PULTOWA
Russia came into existence as a nation on the day of the victory
of the Muscovite troops under Peter the First over the Swedes and
allies under Charles XII. of Sweden, at Pultowa, A.D. 1709. What
Russia has attained to since that date is known and startling
significant; what she was previous to that date is insignificant.
As Creasy says: “Yet a century and a half (two centuries) have
hardly elapsed since Russia was first recognized as a member of
the drama of modern European history--, previous to the battle of
Pultowa, Russia played no part. Charles V. and his great rival
(Francis I.), our Elizabeth and her adversary Philip of Spain, the
Guises, Sully, Richelieu, Cromwell, De Witt, William of Orange,
and the other leading spirits of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, thought no more about the Muscovite Czar than we now
think about the King of Timbuctoo.”
Sweden lost on that dread day when “fortune fled the royal Swede”,
all that she had toilsomely gained thro’ the slow centuries. At
one blow her fairest provinces were torn from her; and the rival
Russian throne ascended to European prominence over the prostrate
power of Sweden.
Peter the Great even upon the field of victory fully realized that
Pultowa was for him the key to the Baltic. Even amid the carnage
of the slaughter-field where ten thousand men lay dying or dead
and the Vorksla river ran red, his eagle gaze beheld the Russia
resultant from the Treaty of Nystadt. Exultantly he cried out that
“the sun of the morning had fallen from Heaven, and the foundation
of St. Petersburg at length stood firm.”
From dread Pultowa’s day even to the hour, Russia has steadily
advanced by slow, gigantic strides unto a dominating prominence
among the family of nations. The cabinets of Turkey, Austria,
Germany, Italy, France, and England are secretly tho’ effectively
influenced by Russia.
REPUBLIC OR EMPIRE.
Napoleon said that all Europe would ultimately become either
Muscovite or Republican. Which shall it be? The answer as deduced
from present tendencies might be--Republican: but no thoughtful
observer can fail to regard attentively and apprehensively that
sullen Sclavonic dominance extending insidiously and simultaneously
into India, Persia, Mongolia, Turkey, the Balkans, and Central
Europe.
Amalgamation, the mergence of the many into one,
sameness--quiescent and content under a powerful, capable, and
just administration, seem to be and ever to have been the ideal
form of government. The empires of the past--Egyptian, Babylonian,
Persian, Grecian, Roman; the Holy Roman Empire and the Socialistic
commune of the future--all include as fundamental principle this
solidarity. So far, indeed, it has proved a marsh-light leading to
the marsh; but we dream that it will yet lead out of and beyond the
muddy, bloody marsh and ultimately light up millennial realms of
world-wide oneness, goodness, gladness, peace.
CHARLES XII. OF SWEDEN.
When Charles set out on that expedition having for its object the
castigation and possible subjugation of the upstart Tartar hordes
weakly held together by Peter of Russia,--all Europe believed that
Charles would briefly and successfully accomplish that object.
Sweden was then a power for whose alliance and friendly interest
the most powerful monarchs of Europe contended. Louis XIV. of
France sought the aid of Charles in the war then waging between
France and England; and Marlborough, leader of the English forces
in France, went personally to the court of Charles in order to
solicit that monarch’s aid or at least his neutrality in the great
struggle then in progress.
Charles himself was fully confident of victory; and in his
romantic plans drawn up for the future, the overthrow of Peter
formed only an episode. A year, perhaps, would be required for the
full accomplishment of the Russian enterprise; then he, Charles
of Sweden, victor of Moscow and arbiter from the Kremlin, would
hastily return to western Europe and begin preparations on a
gigantic scale for his master-achievement--the dethronement of the
Pope of Rome, and the demolition of the Papacy.
Desire-dream of many; achievement of none: for this magic
Gibraltar elusively endures bearing its age-old scars as brightest
ornamentations. Charles XII. did not, indeed, attack Rome; but did
Pultowa save the Papacy? No: the missiles of the Madman of the
North whether hurled in the real or only in that futile future
plan, would have been equally ineffectual; the magic rock would,
perhaps bear another scar bright shining today as trophy of its
past struggle and victory.
The lesson of history would seem to teach mortals to expect the
unexpected. At Saratoga, at Valmy, at Pultowa, in the Teutoberger
Wald, at Marathon, and at Babylon--the undreamed of, the altogether
unanticipated, unprepared for, both by the combatants themselves
and the world-spectators--took place.
Charles XII., who had set out from Sweden with an army of
eighty-five thousand men, Swedes and allies, escaped from the
shambles of Pultowa only by swimming across a river red with
blood and thus reaching an alien shore weak, wounded, a fugitive,
and comparatively alone. Eighty-five thousand men died for the
gratification of the personal ambition of the Swedish king; and,
by the irony of fate, for the ruination of their native land and
the aggrandizement of Peter the First, subsequently and, perhaps,
consequently Peter the Great, of Russia.
SCLAVONIC VERSUS TEUTONIC.
The battle of Pultowa was the first decisive victory of the
Sclavonic race over the Germanic. Arnold, in his _Lectures on
Modern History_, says that the last chapter of the history
of Europe will narrate the achievements leading to Muscovite
ascendency and the glories of world-dominant Panslavism.
Do nations and races attain only to a certain degree of excellence
and then deteriorate? And is that the plan fatefully fixed for the
planet Earth? Mycenæ, Troy, Philæ, Babylon, Athens make answer in
the affirmative.
A poem, _Christ in the Universe_, by Alice Meynell comes to mind.
In a few master touches the writer describes God’s way of revealing
Himself to us mortals:
“With the ambiguous earth
His dealings have been told us; these abide:
The signal to a maid, the human birth,
The lesson, and the Young Man crucified.”
But do the other planets of our solar system, do the stars, those
countless suns controlling countless planets--know aught of God’s
way of dealing with our Earth? Or can we even in loftiest flight of
thought conceive “in what guise He walked the Pleiades, the Lyre,
the Bear?”
Then the good glad confidence of the soul in touch with God, in
tune with the Infinite, in Te Deum ecstasy of exultation, overflows
in the concluding lines:
“Oh, be prepared, my soul;
To read the unconceivable, to scan
The million forms of God those stars unroll
When in our turn we show to them--a Man.”
They are indeed blessed in whom dwells this abiding confidence,
and for whom at times at least, there is overflow in Te Deum
exaltation. The slaughter-fields of history and rivers rolling
red; the answerless Whys wailing from out the past forlorn as
Pharaoh-ghosts in search of non-existent mummies; the chaos of it
all, from Memphis to modern Cairo; the damnable wrongs, the demon
cruelties, the awful sufferings, the hellish horrors--all sound
sonoral in orchestral harmony when faith and hope and good glad
confidence play dominant and the soul is exultant in God.
DEATH OF CHARLES.
Charles XII. never rallied from the defeat of Pultowa. He did,
indeed, linger for a time in Turkey, striving to enlist the
sympathies of the Sultan in his behalf. And history relates that
at last the Sultan yielded to the importunities of Charles, and
that an army was fitted out for the invasion of Russia: but the
command of the forces was entrusted to the Vizier, not to Charles.
And the story runs that the Russians were completely trapped by the
Turkish troops and Pultowa seemed about to be avenged and the hand
of destiny turned backward; when Catherine, later the wife of Peter
the Great and first Empress of Russia, seeing the hopelessness
of exit from the trap into which the Russians had fallen, went
secretly by night into the tent of the Grand Vizier, and by her
charms, and by her gifts of gold, diamonds, and pearls bribed the
stern old soldier so that he failed to see the following day that
the Russians were secretly stealing away from the trap in which he
had caught them.
Charles withdrew to Sweden and, a war having broken out between
Norway and Sweden, he was killed at the siege of Frederickshall:
but just how he met death is not authoritatively known. He was
found dead in the trenches the night preceding the battle.
Voltaire has sympathetically told the story of Charles XII. of
Sweden. His meteoric career has often been used, as Johnson happily
said, “to point a moral or adorn a tale.” He ranks with Alexander
and Napoleon in personal magnetism, in phenomenal attainment, and
in the ultimate loss and evanishment of all attained. His name and
fame are ever subtly suggestive of--
Dread Pultowa’s day
When fortune left the royal Swede;
Around a slaughtered army lay
No more to combat and to bleed;
The power and fortune of the war
Had passed to the triumphant Czar.
--_Byron._