Margit Sandemo - The Ice People 15 - The East Wind

“The boy is soft!” Søren Grip thundered. “What kind of fancies are these? Leading a soldier’s life is one of the most honourable things you can do, and it has been one of the great disappointments of my life that I never did it. Anyway ... read on!”

Christiana’s voice was even more strained as she continued:

Today His Majesty was also injured, in his foot. Disciplined as he is, he did not let anyone know about it and went on giving orders until you could see the blood seeping through his boot and his face was ashen. He has now been forced to take to his bed.

It has been a hard journey to Ukraine, where we are now. I have seen men cutting away the frostbite in their feet and I have watched entire battalions drowning in the swamps. General Lewenhaupt, who was to relieve us with troops from Livonia and Courland, set out from the Baltic coast with eleven thousand men. They encountered the Russians all alone and when they finally reached us there were only six thousand of them left and they had lost all their courage.

Everyone is suffering from consumption, but strangely I have pulled through. I don’t understand why.

The Ice People, Christiana thought. The blessed blood of the Ice People!

Many of the men have managed to contract other nasty diseases. While we were in our winter quarters they went to the local inns and frolicked with diseased girls – they are now so weak that many of them are left to die on the road.

Vendel shouldn’t know about things like the French disease, Christiana lamented.

My daily work consists of taking care of my and Mr Corfitz’s horses; they have to be ready at any moment. As well as that, I have to see to Mr Corfitz’s uniform and boots, clean his weapons and not least attend to his injuries, fetch and carry for him, run errands and be his messenger. Believe me, it’s enough work to fill a day!

But, of course, we have mostly been marching. We have taken part in several big battles and small encounters with Cossacks, Tatars, Poles and of course, Russians. Our greatest and most honourable engagement was at Holowczyn, where we had a great victory over the Russians. But please forgive me, I would rather not write about the battles.

“Damned coward!” Søren Grip snorted. “It would have been fun to hear about how they chastised the Russians! That cowardice of his is something he’s inherited from you. He’s a real mummy’s boy!”

Christiana made no comment. She continued to read:

You have to understand that I have such awful memories of all of this that just thinking about it makes my head spin and my heart ache so that I feel I can’t breathe. My best friend, a boy from the Småland cavalry, was killed at the battle of Holowczyn.

“Oh, no!” Christina screeched like a bird.

“Oh, stop whining! The boy is all of fifteen years old now. That’s a good age for a boy who wants a future career as an officer.”

It was with great difficulty that she read the rest of the letter.

We’ve lost so many battles that we can’t afford to lose a single man now. But I have to admit that we have all grown tired and lost heart. Some of the men are suffering from diseases because we have to settle for whatever food we get and more often than not getting slaughterhouse waste is pure luxury for us. It’s not uncommon for us to get nothing but contaminated water for several days in a row, water that we have to pick the dirt out of.

Oh, Vendel, Christiana thought, how could your father do this to you?

We have besieged Poltava. And we all know that this will be a decisive battle for us, it will be the ultimate test for our forces. Tsar Peter has finally managed to assemble all his troops ready to meet us.

Pray for us, Mum and Dad!

Mum, please be sure to give little Måns, the farm manager’s son, my bow and arrow! He always wanted it and I’ve outgrown that sort of thing now. And be sure to take good care of the horses and the dog for me! And that oak tree I planted, has it survived? Has it started to grow?

My thoughts are always with you and our safe, cosy house in Andrarum.

God bless you, my dear ones!

Your devoted son,

Vendel

That was the last they heard from him.

Of course, they later learned of the crushing defeat at Poltava, which was partly due to the fact that King Karl had been laid up with a fever brought on by his injured foot, but probably first and foremost a result of the worn-out and dejected state of the troops.

They also heard the alarming news that after the defeat Karl XII had headed, not home, but southeast towards Turkey, and that the Swedish soldiers who followed him consisted of a mere thousand men. The rest were Cossacks who had fought on the Swedish side. But there was no news of what happened to the surviving troops under Karl XII. And before the battle the Swedish army had consisted of twelve thousand men!

Lave Beck and Søren Grip died of the plague without knowing the fate of their sons. They didn’t hear another thing from young Vendel or his master Corfitz Beck, only silence.

Chapter 2

Perhaps it is wrong to say that the Swedes capitulated at Poltava, even though that was where the battle was fought.

Karl XII’s officers managed to convince the fever-stricken king that they needed to retreat southwards in order not to fall into the hands of the Russians. He finally agreed to go along with the plan, despite his muddled and lethargic state.

But when the army followed suit, they accidentally went too far down the Vorskla River, past the ford, and ended up in a pocket by Perevolochna, at the confluence of the two raging rivers Vorskla and Dnieper. And that was where the Russians closed in on them.

This was when their war-weariness became a decisive factor. The long years of drudgery and setbacks had finally managed to extinguish their fighting spirit. And they no longer had a king to rouse them and cheer them on – he had long since crossed the river and been transported southwards, ignorant of the dilemma his army was facing. It would have been easy enough for them to fight their way out had they known the true size and efficiency of the Russian forces. The army that captured them was equally as fatigued and starved as they were, and vastly inferior to them in terms of numbers.

True, there were some Swedish regiments willing to continue the fight, but they weren’t enough. It was General Lewenhaupt who gave orders to cease fire, to save the lives of his men. By the time he and the other officers saw just how depleted the Russian Army was, it was too late. But when the Russians, thinking they had captured four or five thousand men, saw the actual size of the force that had fallen into their hands, they were flabbergasted. They had managed to capture sixteen thousand men.

Among them were the Zaporozhian Cossacks, who had risen up against the tsar and gone over to the Swedish side. They were completely convinced that Ukraine belonged to them. These Cossacks were now given horrific punishments. They were broken on the wheel and the rack, and hung upside down with their heads dangling to die in the burning sun.

The Swedes, on the other hand, were marched away from the area. The enormous army was herded like animals across the steppes of Ukraine to Moscow, a distance of seven hundred kilometres, which they travelled on foot. It was a journey that would last six months and no one knows exactly how many Swedish soldiers died along the way.

But the army was heading for Moscow. For Tsar Peter the Great, the Russian triumph was tremendous.

Captain Corfitz Beck and his troops were also subjected to the crushing death march. Time and again, the captain was taken by surprise at his young aide’s stamina and mental strength. But it wasn’t just his hardy vitality that was impressive, it was also the warm-heartedness he displayed when consoling the dying during their last moments. Vendel Grip was always there whenever a man was about to pass away; he always had words of comfort to share that only the dying could hear; he wrote down numerous messages to be sent back to Sweden, the final greetings of the dying prisoners to their mothers, wives and children at home. At first, the guards would take out their whips, but a mere glance from Vendel was enough to calm them down: there was something in his gaze that made them let the man be.