Potapoff, the Bolshevist commander, who was arrested later.
"Captain Bers seized the safe containing the Bolshevist war fund of 4,000,000 rubles. Then, with Colonel Potapoff, the Cossacks arrested the American Consul, Felix Cole; the British and French Consuls, and the French Military Mission. The allied officials were taken to a barn and hidden, the Cossacks holding them and the money as hostages until something definite happened.
"When the allies landed and the local counter-revolution broke out almost simultaneously on Aug. 1 and 2, the Consuls were released. The Cossacks, however, after declaring themselves ready to support the new Government claimed that they were secretly against the Bolsheviki throughout.
Needless to add, such appeals to "old Cossack Law" would have little standing in the Cossack territories — although wild bands like the Siberian border ruffians led bv General Senenov — "Cossacks" in name only — might resort to such a plea.
the same scaffold perished a famous Cossack colonel named Glutchov and a Prussian officer named Koenigseck who had acted as the Cossack Chief of Artillery. At the same time an effigy of Mazeppa was vicariously "tortured" and solemnly degraded from the rank of hetman while a cross of St. Andrew was torn from the mannikin's breast. A more effectual punishment than this childish mummery was the solemn anathema launched against the hetman by the metropolitan of Kiev, a terrible indictment which included all the Orthodox Cossacks who were fighting with the heretics against the head of the Russian church.
As in the case of the rebellious Donskoi, the lacerated bodies of the most important of Mazeppa's adherents were placed on rafts and sent adrift on the Dnieper, so that the news of the Tsar's vengeance might be spread along the whole course of that stream.
At the famous battle of Poltava, whose course and the momentous results it entailed have so often been described, the Cossack nation again found itself hopelessly divided. The majority of the Cossacks and "free citizens" of the Ukraine fought under the banners of the Tsar, their oppressor. On the side of Charles XII the Zaporogians and the hetman's faithful regiments distinguished themselves in a last vain blow for the liberties of the Ukraine. But the armies of Sweden, until now victorious against Russian troops, were for the first time definitely defeated. The Tsar's troops, thoroughly drilled after the European model and his generals schooled in adversity, were at last able to prove their worth and the value of Peter's patient training. Russia's natural allies, cold and distance, added completeness to a defeat which anticipated the appalling disaster which overtook Napoleon a century later. Russia, not Sweden, became the preponderant power in the north of Europe, while, except for sporadic mutinies, little more was heard of the "liberties of the Ukraine" until the present day.*
* "It was the recollection of Narva that caused Charles to lose the battle of Poltava. At daybreak twenty-one thousand confident Swedes attacked the Russian forces taking with them but four pieces of artillery. The King in person conducted the attack, lying in a litter drawn by two horses on account of the wound he had received a few days before. Slipenbak's famous cavalry charged the enemy with great courage. The Muscovite formations were driven in and the Tsar who had himself hurried to rally them received a bullet through his hat.
"Mentchikov had three horses killed under him — and already the Swedish troopers raised a shout of victory."
Shortly after, during the Russian counterattack, the two horses carrying the wounded chief of the Swedish forces were killed by a volley of grape shot, and their place was taken by 24 infantrymen — 21 of whom were shot down before the close of the engagement. Indeed the personal courage of both the Tsar (serving with the simple title of Major-general under General Sheremetiev) and Charles was displayed to every advantage, in their terrible duel for supremacy.
The conduct of ^lazeppa, whose miscalculations had destroyed one of the chief factors upon which Charles' strategy had been based, now gives the lie to those who see in his character only the acts of a finished opportunist. Accompanied by some three thousand Cossacks, Mazeppa and Charles (who, in spite of an agonizing wound had directed the battle from a bed borne on a litter of pikes) fled towards Turkey. The indomitable spirit of the "Lion of the North" still dreamed of rallying Sweden's broken armies. His plan was now to join the troops of General Loewenhaupt, who were waiting the king's arrival somewhere on the Bessarabian border. On the shores of the Dnieper, the fugi-