Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/329

 Rh dispersal of the main army. This consisted of a mere handful of men, but it was the first, as to composition and quality, in any Slav country. The proportion of foreigners it contained was very large, but in the sixteenth century this was by no means an exceptional case. At the Battle of Dreux (December 19, 1562) Guise had over 12,000 Germans, Swiss, and Spaniards in his army, as against 6,000 Frenchmen, and in his enemy's camp the state of things was similar.

The Poles' weak point, in this and all the succeeding campaigns, was to be their enemy's strong one—artillery. In vain did Batory engage cannon-founders in Germany and even in Italy, and beg the Elector of Saxony to send him siege-guns and ammunition; he never could get enough ordnance together, and his artillerymen, of whom he only had seventy-three in 1580, shrank, in the following year, to twenty.

Taking it altogether, the King must have been a very brave man to face the struggle before him with the resources at his command. For this was no matter of fighting the Battle of Wenden over again, and carrying on deceptive hostilities within the borders of Livonia. In that country, worn out by fifteen years of incessant warfare, the ground crumbled beneath the feet of those who fought for it. It was a struggle between phantom armies for shadowy conquests. There was no possibility of winning any definite future advantage, nor even, in the long-run, of keeping up any campaign at all,in a desert sprinkled with ruins. As early as in 1562, Sigismund-Augustus had arrived at the conclusion that the key of the province must be sought elsewhere, and would only be found by attacking the chief competitor on his own hearthstone at Moscow. He had not succeeded in finding means to enable him to take these bold, offensive measures, but Batory had made up his mind to attempt them; and what he meditated was an invasion, a decisive struggle, a desperate game, in which the stakes were far to exceed the original object of the quarrel. This fight for Livonia was really a battle for the empire of the north-west, in which the hegemony of the Slav nations was to be lost or won.

Now for this enterprise, Poland could only reckon on her own efforts. Sweden had allied herself with her, but solely as far as Livonia was concerned, and within Livonian borders. All Sweden saw in Batory's new plan of campaign was an excuse for keeping herself free. She appealed to the letter of her treaty, and claimed to act independently. When Denmark was sounded, she declined; her relations with Ivan were growing pacific. The Khan offered his support, promised to have his Tartars on the move by the month of August, 1578, and ended by doing nothing at all. And when Batory con-