But the most inspiring influence was that of Bluecher.  The staunch patriot seemed to embody the best qualities of the old regime and of the new era.  The rigour learnt in the school of Frederick the Great was vivified by the fresh 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 was to cross a stream, called the Floss Graben, some five miles to the south of Luetzen, storm the villages of Gross Goerschen, Rahna, and Starsiedel, held by the French vanguard, and, cutting into Napoleon’s line of march towards Luetzen and Leipzig, throw it into disorder and rout.  But their great enemy