With the Russians and the Danes effectively out of the war,
Charles planned to descend with the full force of his victorious army
upon the one enemy that remained to him:
Augustus, king of Poland-Lithuania.
(♫ Birth of the People ♫)
Now, you would think that the situation would be looking pretty grim for Poland-Lithuania;
they've just finished getting kicked around,
they're basically out of money and resources,
they're politically fractured,
and their allies have essentially all dropped out of the war.
Most people would back out now --
find a diplomatic solution,
see if they could cut their losses.
But Augustus had a new plan:
"Just keep losing!"
He made a few half-hearted attempts at peace,
figuring that if he didn't really put a lot of effort into it,
he could get right on to losing some more.
So, when Charles XII basically ignored his call for peace,
Augustus gathered his generals and said to them:
"Guys, we really absolutely cannot let the Swedes cross the Düna river
or, hoo boy, are we gonna lose a lot."
*wink wink, nudge nudge*
And, with that, his commanders set out to meet what supporting troops the Russians could give them.
Which, surprisingly, was actually more men than they were fielding themselves.
Proceeding with the plan, the main Polish-Lithuanian commander
managed to deceive himself into thinking that the Swedes were gonna land miles from where they were,
and went personally with the best of his troops
to defend the place where really nobody was going.
All while leaving two non-military men basically in charge of the real army.
Unaware of this, and so undaunted by Augustus's fearsome plan,
Charles XII landed where everybody knew he was going to land all along.
Except for this master of self deception...
Yet still, despite all of this,
the odds for the Polish-Lithuanian forces seemed pretty good.
They outnumbered Charles three-to-one, and they were dug in.
While Charles would have to manage an amphibious landing and assault their entrenched positions.
As dawn just barely broke through the darkness,
the Swedes filled boats with damp straw and set them alight,
sending them sailing towards the shore;
great plumes of smoke obscuring their approach.
The Polish-Lithuanian cannonades(?) fired and the clever floating counter-batteries of the Swedes sang.
Under this bombardment, the troops approached,
and in the first vessel -- against all entireties --
-- sat the Swedish king, Charles the XII.
He landed with his grenadiers.
The Polish-Lithuanian troops fell upon him,
planning to push him back into the waves.
But they faced the best of the Swedish regiments,
lead personally by their king.
The Swedes did not falter.
The Polish-Lithuanian troops fell back,
and the Russians fled in a screaming panic,
many having never fired a shot.
At last, though, the Polish-Lithuanian commander
returned with all the troops he had taken with him,
and the Polish-Lithuwanian forces assailed the Swedes again.
But Swedish reinforcements had now landed,
and they were now much greater in number.
Again, the Poles and the Lithuanians were beaten back.
And, then, a third time, at which point
the Polish-Lithuanians were basically like:
"You know what?
Screw this, let's go home."
Which was a pretty good thing for Charles, because,
having come from ravaged Livonia (?),
he basically started this whole campaign
with no supplies whatsoever.
He did manage to capture plenty after the battle, though,
and was now well on his way to being ready for a good, long fight.
Augustus, realizing now that the Swedes were clearly NOT caving before his plan to "just keep losing!",
went back to the drawing board.
NOW, he had an even better plan.
Now, he would just
keep losing even more.
And so,
while Charles wintered in Wergen(?) throwing snowballs at his officers,
and breaking their windows
so they didn't fall too much in love with comfort,
Augustus prepared for his next near-miss.
This time, he was to get himself trounced in a swamp.
It was a near-run thing for a while;
for a moment, it looked like the Polish-Lithuanian forces
might accidentally prevail.
Augustus was in a good position,
surrounded by woods and boggy terrain.
He outnumbered the Swedish forces
two-to-one, and there was just no way
the Swedes were gonna drag their cannon through that morass.
It was touch-and-go for a bit,
hard fighting for the Swedish forces,
who were, as usual, exhausted from Charles's relentless marches.
So then, Augustus -- nice fellow that he was --
managed to let the Swedes take over his camp
and turn his own artillery on his troops
while they tried to retreat through a marsh.
Yet still, Charles was not cowed by Augustus's mighty strategy
of just keep losing forever.
And so, Augustus refined his plans even further...
He realized now that this approach had been too complex thus far;
too multifaceted.
He would now simplify it,
put it in layman's terms.
His new plan was:
Losing.
Keep doing it.
So Charles rode up to the gates of Krakow
and shouted,
"Open the door!"
And when the guards peeked out to see who this shouting man was,
Charles personally forced the gate
and held it while 300 of his men, who,
not quite prepared for this,
charged through anyway.
And so it was that Charles took the great Polish city of Krakow
with a handful of men armed only with unloaded muskets and canes.
You've got to hand it to Augustus;
that was some solid losing.
But even this did not make Charles quit in disgust.
And so, after being deposed by Charles XII,
who elevated another king in his place,
Augustus spent some time thinking.
Pondering for a while, and furrowing his brow,
he at last came to one resplendent, crystal-clear idea.
He had thought the one sentence that he needed to think:
And that sentence was:
"Cool, now seems like a good time for a civil war."
So Augustus raised his banner against the new king.
But, the civil war began slowly.
Augustus assembled his forces in the duchy of Saxony,
while the Russians ravaged Sweden's Baltic provinces.
Which really had little to do with Poland-Lithuania,
but, you know, good times.
Meanwhile, Charles laid siege to the ancient fortress of Thorn,
where he won surprising praise from the Polish people,
as, when the city fell,
he treated it with remarkable gentleness;
letting captured men return to their families,
even driving a herd of cattle and a flock of sheep into the city so that the starving defenders could eat.
But once things got going, the whole war teetered back and forth,
with Augustus recapturing Warsaw
while Charles was out trying to compel parts of Poland--Lithuania
to support his puppet king.
And then Charles, swooping back in to retake the capital
while Augustus beat a retreat.
But by 1705, the dominoes began to fall.
The Great Poland-Lithuanian Plan,
was to crush the Swedes between the hammer of Augustus' forces marching from the west
and the great Russian anvil to the east.
But Augustus' forces ran into a tiny Swedish contingent outside of Warsaw.
1900 cavalry and just 60 infantry.
The Polish-Lithuanian commander, with his 10,000 men,
was certain of victory.
His forces rushed against this small band of Swedes.
But somehow, by sheer grit,
the Swedish cavalry,
despite being outflanked or almost encircled by the overwhelming number of the enemy,
threw back their attackers.
And then, at the last minute,
the 60 infantrymen emerged from the tall, ryegrass grass where they've been hiding.
The surprise turning the Polish-Lithuanian effort to regroup
into a rout.
Predictably, something similar happened to the Russians in the east.
And soon, the iron was beating up both the hammer and the anvil.
And, for the sake of brevity,
this just keeps happening all over.
Both in open battle and in sieges.
The Polish-Lithuanian forces and the Russian forces just keep getting crushed.
But Augustus made
one more push for Warsaw.
Here, again, he was intercepted by a force half his size.
But this time, superior in cavalry.
His commander tried to hide which of his troops were Russian
by having them turn their uniforms inside-out,
but even this clever ruse did no good.
The Swedish commander realized which part of the line was made up of Russian conscripts
and assaulted it with all of his force,
swinging his cavalry in from the rear and the side.
Meanwhile, the rest of the army was rendered useless by assaults on both flanks,
the Swedish commander copying a page from Hannibal's book
and managing to envelop the enemy forces with his smaller army,
much as Hannibal did at Canae.
Soon, the army was in full retreat.
But with their superior cavalry, the Swedes were able to cut them off,
and the retreat became an unconditional surrender.
No longer able to field an army,
Augustus was forced to sign a humiliating peace,
giving up his kingship,abandoning his alliance with Russia, and acknowledging Charles' puppet king of Poland-Lithuania.
But Augustus is not done yet.
Eventually, he would stumble upon a novel,new, and arguably better idea:
winning.
So, join us next time as the two greatest figures of this period:
Charles XII and Peter the Great, square off in a battle for the destiny of Eastern Europe.
(♫ Song of Gunfire ♫)