Defense of Poltava
The Swedish army consisted of 17,000 persons and had only 6 cannons, because the larger part of their
artillery perished in battle at Lesnaya. In addition, there was lack of shells because they were left in Baturyn. The army suffered from the severe winter and hopelessness of the general situation. The Swedish glorious army had no reserves behind itself, it was cut from its motherland, stood on the foreign territory surrounded by the hostile local population.
In such conditions it was only a miracle that could rescue the Swedes, and they believed in that miracle, in the happy star of their king. Unfortunately, the lighthearted and careless Karl ХІІ went to examine outposts a few days prior to the fight and his foot was heavily injured.
The troops of the hetman didn’t directly participate in the Poltava battle. They guarded the Swedish line, partly took part in the siege of Poltava, which did not allow the Muscovite army to encircle the army of Karl XII or the garrison of Poltava to carry out any outing against the Swedes.
The Swedish army found oneself between two fires: Poltava from the one side and the large Muscovite army with the other one. Karl ХІІ hoped to begin the fight on June, 29, but he received a message that Peter I would launch an offensive on June, 28. Then he decided to begin the fight on June, 27 to hand in the command to general Renskold.
The king was took to the battle-field on his stretcher. Troops of Mazepa and Cossacks being near the village of Pushkarivka, from the one hand, did not enable the Poltava garrison to join the Muscovite army in the field, and from the other hand, protected the Swedish army from the roundabout maneuver of the enemy troops.
At dawn on June, 27 Swedes launched an offensive to the earthen fortifications but notwithstanding their bravery shown couldn’t take them. Karl ХІІ decided to go round these fortifications, and failed again. Losses were very large and it compelled Swedes to retreat to the Budyshcha forest in order to rearrange. At nine in the morning the decisive fight started the Swedish army was outnumbered by the enemy’s troops in.
The Russian artillery welcomed the Swedes with a terrible hail of cannonballs, which the Swedes couldn’t return fire and plunged into a hand-to-hand fight. But they had a new failure: a cannonball burst near Karl ХІІ and broke his stretcher. He compelled himself to sit down astride, but the horse was killed under him. King fell down on earth and being unconscious was taken away from the combat. It caused panic among the Swedes. The Muscovite army forced them with a frightful onslaught and drumfire of artillery to retreat by leaving their camp and lots of prisoners of war.
To cross Dniepr the Swedes found a ferry somewhere at the Vorskla riverside and drove him to Perevolochna crossing. The Swedish soldiers began to embark that ferry and go across to the other bank of Dniepr. The others broke the camp carts for the same purpose, threw boards in the river and tried to cross the river by lying on them. Someone flung wheels into Dniepr and swam across by the wheels.
Not being able to float well and to manage the stream of river waves, the Swedish soldiers were highly threatened to drown, but the Zaporozhian Cossacks assisted them in everything very much. Some Zaporozhians fearlessly swam across by sitting their horsebacks, and after getting tired they grasped at the mane of the horses and, helping the Swedes in water, drew out them on the far bank of the river. The others made rafts offhand, tied the one end of thin ropes at the every raft, and the second end was griped with the strong teeth and so they swam across Dniepr.
Those Cossacks who did not have time to escape were imprisoned with the Russians and cruelly executed by an order of the tsar. The tsar, being awfully angry with the Cossacks, invented the most sophisticated executions for them: he ordered to break some Cossacks on the wheel; the others who had changed clothes into the Swedish uniforms and therefore survived, were pitilessly pricked with bayonets by order of the tsar; the third ones were ordered to be fettered and deported in the remote places of Siberia. The tsar forgave certain number of ordinary Cossacks who came to the tsar with their confessions. Those were about 15,000 persons by the seventh day of July. Starved, possessed by fear, they had hid in different wildernesses and forests for long after the Poltava victory and came to Peter on the day of his triumph over the enemy, giving themselves up on tsar’s will. The tsar touched by hardship of the poor fellows pardoned them and satisfied him by only depriving them their Cossack rank and ordering to settle them in different Ukrainian villages apart.
