The first serious fighting was on October the 10th at Saalfeld, where Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia with a small force sought to protect Hohenlohe’s flank march westwards on Jena.  The task was beyond the strength even of this flower of Prussian chivalry.  He was overpowered by the weight and vigour of Lannes’ attack, and when already wounded in a cavalry melee was pierced through the body by an officer to whom he proudly refused to surrender.  The death of this hero, the “Alcibiades” of Prussia, cast a gloom over the whole army, and mournful faces at headquarters seemed to presage yet worse disasters.  Perhaps it was some inkling of this discouragement, or a laudable desire to stop “an impolitic war,” that urged Napoleon two days later to pen a letter to the King of Prussia urging him to make peace before he was crushed, as he assuredly would be.  In itself the letter seems admirable—­until one remembers the circumstances of the case.  The King had pledged his word to the Czar to make war; if, therefore, he now made peace and sent the Russians back, he would once more stand condemned of preferring dishonourable ease to the noble hazards of an affair of honour.  As Napoleon was aware of the union of the King and Czar, this letter must be regarded as an attempt to dissolve the alliance and tarnish Frederick William’s reputation.  It was viewed in that light by that monarch; and there is not a hint in Napoleon’s other letters that he really expected peace.

He was then at Gera, pushing forward his corps towards Naumburg so as to cut off the Prussians from Saxony and the Elbe.  Great as was his superiority, these movements occasioned such a dispersion of his forces as to invite attack from enterprising foes; but he despised the Prussian generals as imbeciles, and endeavoured to unsteady their rank and file by seizing and burning their military stores at the latter town.  He certainly believed that they were all in retreat northwards, and great was his surprise when he heard from Lannes early on October 13th that his scouts, after scaling the hills behind Jena in a dense mist, had come upon the Prussian army.  The news was only partly correct.  It was only Hohenlohe’s corps:  for the bulk of that army, under Brunswick, was retreating northwards, and nearly stumbled upon the corps of Davoust and Bernadotte behind Naumburg.

Lannes also was in danger on the Landgrafenberg.  This is a lofty hill which towers above the town of Jena and the narrow winding vale of the Saale; while its other slopes, to the north and west, rise above and dominate the broken and irregular plateau on which Hohenlohe’s force was encamped.  Had the Prussians attacked his weary regiments in force, they might easily have hurled them into the Saale.  But Hohenlohe had received orders to retire northwards in the rear of Brunswick, as soon as he had rallied the detachment of Ruechel near Weimar, and was therefore indisposed to venture on the bold offensive which now was his only means of safety.  The respite thus granted was used by the French to hurry every available regiment up the slopes north and west of Jena.  Late in the afternoon, Napoleon himself ascended the Landgrafenberg to survey the plateau; while a pastor of the town was compelled to show a path further north which leads to the same plateau through a gulley called the Rau-thal.[105]