He was conscious of defects in his own statecraft; the Muscovite envoys whom he kept in Stockholm to swear friendly relations with Sweden had merely angered and disgusted the severe honor of the Northern King, and the Russian manifesto, in which the most puerile reasons were given for declaring war, had been better if never published; but so far no Czar of Russia had ever published any document concerning European diplomacy; in everything Peter trod new ground and was keenly conscious of his numerous mistakes.
“I will go to Poland,” he said, his words following out his train of thought.
“You will have to defeat Sweden first, sire,” replied Croy.
“Well,” said Peter gloomily, “one can try. We march against Narva. The Swedes do not fear a winter campaign--since they are willing to fight amid the ice we must learn to do so also.”
Saying these words with a certain simplicity, he abruptly left the chamber, and, passing through a maze of gilt and painted apartments, came out on the great terrace of the Kremlin that overlooks Moscow and the bridges over the Moskva.
He felt neither excited nor elated; perhaps he knew better than either Croy or Mentchikoff the difficulty of this, his first great enterprise, for, by the measure of his own wild heart he could judge of the greatness of his rival in glory; extraordinary himself, he found it easy to credit the extraordinary in others, and just as he was prepared to open war in the depth of winter, in a Polar climate, so he believed that Karl would be ready to meet him; nothing could prevent him from carrying out his ambitions, even if he had to perform feats that in the eyes of ordinary men were madnesses, and he rightly gauged his enemy’s character to be the same in this respect.
He was glad that it was not possible to open the campaign till the winter, for he considered the added difficulty an added glory; with that sense of his own deficiency that was his truest greatness he did not intend to command his army himself, but to serve in it as a lieutenant, thereby giving the Russians a lesson in discipline and the value of training, for he was aware that his soldiers would consist of a horde of armed slaves and his officers of lawless nobles without experience or any capacity for warfare.