied, as it were, behind the back of the Swedish King and army. Besides, a Russian campaign offered Charles the kind of military operation he dreamed of. Through all his years in Poland, he had been caught in the fluctuating tides of European politics. Now, with a clean stroke of the sword, he would decide everything. And if the risks of marching an army a thousand miles into Russia were great, so were the possible rewards when a King of Sweden stood in the Kremlin and dictated a peace with Russia which would last for generations. And perhaps the risks were not so great. Among Swedes and West Europeans in general, opinion of the Russians as warriors remained low. The effect of Narva had sunk deep, and none of Peter's subsequent successes in the Baltic had erased the impression that the Russians were an unruly mob which could not fight a disciplined Western army.
Finally, there was the Messianic side of Charles' character. In Charles' view, Peter must be punished as Augustus had been punished: The Tsar must step down from the Russian throne. To Stanislaus, who was urging peace because of the misery of the people of Poland, Charles said, "The Tsar is not yet humiliated enough to accept the conditions of peace which I intend to prescribe." Later, he again rebuffed Stanislaus by saying, "Poland will never have quiet as long as she has for a neighbor this unjust Tsar who begins a war without any good cause for it. It will be needful first for me to march thither and depose him also." Charles went on to talk of restoring the old regime in Moscow, canceling the new reforms and, above all, abolishing the new army. "The power of Muscovy which has arisen so high thanks to the introduction of foreign military discipline must be broken and destroyed," the King declared. Charles looked forward to this change, and as he was leaving on his march to Moscow, he said cheerfully to Stanislaus, "I hope Prince Sobieski will always remain faithful to us. Does Your Majesty not think that he would make an excellent Tsar of Russia?"
Charles knew from the beginning that a Russian campaign would not be easy. In meant traversing vast expanses of rolling plain, penetrating miles of deep forest and crossing a series of wide rivers. Indeed, Moscow and the heart of Russia seemed to be defended by nature. One after another, the great north-south river obstacles would have to be crossed: the Vistula, the Neman, the Dnieper, the Berezina. Working from maps of Poland and from a new map of Russia given to Charles as a present by Augustus, Charles and his advisors plotted their march, although the actual route was so hidden in secrecy that even Gyllenkrook, Charles' Quartermaster General in charge of the maps, was not sure which one had been chosen.
The first possibility—one which most of the officers at Swedish headquarters in Saxony assumed the King would adopt—was to march to the Baltic to cleanse these former Swedish provinces of their Russian occupiers. Such a campaign would expiate the insult of their loss, seize the new city and port which Peter was building and drive the Russians back from the sea—a powerful blow at Peter, whose passion for salt water and St. Petersburg were well known. The military advantage of such a great sweep up the Baltic coast was that Charles would be advancing with the sea close to his left flank, providing his army with easy access to sea-borne supply and reinforcement from Sweden itself. In addition, the large army he was assembling would be further augmented by forces already stationed in those Baltic regions: almost 12,000 men under Lewenhaupt at Riga and 14,000 under Lybecker in Finland already poised for a blow at St. Petersburg. But there were negative aspects to a Baltic offensive. These Swedish provinces already had suffered terribly from seven years of war. The farms were burned, the fields in weeds, the towns almost depopulated by war and sickness. If these exhausted provinces once again became a battlefield, nothing would be left. More important than his feelings of compassion, Charles also realized that even if such a campaign were wholly successful, even with the entire coast recaptured and the flag of Sweden floating over the Peter and Paul Fortress he would not have achieved a decisive victory. Peter still would be Tsar in Moscow. Russian power would be driven back, but only temporarily. Sooner or later, this vigorous Tsar would reach for the sea again.
Thus, the march to the Baltic was rejected for something bolder: a strike directly at Moscow, Russia's heart. Charles had concluded that only by a deep thrust which could place him personally inside the Kremlin could he achieve a lasting peace for Sweden.
The Russians, of course, were not to be allowed to know this. To encourage the Tsar to believe that the objective was the Baltic, important subsidiary operations in that area were planned. Once Charles had begun to march eastward directly across Poland, and the Russians had begun to shift troops from the Baltic coast to Poland and Lithuania, the Swedish armies in the Baltic would take the offensive; the Finnish army under Lybecker would drive down the Karelian Isthmus toward Schlusselburg, the Neva and St.
Petersburg. Then, as the thrust of the main Swedish army drew Russian troops away from the force opposing Lewenhaupt near Riga, Charles would use those troops as the escort for a vast supply convoy which would move south from Riga to rendezvous with and resupply the main army for the last stage of its march to the Russian capital.
Meanwhile, in all those towns and villages of Saxony where Swedish regiments were stationed, military preparations were moving forward. Squads and platoons were mustered from the houses and barns where they had spent their idle months. Thousands of new recruits flocked to join the ranks, many of them German Protestants. Silesian Protestants, anxious to serve a monarch who supported their cause against Catholic domination, clustered so quickly about the recruiting booths that Swedish sergeants had only to pick and choose the best.
Augmented by these new volunteers, the army which on its entry into Saxony had numbered 19,000 had now risen to more than 32,000. In addition, 9,000 fresh recruits from Sweden were drilling in Swedish Pomerania, preparing to join the main army after it had entered Poland. There, the overall strength of Charles' army would reach 41,700 men, including 17,200 infantrymen, 8,500 cavalrymen and 16,000 dragoons. Many of the dragoons were newly recruited, although not necessarily experienced, Germans; as dragoons, they were in effect mounted infantrymen, prepared to fight either on foot or on horseback as circumstances dictated. Finally, there were the surgeons, chaplains, officers' servants, civil officials. Not part of the army proper and thus not counted were the hundreds of civilian wagoners, locally hired to drive cartloads of supplies and ammunition over specific sections of the road.