Napoleon wasn't the first great general to march into Russia and destroy himself.

Napoleon wasn't the first great general to march into Russia and destroy himself. He wasn't even the first to do it with a book warning him exactly how it would go.

A hundred years earlier, Charles XII of Sweden was the most feared soldier in Europe. He became king at 15. At 18 he took about 10,000 Swedes through a blinding snowstorm at Narva and routed a Russian army more than three times his size. Peter the Great's new army was humiliated. Charles spent the next several years tearing through Poland, knocking a king off his throne and installing his own.

By 1708 he decided to finish Russia for good. He marched for Moscow with one of the best armies in Europe.

Peter refused to give him the battle he wanted. The Russians fell back, burned villages and crops, poisoned the land behind them, and let distance do the fighting. Sound familiar?

Charles needed supplies badly. A Swedish general named Lewenhaupt was bringing him a huge wagon train of food, ammunition and reinforcements. At Lesnaya in the fall of 1708, the Russians caught that column and forced it to abandon nearly everything. Lewenhaupt reached Charles with a few thousand exhausted men and almost none of the supplies.

That was the moment to turn back. Charles didn't. Instead he swung south into Ukraine, betting on the Cossack hetman Ivan Mazepa, who had secretly agreed to switch sides and bring tens of thousands of fighters with him. Peter found out first. His troops stormed Mazepa's capital at Baturyn and massacred it. Mazepa showed up with a fraction of what he'd promised.

Then the sky turned on Sweden. The winter of 1708 to 1709, the Great Frost, was one of the worst Europe saw in centuries. Rivers and harbors froze across the continent. Swedish soldiers lost fingers, toes, noses. Men froze to death in the saddle. Charles kept going.

By spring he was besieging Poltava with a starving, shrunken army deep in enemy country. A few days before the decisive battle he was shot in the foot while scouting. On the day of Poltava in 1709, the king who had built his legend leading from the front had to be carried around the battlefield on a stretcher. The Swedes, outnumbered more than two to one, were shattered.

Days later the remains of the army, still well over 10,000 men, surrendered on the banks of the Dnieper. Charles escaped into the Ottoman Empire and stayed there for about five years, at one point fighting off Turkish soldiers trying to evict him from his own camp.

Peter threw a feast for the captured Swedish generals and raised a toast to them as his teachers. Sweden never recovered its place as a great power. Russia stepped into it and never left.

Now jump forward to 1812. Napoleon reportedly carried Voltaire's history of Charles XII with him into Russia. He had the whole story in front of him. The retreating enemy. The scorched earth. The lost supply line. The chance to stop that got ignored. The bet on a deal that never came.

He read it, and did it anyway.

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