Peter the Great

Although the wound must have been excruciatingly painful, the King continued his tour of inspection as if nothing had happened. It was not until eleven a.m., almost three hours after being hit, that he returned to his headquarters and prepared to dismount. By this time, the officers and men near him had noticed his extreme pallor and the blood dripping from his torn left boot. Charles tried to dismount but the movement caused such agony that he fainted.
By then, the foot had swollen so much that the boot had to be cut off. The surgeons examining him found that the ball, which had come out of the foot, was resting in the King’s stocking near his big toe. Several bones had been crushed and there were splinters in the wound. The doctors hesitated to make the deep incision necessary to remove the splinters, but Charles, coming out of his faint, was adamant. “Come! Come! Slash away! Slash away!” he said and, grasping his own leg, held his foot up to the knife. Throughout the operation, he watched, stubbornly suppressing all signs of pain. Indeed, when the surgeon approached the lips of the wound, swollen, inflamed and sensitive, and shrank from cutting them away, Charles took the scissors himself and coolly removed the necessary flesh.

On June 4, Peter arrived and while his habit had been to appoint one of his generals as commander-in-chief and to take only subordinate rank himself, he now assumed supreme command.

Peter’s reaction to Augustus’ dethronement and the election and coronation of Stanislaus had been to immediately crown his own court fool as King of Sweden, but he knew that the events in Poland were deadly serious for Russia.

“Less servility, more zeal in service and more loyalty to me and to the state—this is the respect which should be paid to the tsar.”

Carriage, horseback, sled, river barge and boat—these were the means by which Peter traveled across Russia. “He has,” wrote Perry, “traveled twenty times more than ever any prince in the world did before him.”

After Peter, a succession of empresses and emperors would transform the early settlement of logs and mud into a dazzling city, its architecture more European than Russian, its culture and thought a blend of Russia and the West. A long line of majestic palaces and public buildings, yellow, light blue, pale green and red, would rise along the three-mile granite quay which fronted the south bank of the Neva. With its merging of wind and water and cloud, its 150 arching bridges linking the nineteen islands, its golden spires and domes, its granite columns and marble obelisks, St. Petersburg would be called the Babylon of the Snows and the Venice of the North. It would become a fountainhead of Russian literature, music and art, the home of Pushkin, Gogol and Dostoevsky, of Borodin, Mussorgsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov, of Petipa, Diaghilev, Pavlova and Nijinsky. For two centuries, the city would also be the stage on which the political destinies of Russia were enacted as Russia’s sovereigns struggled to rule the empire from the city Peter had created. And in this city was played the final act of the drama in which Peter’s dynasty was overthrown. Even the name of the city would change as the new regime, seeking to honor its founder, decided to give Lenin “the best we had.” The new name, however, still sticks in the throats of many of the city’s citizens. To them, it remains simply “Peter.”

Peter was right. The Swedes did return—but again and again they were beaten off. Through the centuries, none of the conquerors who subsequently entered Russia with great armies—Charles XII, Napoleon, Hitler—was able to capture Peter’s Baltic port, although Nazi armies besieged the city for 900 days in World War II. From the day that Peter the Great first set foot on the mouth of the Neva, the land and the city which arose there have always remained Russian.

Although Charles’ body was frail, his boyhood was spent in rough, masculine activity. When he was only four, the people of Stockholm became accustomed to seeing his small figure in the saddle, riding behind his father at military reviews. At six, he was taken out of the care of women and installed in his own apartment with male tutors and servants. At seven he shot a fox, at eight he killed three deer in one day, at ten he killed his first wolf and at eleven his first bear.

Louis himself paid credit to his servant: “A town defended by Vauban is a town impregnable; a town besieged by Vauban is a town taken.”*

A long-vanished aspect of those civilized wars was the issuance of passports to prominent officers to travel through hostile territory on the shortest routes for winter leave.