Page:Works of Voltaire Volume 20.djvu/177

Rh presenting him with another, both the equerry and horse were struck dead upon the spot. Charles fought on foot, surrounded by some of his officers who instantly flocked around him.

Many of them were taken, wounded, or slain, or pushed to a great distance from the king by the crowds that assailed them; so that he was left at last with no more than five attendants. With his own hand he had killed above a dozen of the enemy without receiving a single wound, owing to that surprising good fortune which had hitherto attended him, and upon which he always relied. At length a colonel, named Dardoff, forced his way through the Calmucks, with a single company of his regiment, and arrived soon enough to save the king. The rest of the Swedes put the Tartars to the sword. The army recovered its ranks; Charles mounted his horse and, fatigued as he was, pursued the Russians for two leagues.

The conqueror was still on the great road to the capital of Muscovy. The distance from Smolensk, near which the battle was fought, to Moscow, is about a hundred French leagues; and the army began to be in want of provisions. The officers earnestly entreated the king to wait till General Löwenhaupt, who was coming up with a reinforcement of fifteen thousand men, should arrive. The king, who seldom indeed took counsel of any one, not only rejected this wholesome advice, but, to the great astonishment of all the army, quitted the road to Moscow, and began to march southwards towards the Ukraine, the country of the Cossacks, lying between Little Tartary, Poland, and