What happened at the Battle of Lesnaya?
On 9 October 1708 a Russian flying corps under Peter the Great attacked the Swedish corps of General Adam Ludwig Lewenhaupt near the village of Lesnaya, in today's Belarus. Lewenhaupt was bringing a huge supply train to Charles XII, who had turned south into Ukraine. After a day of hard fighting the Swedes slipped away by night, abandoned their wagons and guns, and reached the king with about half their men.1
In 1708 Charles XII of Sweden was marching on Moscow. Peter the Great answered with scorched earth, and by the autumn the Swedish main army was short of food. Its supplies and reinforcements were to come from Riga, with General Adam Ludwig Lewenhaupt. On 28 September by today's calendar Charles gave up the direct road to Moscow and turned south into Ukraine, and the gap between the king and his convoy grew.2
A column of thousands of wagons
Gathering the stores took far longer than planned, and the column did not leave Riga until the end of June. John Rickard of HistoryOfWar.org gives it an escort of 12,500 men, 5,000 cavalry and 7,500 infantry. The military historian Gunnar Åselius counts 13,000 soldiers, 4,500 wagons, 1,000 pack horses and 13,000 head of cattle; reviewing the study by Pavel Konovalchuk and Einar Lyth, he reports a column some 83 kilometers long in theory and closer to 150 in practice. The Polish historian Bohdan Korol writes that merchants and camp followers swelled it until some 7,000 to 8,000 wagons trailed the corps, and that on bad roads a single regiment could break the wheels of a hundred wagons in a day.3
Peter saw his chance. He sent a flying corps of dragoons and mounted infantry after Lewenhaupt. Rickard puts it at 6,795 dragoons and 4,830 mounted infantry, 11,625 in all; Korol at 12,941 men before the battle. Åselius notes that the dragoons fought on foot and brought their own horse artillery, which the Swedes did not have. The State Russian Museum, describing a later painting of the battle, gives 12,000 Russians against 16,000 Swedes. On any count this was not a huge army crushing a small one.4
The fight at Lesnaya
The armies met near the village of Lesnaya, by the little Lesnyanka river, on 28 September by the Russian calendar, 29 September by the Swedish one and 9 October by the calendar used today. Korol describes a field about 1.5 kilometers wide and 2 kilometers deep, with the Swedes between the village and the river and the Russians in the woods opposite. Behind the Swedes the only way out toward Propoisk was a light wooden bridge.5
The fighting began around 10 or 11 in the morning. Rickard writes that it was hard and that the Swedes, whose tactics relied on the pike, bayonet and sword, were hampered by having to guard their wagons, while Cossacks plundered the train. In Korol's account the Russian guards, the Preobrazhensky and Semyonovsky regiments, broke the Swedish left early on, and by the decisive phase some 9,000 Swedes faced about 10,000 Russians. In the late afternoon General Bauer's dragoons reached the field and tipped the balance; Bauer himself was shot in the head but survived. Rain set in, powder got wet, and the fighting turned to hand-to-hand combat around the bridge until dark.6
Retreat by firelight
Rickard notes that the Swedes still held the field at nightfall. But Lewenhaupt knew another day would finish his corps. That night, Korol writes, he began to take his men over the bridge, leaving large fires burning by the wagons so that the Russians would think the camp was still held, and abandoning the wounded and about 700 wagons. Over the next day the infantry was put on horses and more of the train was left in the mud. Rickard and Åselius agree that Lewenhaupt lost the supply train and his artillery and reached the king with about half his men. Korol gives the survivors who regrouped near Propoisk as 3,451 infantry and 3,052 cavalry.7
The cost
Losses are given most fully by Korol. He puts Russian losses at 3,967, of whom 1,111 were killed and 2,856 wounded, with the guards regiments hit hardest. Swedish losses were about 6,500 according to Russian historians, or 6,397 according to the Swedish general Petre, who was there: 3,837 killed, at least 877 prisoners and wounded taken, and about 1,600 men who deserted and made their way back to Livonia. The Russians took every Swedish gun and a camp full of ammunition, food, silver and colors. The State Russian Museum describes the captured train as food for three months, artillery and munitions. On the field the victors built a wooden Orthodox church, which stood until the twentieth century.8
The mother of Poltava
Charles XII, short of food already, received not a fresh corps with a full train but the worn remnants of one. Rickard argues that the loss hurt less than it would have nearer Moscow, but points to what may have worried the Swedes most: the Russians had won a formal battle against a Swedish army without greatly outnumbering it. Peter himself called Lesnaya the mother of Poltava. At Poltava on 8 July 1709 by today's calendar the Swedish main army was destroyed; the story is told in our article on Poltava, and the war's first great battle in our article on Narva. The day itself is on 9 October in history.9
