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Updated: May 14, 2025
I was inhaling it in deep, intoxicating gulps. It gave me a pleasure so keen it seemed to verge on pain. It was so unlike the air I had left in the sweltering city that the place seemed to belong to another planet I stopped at the Rigi Kulm House.
While, then, the French general was showering his blows against the allies below Kulm, the Prussians swarmed down from the heights of Nollendorf on his rear. Even so, the French struggled stoutly for liberty. Their leader, scorning death or surrender, flung himself with his braves on the Russians in front, but was borne down and caught, fighting to the last.
The best of these roads crosses the Erzgebirge by way of Nollendorf and the gorge leading down to Kulm, the other by the Zinnwald pass, while between them is a third and yet more difficult track. Vandamme was to take up a position west or south-west of Pirna so as to cut off the retreat of the foe.
We reached the summit just as the sunset-gazing crowd were dispersing. And this is Righi Kulm! Wednesday, 27. At half past three in the morning we were aroused by the Alpine horn. We sprang up, groping and dressing in the dark, and went out in the frosty air. Ascending the ridge we looked off upon a sleeping world. Mists lay beneath like waves, clouds, like a sea.
I saw the Alps, and a thunderstorm in the Alps, passed starlit nights on the Swiss lakes, traced the courses of foaming mountain streams such as the Tamina at Pfaeffers, ascended the Rigi at a silly forced march, and from the Kulm saw a procession of clouds that gripped my fancy like the procession of the Vanir in Northern mythology.
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.
At the junction of the roads, where the fighting was hottest, the Austrians have erected a monument to one of their generals. Not far from it is that of Prussia, simple and tasteful. A woody hill near, with the little village of Kulm at its foot, was the station occupied by Vandamme at the commencement of the battle. There is now a beautiful chapel on its summit, which can be seen far and wide.
As it was, the disaster of Kulm kept the Emperor tethered for some days within a few leagues of Dresden, while Bülow and Blücher saved the campaign for the allies in the north, thereby exciting a patriotic ferment which drove Jerome Bonaparte from Cassel and kept Davoust to the defensive around Hamburg.
Macdonald was conquered in Silesia; Ney, near Berlin; Vandamme, at Kulm. Unable to obstruct the enemy, pouring on him from all parts, Napoleon thought of retreating. The princes of the confederation of the Rhine chose this moment to desert the cause of the empire.
Yet once more he plunged into the Erzgebirge, engaged in a fruitless skirmish in the defile above Kulm, and again had to lead his troops back to Pirna and Dresden. A third move against Blücher led to the same wearisome result. The allies, having worn down the foe, planned a daring move.
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