resh young enthusiasm of the dawning age of
nationality. Not that the old soldier could appreciate the lofty
teachings of Fichte the philosopher and Schleiermacher the preacher.
But his lack of learning--he could never write a despatch without
strange torturings of his mother-tongue--was more than made up by a
quenchless love of the Fatherland, by a robust common sense, which hit
straight at the mark where subtler minds strayed off into side issues,
by a comradeship that endeared him to every private, and by a courage
that never quailed. And all these gifts, homely but invaluable in a
people's war, were wrought to utmost tension by an all-absorbing
passion, hatred of Napoleon. In the dark days after Jena, when,
pressed back to the Baltic, his brave followers succumbed to the
weight of numbers, he began to store up vials of fury against the
insolent conqueror. Often he beguiled the weary hours with lunging at
an imaginary foe, calling out--_Napoleon_. And this almost Satanic
hatred bore the old man through seven years of humiliation; it gave
him at seventy-two years of age the energy of youth; far from being
sated by triumphs in Saxony and Champagne, it nerved him with new
strength after the shocks to mind and body which he sustained at
Ligny; it carried him and his army through the miry lanes of Wavre on
to the sunset radiance of Waterloo.

What he lacked in skill and science was made up by his able
coadjutors, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, the former pre-eminent in
organization, the latter in strategy. After organizing Prussia's
citizen army, it was Scharnhorst's fate to be mortally wounded in the
first battle; but his place, as chief of staff, was soon filled by
Gneisenau, in whose nature the sternness of the warrior was happily
blended with the coolness of the scientific thinker. The accord
between him and Bluecher was close and cordial; and the latter, on
receiving the degree of doctor of laws from the University of Oxford,
wittily acknowledged his debt to the strategist. "Well," said he, "if
I am to be a doctor, they must make Gneisenau an apothecary; for he
makes up the pills and I then administer them."

On these resolute chiefs and their 33,000 Prussians fell the brunt of
the fighting near Luetzen. Wittgenstein, with his 35,000 Russians,
showed less energy; but if a fourth Russian corps under Miloradovitch,
then on the Elster, had arrived in time, the day might have closed
with victory for the allies. Their plan