[250] ["It happened ... that during the operations of June 27-28, Charles was severely wounded in the foot. On the morning of June 28 he was riding close to the river ... when a ball struck him on the left heel, passed through his foot, and lodged close to the great toe.... On the night of July 7, 1709 ... Charles had the foot carefully dressed, while he wore a spurred boot on his sound foot, put on his uniform, and placed himself on a kind of litter, in which he was drawn before the lines of the array.... [After the battle, July 8] those who survived took refuge in flight, the King--whose litter had been smashed by a cannon-ball, and who was carried by the soldiers on crossed poles--going with them, and the Russians neglecting to pursue. In this manner they reached their former camp."--_Charles XII._, by Oscar Browning, 1899, pp. 213, 220, 224, sq. For an account of his flight southwards into Turkish territory, _vide post_, p. 233, note 1. The bivouack "under a savage tree" must have taken place on the night of the battle, at the first halt, between Poltáva and the junction of the Vórskla and Dniéper.] [251] {208}[Compare-- "Thus elms and thus the savage cherry grows." Dryden's _Georgics_, ii. 24.] [252] {209}[For some interesting particulars concerning the Hetman Mazeppa, see Barrow's _Memoir of the Life of Peter the Great_, 1832, pp. 181-202.] [253] {211}[The Dniéper.] [254] [John Casimir (1609-1672), Jesuit, cardinal, and king, was a Little-Polander, not to say a pro-Cossack, and suffered in consequence. At the time of his proclamation as King of Poland, November, 1649, Poland was threatened by an incursion of Cossacks. The immediate cause was, or was supposed to be, the ill treatment which [Bogdán Khmelnítzky] a Lithuanian had received at the hands of the Polish governor, Czaplinski. The governor, it was alleged, had carried off, ravished, and put to death Khmelnítzky's wife, and, not content with this outrage, had set fire to the house of the Cossack, "in which perished his infant son in his cradle." Others affirmed that the Cossack had begun the strife by causing the governor "to be publicly and ignominiously whipped," and that it was the Cossack's mill and not his house which he burnt. Be that as it may, Casimir, on being exhorted to take the field, declined, on the ground that the Poles "ought not to have set fire to Khmelnítzky's house." It is probably to this unpatriotic determination to look at both sides of the question that he earned the character of being an unwarlike prince. As a matter of fact, he fought and was victorious against the Cossacks and Tartars at Bereteskow and elsewhere. (See _Mod. Univ. Hist._, xxxiv. 203, 217; Puffend, _Hist. Gener._, 1732, iv. 328; and _Histoire des Kosaques_, par M. (Charles Louis) Le Sur, 1814, i. 321.)] [255] [A.D. 1660 or thereabouts.]