Having so far employed only a very small part of the troops entrusted to him for offensive operations, on the 7th Kaulbars definitely and finally assumed the defensive. He did not even seize the opportunity of the repulses suffered by the enemy at Wu-kuan-tun and against Tserpitski’s force to attack. On the 7th, 8th, and 9th, with 140 battalions at his disposal, he assumed a passive rôle everywhere. While allowing a great confusion of units, he did not take proper steps, which he was quite able to do, to re-establish the corps, divisional and brigade organization, and on the 8th he did not take advantage of the possibility of forming a reserve from the entire 10th Corps, which would have enabled him to re-establish the organization of the other corps. On the 4th he removed Generals Muiloff, Topornin, and Kutnevich from the command of their corps for no reason, and as he did not replace them by other officers, the staffs of these corps were headless. The employment of the reserves in the 2nd Army was neither carried out by arrangement, nor in accordance with the actual necessities of the situation, so that there were instances of reserves being sent up when not required (Gerngross on March 8). In spite of my order, which he received on the 5th, to send back the baggage and transport to the north, Kaulbars only obeyed this instruction in regard to Tserpitski’s and Gerngross’s columns on the 9th, and thus made our retirement, especially that of our rearguards, most difficult. He failed to observe the appearance or concentration of the enemy on the northern front, and took no steps to avert this danger. The concentration of our forces on this side was carried out under my own orders. Had it not been for this, the enemy would have seized the village of San-tai-tzu and the grove of the Imperial tombs on the 7th.
One occasion when Kaulbars did issue orders that met the case was when he ordered Launits to attack the enemy on March 10 at Hei-ni-tun so as to assist the retirement, and he got together a strong force for this purpose. But then, when these troops were on the point of commencing the attack, he went to Launits and countermanded it, without even informing me of this most important change in his previous dispositions. Yet, had this attack been only partially successful, it would have greatly relieved the situation. Right up to March 13 not one of the arrangements made by him was fully carried out, and it is clear that he did not even then in the least appreciate the conditions. In addition to wasting time, extending his front, and acting only on the defensive, he did not realize the danger of Nogi’s appearance at such a moment north of Mukden, nor of his movement round our flank. In a letter to me of August 11, he wrote that on March 8 and 9, “although we had been retiring for a week, circumstances were going very well for us, as, the further the enemy moved northwards, the nearer they were getting to their Poltava.”