Once aroused to action, he was ready to move before even his would-be conquerors, in those slow-going days, imagined he had thought of resistance. Money and men were raised, the alliance of England and Holland were secretly obtained, a council of defence was appointed to govern Sweden during the absence of the king, and on the twenty-third of April, 1700, two months before his eighteenth birthday, King Charles bade his grandmother and his sisters good-bye and left Stockholm for ever. Even as he left the news came that another member in this firm of hostile kings, Augustus of Saxony and Poland, had invaded Sweden's tributary province of Livonia on the Gulf of Finland. Not to be drawn aside from his first object--the punishment of Denmark--Charles simply said: "We will make King Augustus go back the way he came," and hurried on to join his army in Southern Sweden. By the third of August, 1700, King Charles had grown tired of waiting for his reserves and new recruits, and so, with scarce six thousand men, he sailed away from Malmo--clear down at the most southerly point of Sweden--across the Sound, and steered for the Danish coast not twenty-five miles away. Young Arvid Horn, still the king's fast friend, and now one of his aids, following his leader, leaped into the first of the small barges or row-boats that were to take the troops from the frigates to the Danish shore. His young general and king, impatient at the slowness of the clumsy barges, while yet three hundred yards from shore, stood upright in the stern, drew his sword, and exclaimed: "I am wearied with this pace. All you who are for Denmark follow me!" And then, sword in hand, he sprang over into the sea. Arvid Horn quickly followed his royal friend. The next moment generals and ministers, ambassadors and belaced officials, with the troops that filled the boats, were wading waist-deep through the shallow water of the Sound, struggling toward the Danish shore, and fully as enthusiastic as their hasty young leader and king. The Danish musket-balls fell thick around them as the Danish troops sought from their trenches to repel the invaders. "What strange whizzing noise is this in the air?" asked the young king, now for the first time in action. "'T is the noise of the musket-balls they fire upon you," was the reply. "_Ack_, say you so," said Charles; "good, good; from this time forward that shall be my music." In the face of this "music" the shore was gained, the trenches were carried by fierce assault, and King Charles' first battle was won. Two days later, Copenhagen submitted to its young conqueror, and King Frederick, of Denmark, hastened to the defence of his capital, only to find it in the possession of the enemy, and to sign a humiliating treaty of peace.