sound military principles.  That Vandamme was right is established by the fact that an order came from Napoleon to Marshal Mortier, who commanded at Pirna, to reinforce him with two divisions; but the order did not reach Mortier until after Vandamme had been defeated.  Marshal Saint-Cyr, who was bound to aid Vandamme, was grossly negligent, and failed of his duty; but even he would have acted well, had he been acting under the eye of the Emperor, as would have been the case, had not the weather of the 27th broken down the health of Napoleon, and had not other disasters to the French, all caused by the same storm that had raged around Dresden, induced Napoleon to direct his personal attention to points remote from the scene of his last triumph.[B]

[Footnote B:  There was a story current that Napoleon’s indisposition on the 28th of August was caused by his eating heartily of a shoulder of mutton stuffed with garlic, not the wholesomest food in the world; and the digestive powers having been reduced by long exposure to damp, this dish may have been too much for them.  Thiers says that the Imperial illness at Pirna was “a malady invented by flatterers,” and yet only a few pages before he says that “Napoleon proceeded to Pirna, where he arrived about noon, and where, after having partaken of a slight repast, he was seized with a pain in the stomach, to which he was subject after exposure to damp.”  Napoleon suffered from stomach complaints from an early period of his career, and one of their effects is greatly to lessen the powers of the sufferer’s mind.  His want of energy at Borodino was attributed to a disordered stomach, and the Russians were simply beaten, not destroyed, on that field.  When he beard of Vandamme’s defeat, Napoleon said, “One should make a bridge of gold for a flying enemy, where it is impossible, as in Vandamme’s case, to oppose to him a bulwark of steel.”  He forgot that his own plan was to have opposed to the enemy a bulwark of steel, and that the non-existence of that bulwark on the 30th of August was owing to his own negligence.  Still, the reverse at Kulm might not have proved so terribly fatal, had it not been preceded by the reverses on the Katzbach, which also were owing to the heavy rains, and news of which was the cause of the halting of so large a portion of his pursuing force at Pirna, and the march of many of his best men back to Dresden, his intention being to attempt the restoration of affairs in that quarter, where they had been so sadly compromised under Macdonald’s direction.  He was as much overworked by the necessity of attending to so many theatres of action as his armies were overmatched in the field by the superior numbers of the Allies.  He is said to have repeated the following lines, after musing for a while on the news from Kulm:—­

  “J’ai servi, commande, vaincu quarante annees;
  Du monde entre mes mains j’ai tu les destinees,
  Et j’ai toujours connu qu’en chaque evenement
  Le destin des etats dependait d’un moment.”