On January 29, Charles struck at Menshikov. As the Prince was finishing dinner in Oposhnya on the Vorskla, there was a sudden alarm and Charles burst in on him with five cavalry regiments. It was the kind of action which the King loved, a repeat of the dashing sortie at the Grodno bridge the year before. Charles, sword in hand, was riding with the Drabants as they attacked. Menshikov himself escaped, but his seven dragoon regiments were chased out of town and pursued until the Swedes were finally stopped by deep snow. When Charles gave the order to withdraw, he had inflicted 400 casualties at the cost of only two men killed.
Throughout this offensive, Charles ravaged and destroyed. He was applying the tactics which Peter had taught him: to shield his army by laying down a belt of devastation through which enemy penetration would be painful and difficult. By mid-February, Charles had turned southeast toward Kharkov, and on the 13th he reached Kolomak on a small river of the same name. This was the most easterly point, the deepest penetration, of the Swedish invasion of Russia. Just then, however, Charles' month-long offensive was halted by a new factor: another great turn in the Russian weather. The intense cold suddenly gave way to sweeping thaw. Crashing thunderstorms and a torrential downpour were followed by a rapid melting of masses of snow. Rivers and streams overflowed, the Swedish soldiers sank in the mud, and water and melted snow poured in over their boot tops. Further military operations were paralyzed, and Charles had no choice but to order a withdrawal. With great effort, artillery and wagons were dragged through the mire. On the 19th, the Swedes were back at Oposhnya on the Vorskla. By the middle of March, the thaw was over and the ground hard and passable again. Taking advantage of the moment, the Swedes with all their baggage and most of their Cossack allies moved even farther south to new positions between the Pysol and the Vorskla, both tributaries of the Dnieper. There, the regiments were strung out along a forty-mile north-south line along the west bank of the Vorskla. Near die southern end of this line lay the town of Poltava, still strongly held by a Russian garrison. In this freshly occupied, relatively untouched region, the Swedish army waited through the rest of March and April. Behind them to the north, the land of milk and honey was now a ruined earth of plundered towns and burned villages.
Charles was able to inspect and assess the damage inflicted on the army during the winter. The situation was alarming. Frostbite, fever and battle casualties had taken a heavy toll, shoes and boots were worn through, uniforms were frayed and ragged. There was enough to eat, but the entire Swedish artillery now consisted of only thirty-four cannon, and the powder was wet and deteriorated. "The campaign is so difficult and our condition so pitiful," Count Piper wrote to his wife, "that such great misery cannot be described and is beyond belief." A little later, he wrote, "The army is in an indescribably pitiful state."
Charles, however, seemed determined not to notice. On April 11, he wrote to Stanislaus, "I and the army are in very good condition. The enemy has been beaten and put to flight in all the engagements." His determination to remain positive, to stiffen morale and encourage optimism is illustrated by a meeting with a wounded young officer, Ensign Gustav Piper of the Guards. Piper had resisted the surgeon's desire to amputate both his legs, but had nevertheless lost some toes and both heels. Crippled and unable to walk, he was traveling in one of the baggage wagons when the King came up.
I saw His Majesty King Charles XII a great way off, with a suite of some fifty horsemen, riding along a column of wagons; and since I lay unclothed in nought but a white undershirt, bedded in an ammunition wagon with half the lid open to shade me from the sun and admit fresh air, I thought it not decent to see the King in such a posture. Therefore, I turned about with by back to the opening and feigned sleep. But His Majesty came straight forward along the line of wagons, he came at last to mine and inquired who I was. The colonel replied, "This is the unfortunate Ensign Piper of the Guards, whose feet were frostbitten." His Majesty then rode up close beside the wagon, inquiring of the groom, "Is he asleep?" The groom answered, "I don't know. He was awake but now." And the King staying beside the wagon, I thought it not fitting to keep my back to him and so turned. He asked me, "How is it with you?" I replied, "Ill enough. Your Majesty, for I cannot stand upon either foot." His Majesty asked, "Have you lost part of your feet?" I told him that my heels and toes were gone, and to this he said, "A trifle. A trifle," and resting his own leg upon the pommel of his saddle, he pointed to half the sole, saying, "I have seen men who lost this much of their foot and when they had stuffed their boot [to support the missing part], they walked as well as before." Turning then to the colonel, His Majesty asked, "What does the surgeon say?" The colonel answered, "He believes he may do something for the feet." His Majesty said: "Perhaps he will run again?" The colonel replied, "He may thank his God if he can so much as walk; he must not think of running." And as His Majesty rode away, he said to the colonel, who afterward told me, "He is to be pitied, for he is so young."
Charles himself was then twenty-six.
The declining state of the Swedish army and its exposed position on the steppe led Count Piper and Charles' officers to a single urgent conclusion: The King must withdraw from the Ukraine, retreat across the Dnieper in the direction of Poland, seeking reinforcement from the armies of Stanislaus and Krassow in Poland. Thus augmented, he might renew his invasion of Russia, although many wondered whether further pursuit of the elusive and dangerous Tsar would ever bring the decisive, overwhelming triumph to which the King obsessively committed himself.
Charles flatly refused to give up his campaign and to retreat, saying that a withdrawal would look like a flight and only make Peter bolder. Instead, he told his dismayed senior advisors that he intended to remain where he was and press on in his duel with the Tsar. He admitted that, in its diminished state, his Swedish army alone, even with Mazeppa's men, was now too small to reach Moscow unaided. Accordingly, while holding his advanced position, he would seek reinforcements. Already in December, he had ordered Krassow in Poland to join with Stanislaus' Polish royal army, and to march from Poland to Kiev and then eastward to unite with the main army. Further, he hoped to recruit additional allies among the Cossacks of the Ukraine. Mazeppa had assured him that many of these people would willingly join the Swedish King once his army came near enough to offer them protection from the Tsar's retribution. Finally, the grandest dream of alclass="underline" Charles hoped to persuade the Crimean Tatars and perhaps their overlords, the Ottoman Turks, to break the armistice signed in 1700 and join with him in a mighty coalition. With himself as its commander, and with his Swedish veterans as its steely core, a vast allied army would march irresistably on Moscow from the south. Then, with the King in the Kremlin, Russia would be carved up and each of the invading parties—Swedes, Cossacks, Tatars and Turks—would take that slice which it found most desirable. But none of this was possible, Charles insisted, unless the army remained where it was to provide the nucleus and launching point for this next phase of his great enterprise.