The futility of the effort was compounded by a cruel fate which awaited the army at Gadyach. The Swedes struggled forward, arriving at evening, hoping to reach shelter and warmth. But they found that the only entrance to the town was a single, narrow gate, which soon was jammed and blocked by a mass of men, horses and wagons. Most of the Swedes had to spend one night, and some two or three nights, camped outside the town in the open air. The suffering was extreme. Sentries froze to death at their posts. Frostbite furtively stole noses, ears, fingers and toes. Sledgeloads of frostbitten men and long lines of wagons, some of whose passengers were already dead, crawled slowly through the narrow gate into the town. "The cold was beyond description, some hundred men of the regiment being injured by the freezing away of their private parts or by loss of feet, hands, noses, besides ninety men who froze to death," wrote a young Swedish officer who participated. "With my own eyes, I beheld dragoons and cavalrymen sitting upon their horses stone-dead with their reins in their hands in so tight a grip that they could not be loosened until the fingers were cut off."
Inside the town, nearly every house became a hospital. The patients were crowded onto benches near a fire or laid side by side on the foor covered by a layer of straw. Amid the stench of gangrene, the surgeons worked, crudely lopping off frozen limbs, adding to the piles of amputated fingers, hands and other parts accumulating on the floor. The carnage inflicted on the Swedish army during the nights among the snowdrifts under the open sky was more terrible than any which might have come from the battle Charles had sought. Over 3,000 Swedes froze to death, and few escaped being maimed in some way by frostbite. Out of ignorance, most refused to rub their frozen extremities with snow in the manner of the Cossacks. Charles himself was caught by frostbite on the nose and cheeks and his face began to turn white, but he quickly followed Mazeppa's advice and restored himself by rubbing his face with snow.
The cold reached its peak at Christmas, normally the most festive time in the Swedish church calendar. During these days, Charles rode from regiment to regiment inspecting the men crowded twenty and thirty into small cabins. All church services and sermons, including one on Christmas Day itself, were canceled to avoid calling the men out into the open. Instead, simple morning and evening prayer services for each group were led by an ordinary soldier. Two days after Christmas, the cold was at its worst. The third day, it was a little warmer, and by December 30 the men began to move outside again. Charles consoled himself with the assumption that if the winter had been hard on his own men, it must have been equally hard on the Russians. In fact, although Peter's troops had also suffered, they were in general more warmly clothed and their losses were comparatively lighter.
Astonishingly, despite the widespread suffering and partial destruction of his army, Charles could not suppress the impulse to attack which had allowed the army to be lured to Gadyach in the first place. "Although Earth, Sky, and Air were now against us," exclaimed the young Prince Max of Wurttemberg, "the king's designs had to be accomplished." The loss of Romny to Hallart grated on him, and he wished to regain the initiative. On top of a hill only eight miles from Gadyach there was a small, fortified Cossack village called Veprik. Charles disliked having a Russian position so close, and decided to take it. But Veprik had been strongly garrisoned by Peter with 1,100 Russians and several hundred loyal Cossacks, the whole commanded by an English officer of Peter's army. On taking command, this energetic officer had raised the level of the village walls by piling baskets filled with earth on top of them. These earth ramparts had then been made even more difficult to climb by pouring water over the surface, which, when the temperature plunged, made them palisades of solid ice. The village gates were blocked in similar fashion with cartloads of dung covered with a layer of water. Thus ingeniously prepared, the English officer was undismayed when Charles arrived on January 7 and demanded his immediate surrender. When the King threatened to hang the Englishman and all his garrison from the walls, the commander calmly refused and, instead, prepared his men to receive an assault. Knowing that the Swedish officers would be out in front leading their men up his ice-covered ramparts, he ordered his soldiers to aim especially at the Swedes who came first.
Charles' assault force consisted of six of his depleted infantry battalions and two dragoon regiments, a total of 3,000 men for what seemed a simple operation. He would sweep the walls clear of defenders with artillery, and then three columns of infantry would storm over the walls and into the town. The attack was begun with great resolution by the Swedish veterans. Under the roar of cannon, the three assault columns approached the walls carrying ladders. But the artillery failed. The guns were too few and the fire too sparse. The defenders were able to maintain their places on the walls and shoot down many of the men carrying the ladders before they could be put in place. When the remaining ladders were in position and the infantry began to mount them, the walls were found to be too slippery and the ladders too short. Cossack and Russian marksmen poked their barrels over the top, shooting first, as instructed, at the Swedish officers. Other Russians threw logs, boiling water and even hot porridge down on the assailants.
Although Swedish bodies were piling up at the foot of Veprik's ice ramparts, Charles refused to admit that he could be held off by such a "hovel." Once again, the attack was launched, and again it was beaten off with heavy casualties. Rehnskjold, who had been in the middle of the action, was hit by splinters from an exploding grenade and received a wound in the chest from which he never completely recovered. Still the fort was holding out when darkness forced the Swedes to abandon the attack. Luckily for Charles, the commander of the garrison did not know how heavily the Swedes had suffered and, fearing that his men could not withstand a third assault, sent a messenger after dark to arrange a surrender on honorable terms. Charles agreed, and the garrison marched out, surrendering 1,500 men and four cannon. But Charles' losses had been severe. In two hours on a short winter afternoon, 400 Swedes had died and 800 had been wounded— more than a third of the attacking force and a serious drain on the dwindling strength of the Swedish army. The town was taken, but no major advantage had been gained.
From mid-January to mid-February, the Swedish army once again was on the move. Charles was mounting a limited offensive, moving generally eastward across the frozen streams and untrodden snows. Peter watched uneasily; Kharkov, the major city of the eastern Ukraine, was less than a hundred miles from the Swedish vanguard. Worse from the Tsar's point of view, the King might be marching toward the precious dockyards at Voronezh on the Don. To protect this place on which so much effort had been lavished was worth any sacrifice, even a major battle. Accordingly, as the Swedes began to lap around his southern flank, Sheremetev, with the main Russian army, began shifting southward. His course lay parallel to and west of the Swedes, constantly interposing him between the invader and the shipyards. Meanwhile, Menshikov and the bulk of the Russian horsemen, both cavalry and dragoons, slipped south of the Swedish advance, screening Charles from the Vorskla and standing ready to oppose any Swedish crossing of the river.