To these misfortunes the affair at Kulm was a fitting climax. No worse leader for a delicate independent movement could have been selected than the reckless Vandamme. He was so rash, conceited, and brutish that Napoleon once exclaimed in sheer desperation: "If there were two Vandammes in my army, nothing could be done until one had killed the other." As might have been expected, the headlong general far outstripped the columns of Marmont, Saint-Cyr, and Murat, which had been tardily sent to support him. Descending without circumspection into the plain of Kulm, he found himself, on the twenty-ninth, confronted by the Russian guard; and next morning, when attacked by them in superior force, he was compelled to retreat through a mountain defile toward Peterswald, whence he had come. At the mouth of the gorge he was unexpectedly met by the Prussian corps of Kleist. Each side thought the other moving to cut it off. They therefore rushed one upon the other in despair, with no other hope than that of breaking through to rejoin their respective armies. The shock was terrible, and for a time the confusion seemed inextricable. But the Russians soon came up, and Vandamme, with seven thousand men, was captured, the loss in slain and wounded being about five thousand. Saint-Cyr, Marmont, and Murat halted and held the mountain passes. This was the climax of disaster in Napoleon's great strategic plan. In no way responsible for Grossbeeren, nor for Macdonald's defeat on the Katzbach, he was culpable both for the selection of Vandamme and for failure to support him in the pursuit of Schwarzenberg. At St. Helena the Emperor strove in three ways to account for the crash under which he was buried after Dresden: by the sickness which made him unable to give attention to the situation, by the inundation which rendered Macdonald helpless at the crossing of the Bober, and by the arrival of a notification from the King of Bavaria that, after a certain date, he too would join the coalition. This was not history, but an appeal to public sentiment, carefully calculated for untrained readers.