Peter raised his hand to stop the drummer and saw the passage close behind the regiment.
If he sent the men back to their former position, they would come under attack. If he declared the retreat an act of insubordination, the neighbouring units would lose the only order that was still working. In his first life there had been no such signal. Memory, then, could not tell him the cost of countermanding it.
Peter lowered his hand.
"Support the withdrawal. Punish them after the battle if they cannot prove it was necessary."
The regimental commander heard the second half and passed on the first. Farther down the line, others took up the drumbeat. Men who knew nothing of the overall plan at least knew what to do next: fall back, keep formation, open a corridor for the wounded.
Afanasy Naryshkin sent the carts not to the tsar's camp but to a place the junior commanders had chosen in advance. Pale strips of cloth appeared on the bearers' sleeves. They made no distinction between Russians, foreigners and men from an unpopular regiment. First they carried out those who could not walk, then those who still clung to their weapons and insisted their wounds were slight.
One officer demanded that a cart be cleared for the standards. Afanasy took down a standard, wrapped it around a soldier's broken leg and ordered the staff to be carried separately.
The standard wrapped around the broken leg could be seen from far away. Afanasy, whom Peter had once saved in the Kremlin, was now saving the wounded without a command from the tsar and deciding for himself who should be taken out first.
The artillerymen began withdrawing the guns. Before, every crew had waited for permission to abandon its position, because the loss of a gun was considered a disgrace. Now they had a procedure: remove the lock, preserve the measuring instruments, take away every serviceable barrel and destroy whatever could not be moved. The senior gunner did not ask Peter which gun to save. He inspected the wheels and teams.
One gun became stuck. The young gunner who had admitted to damp powder at Azov wanted to remain with it. The master of the crew shoved him in the shoulder and ordered him to clear the way. The men stripped off some of the weight, laid boards beneath it and hauled the barrel free together.
The Book added to Might in the midst of defeat: a crew had saved its gun without an order from the tsar.
On another part of the field, panic began with a cry that the foreign officers had sold out the ranks and the old regiments had refused to fight. Ivan Naryshkin was already looking for the names of men on whom the failure could be laid.
Peter ordered that no culprits be seized on the field. First they had to bring out those still fit for service, collect reports and distinguish flight from an organised withdrawal. For refusing immediate punishment, he paid with a rumour that the tsar had lost control of his army.
One regiment nevertheless held together, a second came out behind it, and the corridor for the wounded reached the crossing. Several guns that had been lost in the former line remained in Russian hands.
The organised withdrawal did not turn Narva into a victory. Men lay in the snow, the defences had been breached, and the command had disintegrated faster than Peter could acknowledge the changed course of the battle. But the commanders, artillery crews and men who knew how to keep formation withdrew with the rest. From them a new army could be built.
By evening Peter had gathered the officers beside the guns they had saved. There he could have blamed the weather, accused the messengers who had failed to persuade him or declared that the independent manoeuvre had caused the breach.
Instead, he pointed to the empty position where he himself had sent the reserve.
"That order was mine. I expected the enemy to repeat the earlier battle, and I sent the reserve to the wrong place."
No one objected. Every man heard him admit his fault.
Might fell: the army had proved weaker than the exercises and the rolls had suggested. Debt rose for the wounded, the widows, the ruined households and the new levy that would soon demand still more men. Trust rose within the surviving units because the sovereign had not executed those who had saved the formation in defiance of his plan.
The Book showed new numbers. Might: twenty-seven. Trust: thirty-one. Debt: sixty-one.
Then a new line appeared.
The line is not mine.
Peter expected fear. Instead he felt an emptiness like the silence after a shot. Until that moment, the future might have lied in its details, but it had remained a map. Now he knew only the unavoidable tasks: Sweden would not relinquish the Baltic, the army would need metal and men, the state roads and money. Memory no longer guaranteed a single correct next move.
Peter asked the Book where Charles XII would strike next. It showed neither place nor time. The enemy's intentions were clear, but Charles himself had not yet chosen his target. Instead of the future move, the Book listed what already existed: a shortage of good metal, broken supply lines, too few experienced officers and too few men able to object before disaster struck. There was no ready answer now.
The ten-year-old Alexei Petrovich saw the consequences of Narva in the schedules of the wounded. One household appeared in three books: the father was in the new levy, the elder son in the baggage train, and their horse had been requisitioned to carry the wounded. Each entry rested on a separate legal ground.
"If everything has been recorded correctly, who will notice that too much has been taken from one family?" he asked.
Peter ordered that case put right, but Alexei did not thank him. He asked who would put the others right.
The Book had no answer.
When the salvaged gun was dismantled, the commission found what the previous inspection had missed. They cut open the barrel, sound to all outward appearance, and found a dark streak inside. The impurity ran the full length of the casting. The same traces were found in two more guns from different suppliers.
Someone had already learnt to conceal the same defect in several places. A bombardier's personal skill was not enough for this war. They needed ore, furnaces, a standard of quality and men permitted to reject an order placed by the tsar.
On the map for the next campaign, Peter paused with his pen over the name Marienburg. He remembered that in two years the grown Marta Skavronska would be there. His hand wrote her name beside the fortress of its own accord.
Peter crossed out the words.
Marta was not a military objective, cargo or a promised reward. If the fortress became the object of a campaign, the decision must have a reason of state that would exist even without her name.
After Narva, memory ceased to be a map of the future. And the dark streak inside the salvaged gun showed him where he would have to begin again.
Open in the reader