1831.81
The two generals returned to Barclay’s headquarters convinced that the Russians must pin down Vandamme’s right and centre between Straden and Priesten, while Colloredo and Bianchi’s Austrian divisions, supported by Russian cavalry, worked their way through and around the French left flank in the south. They had spotted the weakness of Vandamme’s left, his vulnerability to an outflanking movement, and the fact that the Austrian approach could to a great extent be concealed behind the Strisowitz heights. If, as was now expected, Kleist struck into Vandamme’s rear at the same time as the Austrians were turning his flank, the possibilities of a decisive victory were clear. Without Kleist the allies outnumbered Vandamme by perhaps five to four. If the Prussians joined the battle, however, then allied superiority would be massive. Barclay, who commanded the allied forces on the battlefield, accepted Diebitsch’s and Toll’s suggestions and the counter-attack was launched in the morning of 30 August.82
For once in August 1813, things went more or less as the allied commanders had planned. It was in fact Vandamme who restarted the battle at seven o’clock by again trying to batter his way through the Russians at Straden. Overnight the First Guards Division had withdrawn into reserve, to be replaced by the Second Guards and the First Grenadier divisions. Pyshnitsky’s regiments, cut off on 28 August, had rejoined Eugen’s corps. The Russians stopped Vandamme’s attack without much trouble. Colloredo went into action at about 9.30. He quickly spotted the possibilities of outflanking the French troops facing him. Barclay agreed to Colloredo’s proposal to shift to his right and Bianchi’s division moved up to fill the gap. The threat from the south caught the French by surprise and they were unable to stop the Austrian infantry’s advance, which kept threatening to outflank them on their left. Within an hour the Austrian infantry was over the Strisowitz heights and advancing deep into Vandamme’s left flank towards Kulm and Auschine. The Austrians were well supported by Russian cavalry, which overran one big French battery and kept the French infantry in a constant state of alarm. Austrian and Russian artillery got up onto all the heights to the south of Vandamme’s position and inflicted heavy casualties on the French infantry as they tried to make a stand in Kulm and Auschine.
At this point Kleist’s corps of 25,000 infantry and 104 guns joined the fray. Amidst the confusion of battle it was initially unclear both to the French and to the allied commanders whether these new troops were the Prussians or Napoleon’s reinforcements. Colloredo, for instance, stopped his advance until the situation was clarified. Once Kleist’s artillery opened fire, however, all doubts disappeared. Vandamme’s situation was now desperate but he responded calmly and courageously. He accepted the need to sacrifice his artillery and planned to stage a fighting withdrawal in the west against the Russians and in the south against the Austrians, while breaking through to the east against the Prussian forces on the Teplitz highway. His plan partly succeeded in that much of his cavalry did break through Kleist’s corps and make its escape up the highway. This happened above all because most of Kleist’s units were Landwehr battalions filled with exhausted militiamen, very many of whom were seeing action for the first time. Trained infantry would have deployed across the road and stopped the cavalry’s advance but the Landwehr battalions panicked and scattered into the surrounding forest. Kleist’s corps did, however, rally in time to block the French infantry which were trying to retreat in their cavalry’s wake.
By two o’clock in the afternoon the battle was over. Vandamme himself was captured by the Cossacks and delivered to the allied monarchs. The Russian officer who rescued him from these Cossacks recalls that, in the mistaken belief that he was a general, Vandamme handed over his sword to him. The gesture was accompanied by a rather theatrical speech: ‘I surrender to you my sword which has served me for many years to the glory of my country.’ By the time the speech was made for the third time, when Vandamme and his sword were finally handed over to Alexander, it had lost some of its sprightliness. The monarchs treated him politely but the German civilian population was less generous, since he was notorious throughout Germany for his cruelty and extortion. Everywhere he showed himself he was greeted with jeers, insults and sometimes stones: shouts of ‘tiger’, ‘crocodile’ and ‘poisonous snake’ were interspersed with good wishes for his trip to Siberia. In fact when he got to Moscow Vandamme was well treated by the local nobility until an indignant Alexander reminded the city’s governor-general that Vandamme’s harsh and avaricious behaviour had made him detestable even to his own troops. The emperor directed that Vandamme be removed to Viatka. This was not quite Siberia but it was the nearest thing to it in European Russia.83
The allies also claimed 82 guns and more than 8,000 prisoners, including Vandamme’s chief of staff. At least as many Frenchmen were killed and wounded, and this came on top of the heavy casualties of the previous days. Vandamme’s First Corps essentially ceased to exist. Even so, in terms of sheer numbers the allies had lost more men in the Dresden campaign as a whole than Napoleon. Not only could they afford to do so, however, but their biggest losses – Mesko’s raw recruits – could quickly be replaced because the Austrian mobilization of manpower was finally cranking into top gear. Nor in any case were numbers the key point. Victory at Kulm made a huge difference to allied morale and unity. The great tensions between the allies created by defeat at Dresden were very much reduced, not least because of the fact that Kulm was in the fullest sense an allied victory. If the Russians were the heroes on 29 August, Colloredo’s Austrians and Kleist’s Prussians had made the biggest contribution to victory on the following day.
An officer in Alexander’s entourage recalled that as the emperor rode across the battlefield of Kulm after Vandamme’s surrender ‘joy shone on his face, for this was the first total defeat of the enemy in which he had participated personally’. All his life he had dreamed of military glory. Until now his dreams had been mocked. At Austerlitz his army had been routed and he himself humiliated. In 1812 his closest advisers had conspired to remove him from the army as a nuisance, and the emperor was far too intelligent and sensitive not to have seen through their arguments. All his enormous efforts thus far in 1813 had led to defeat at Lutzen, Bautzen and Dresden. Now at last there was a spectacular victory and one which was owed above all to his Guards, who were the apple of his eye.
With his cup already overflowing, just after Vandamme had been dispatched to Teplitz the emperor received news of Blucher’s victory at the river Katzbach. Even his normally restrained entourage burst into resounding cheers. Riding back to Teplitz, Alexander overtook carts carrying the Russian wounded. ‘The emperor rode up to them, thanked them, asked them how he could help them, and called them his comrades in arms.’ To do him justice, if he had never quite shared his men’s hunger or their bivouacs, he had frequently risked his life on the battlefield and he had carried mental burdens of which few of them could conceive. To his dying day Alexander talked frequently of the two days of battle near Kulm. In time he was to witness other victories and triumphs, ‘but the battle of Kulm remained always his favourite memory’.84
Rewards poured down on the heads of generals and even soldiers, with the partial exception of the brave men of Eugen’s and Helfreich’s divisions, whose enormous services and sacrifices were cast into the shade by the attention given to the Guards. Barclay de Tolly was awarded the Grand Cross of St George, the soldier’s ultimate accolade, granted to only thirteen military leaders in the whole history of the Russian Empire.85 Barclay richly deserved this award for everything he had done for the army as both war minister and commander- in-chief. Never did he deserve it less than in August 1813, however, when his performance was often mediocre. In this respect Barclay was rather typical of the allied leadership during the Dresden campaign.
Undoubtedly the allies had been extremely lucky. There can have been few victories in history won by such a chaotic and inefficient command structure. Not merely could the campaign have ended in disaster, in all logic it ought to have done so once the retreat from Dresden began. The allies owed much to luck, though also to the courage and endurance of their troops, especially of the Russians on the first day of the battle of Kulm. Some of the allied generals had performed well. Kleist had shown real courage in advancing into Vandamme’s rear. Ermolov displayed inspiring leadership on the first day at Kulm, and Colloredo did well on the second. Above all, Eugen of Wurttemberg stands out as the allied general who contributed most to making victory possible.
But Napoleon and his generals had also made a big contribution. In Vandamme’s case this had less to do with his performance at Kulm than in the three days before the battle, when he had allowed the Russians to hold his far larger corps at bay and to sneak back to Bohemia under his nose. Saint-Cyr was also to blame for losing touch with Kleist’s corps and thereby allowing it to intervene in the battle of Kulm. Above all, however, the disaster was Napoleon’s fault. He had explicitly ordered Vandamme to advance into Bohemia and equally explicitly had ordered the Young Guard to remain on the Teplitz highway right back at Pirna. These two commands were the key reasons for Vandamme’s destruction. More important than the loss of a single corps was the fact that in the three days after the battle of Dresden Napoleon had it within his power to destroy the main allied army and end the war. Not merely did he fail to grasp this opportunity but he made a big contribution to turning possible total victory into a very serious defeat.
