The action of the exile was furthered by the word of a thinker and seer.  A worthy professor at the University of Breslau, named Steffens, had long been meditating on some means of helping his country.  The arrival of Frederick William had kindled a flame of devotion which perplexed that modest and rather pedantic ruler.  But he so far responded to it as to allow Hardenberg to issue (February 3rd) an appeal for volunteers to “reinforce the ranks of the old defenders of the country.”  The appeal was entirely vague:  it did not specify whether they would serve against the nominal enemy, Russia, or the real enemy, Napoleon.  Pondering this weighty question, as did all good patriots, Steffens heard, in the watches of the night, the voice of conscience declare:  “Thou must declare war against Napoleon.”  At his early morning lecture on Physics, which was very thinly attended, he told the students that he would address them at eleven on the call for volunteers.  That lecture was thronged; and to the sea of eager faces Steffens spoke forth the thought that simmered in every brain, the burning desire for war with Napoleon.  He offered himself as a recruit:  200 students from Breslau and 258 from the University of Berlin soon flocked to the colours, and that, too, chiefly from the classes which of yore had detested the army.  Thanks to the teachings of Fichte and the still deeper lessons of adversity, the mind of Germany was now ranged on the side of national independence and against an omnivorous imperialism.

Where the mind led the body followed, yet still somewhat haltingly.  In truth, the King and his officials were in a difficult position.  They distrusted the Russians, who seemed chiefly eager to force Frederick William into war with France and to arrange the question of a frontier afterwards.  But the eastern frontier was a question of life and death for Prussia.  If Alexander kept the whole of the great Duchy of Warsaw, the Hohenzollern States would be threatened from the east as grievously as ever they were on the west by the French at Magdeburg.  And the Czar seemed resolved to keep the whole of Poland.  He told the Prussian envoy, Knesebeck, that, while handing over to Frederick William the whole of Saxony, Russia must retain all the Polish lands, a resolve which would have planted the Russian standards almost on the banks of the Oder.  Nay, more:  Knesebeck detected among the Russian officials a strong, though as yet but half expressed, longing for the whole of Prussia east of the lower Vistula.

For his part, Frederick William cherished lofty hopes.  He knew that the Russian troops had suffered horribly from privations and disease, that as yet they mustered only 40,000 effectives on the Polish borders, and that they urgently needed the help of Prussia.  He therefore claimed that, if he joined Russia in a war against Napoleon, he must recover the whole of what had been Prussian Poland, with the exception of the district of Bialystock ceded at Tilsit.[284]