Then, taking a glass of wine, “To the health of my masters in the art of war,” he said. Renschild asked who they were whom he honoured with so high a title? “You, gentlemen, the Swedish Generals,” answered the Czar. “Your Majesty is very ungrateful to handle your masters so severely,” replied Renschild. When dinner was over the Czar ordered their swords to be restored to all the officers, and treated them as a Prince who had a mind to give his subjects lessons in generosity and good breeding. But this same Prince, who treated the Swedish Generals so well, had all the Cossacks he caught broken on the wheel. Thus the Swedish army, which left Saxony in such triumph, was now no more: one half having perished from want, and the other half being enslaved or massacred. Charles XII had lost in one day the fruit of nine years’ labours and almost a hundred battles. He fled in a wretched calash, with General Hoorn, dangerously wounded; the rest of his troops followed, some on horseback, some in wagons, across a desert where there were neither huts, tents, men, animals nor roads; everything, even water, was lacking. That was at the beginning of July. The country is in the forty-seventh degree of latitude; the sun’s heat was made less endurable by the dry sand of the desert; horses fell by the way, and men were near dying of thirst. Towards night they found a spring of muddy water; they filled bottles with the water, which saved the lives of the King’s little troop. After five days’ march he found himself on the banks of the river Hippais, now called the Bogh by the barbarians, who have disfigured even the names of the countries to which Greek colonies had brought prosperity. This river joins the Borysthenes some miles lower, and with it falls into the Black Sea. Beyond the Bogh, towards the south, is the little town of Oczakou, frontier-town of the Turkish empire. The inhabitants, seeing approach a troop of men-at-arms whose dress and language were strange to them, refused to carry them over to Oczakou without an order from the Governor of the town, Mahomet-Bacha. The King sent this Governor an express message, asking for a passage. But the Turk, not knowing how to act in a country where a false step often costs a man his life, dare not act on his own responsibility without the permission of the Pasha of the province, who lived at Bender, in Bessarabia, thirty leagues from Oczakou. While they were awaiting this permission the Russians had crossed the Borysthenes, and approached to seize the King himself.