But there was small need of appeals and decorations.  The people rushed to arms with an ardour that rivalled the levee en masse of France in 1793.  Nobles and students, professors and peasants, poets and merchants, shouldered their muskets.  Housewives and maidens brought their scanty savings or their treasured trinkets as offerings for the altar of the Fatherland.  One incident deserves special notice.  A girl, Nanny by name, whose ringlets were her only wealth, shore them off, sold them, and brought the price of them, two thalers, for the sacred cause.  A noble impulse thrilled through Germany.  Volunteers came from far, many of whom were to ride with Luetzow’s irregular horse in his wild ventures.  Most noteworthy of these was the gifted young poet, Korner, a Saxon by birth, who now forsook a life of ease, radiant with poetic promise, at the careless city of Vienna, to follow the Prussian eagle.  “A great time calls for great hearts,” he wrote to his father:  “am I to write vaudevilles when I feel within me the courage and strength for joining the actors on the stage of real life?” Alas! for him the end was to be swift and tragic.  Not long after inditing an ode to his sword, he fell in a skirmish near Hamburg.

Germany mourned his loss; but she mourned still more that her greatest poet, Goethe, felt no throb of national enthusiasm.  The great Olympian was too much wrapped up in his lofty speculations to spare much sympathy for struggling mortals below:  “Shake your chains, if you will:  the man (Napoleon) is too strong for you:  you will not break them.”  Such was his unprophetic utterance at Dresden to the elder Korner.  Men who touched the people’s pulse had no such doubts.  “Ah! those were noble times,” wrote Arndt:  “the fresh young hope of life and honour sang in all hearts; it echoed along every street; it rolled majestically down every chancel.”  The sight of Germans thronging from all parts into Silesia to fight for their Prussian champions awakened in him the vision of a United Germany, which took form in the song, “What is the German’s Fatherland?"[286]

Against this ever-rising tide of national enthusiasm Napoleon pitted the resources which Gallic devotion still yielded up to his demands.  They were surprisingly great.  In less than half a year, after the loss of half a million of men, a new army nearly as numerous was marshalled under the imperial eagles.  Thirty thousand tried troops were brought from Spain, thereby greatly relieving the pressure on Wellington.  Italy and the garrison towns of the Empire sent forth a vast number.  But the majority were young, untrained troops; and it was remarked that the conscripts born in the years of the Terror, 1793-4, had not the stamina of the earlier levies.  Brave they were, superbly brave; and the Emperor sought by every means to breathe into them his own indomitable spirit.  One of them has described how, on handing them their colours, he made a brief speech; and, at the close, rising in