opinion hopefully bruited by General Ruechel, that "several were
equal to M. de Bonaparte." Events were to prove that Gneisenau,
Scharnhorst, and Bluecher rivalled the best of the French Marshals; but
in this war their lights were placed under bushels and only shone
forth when the official covers had been shattered. Scharnhorst,
already renowned for his strategic and administrative genius, took
part in some of the many councils of war where everything was
discussed and little was decided; but his opinion had no weight, for
on October 7th he wrote: "What we ought to do I know right well, what
we _shall_ do only the gods know."[103] He evidently referred to the
need of concentration. At that time the thin Prussian lines were
spread out over a front of eighty-five miles, the Saxons being near
Gera, the chief army, under Brunswick, at Erfurth, while Ruechel was so
far distant on the west that he could only come up at Jena just one
hour too late to avert disaster.

And yet with these weak and scattered forces, Prince Hohenlohe
proposed a bold move forward to the Main. Brunswick, on the other
hand, counselled a prudent defensive; but he could not, or would not,
enforce his plan; and the result was an oscillation between the two
extremes. Had he massed all his forces so as to command the valleys of
the Saale and Elster near Jena and Gera, the campaign might possibly
have been prolonged until the Russians came up. As it was, the allies
dulled the ardour of their troops by marches, counter-marches, and
interminable councils-of-war, while Napoleon's columns were threading
their way along those valleys at the average rate of fifteen miles a
day, in order to turn the allied left and cut the connection between
Prussia and Saxony.[104]

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