Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 6.djvu/80

 252 WORKMEN AND HEROES were hailed with thunders of applause in street and theatre, and when the queen, clad in the uniform of her own Hussars, rode at their head through the city, she was greeted with passionate loyalty. Unhappily, Friedrich Wilhelm, hitherto too tardy, was now too precipitate. He had been passive while France crushed Austria, and Austria, suspicious and disabled, neither could nor would assist him. Russia, with better reason for dis- trust, responded generously to his appeal, but he did not wait for her promised aid. For all his haste, Napoleon, with 180,000 men, was nearing the Thuringian Forest before the Prussian troops left Berlin. They were very confident, those Prussian troops, and the shouting multitudes who watched the well-trained artil- lery and cavalry defiling by, hardly dreamed of disaster; yet it came almost at once. The Saxon corps, led by the king's cousin, Prince Louis, pushing on too fast, was surprised and surrounded, and the gallant young commander, the queen's dear friend, the idol of the army, fell while rallying his men. Louise, who had hurriedly joined the king from Weimar, could hardly be persuaded to leave him, but on the evening of October 13th he confided her to a cavalry escort, promising speedy tidings of the coming battle. As she threaded the lonely passes of the Hartz Mountains she heard the distant cannonading, and a broken sentence now and again fell from her lips : " We know that all things work together for good." Late in the misty October twilight she drove into Brunswick. At Brandenburg a courier brought the news her trembling heart awaited. All was lost ! Twenty thousand Prussians lay on the fields of Auer- stadt and Jena, and the French were already in Weimar. The king was alive, but two horses had been killed under him. Grief-stricken, travel-worn as she was, Louise must not halt. Before she reached Berlin her children had been sent to Schwedt-on-Oder. She followed thither, almost terrifying them by her changed, despairing looks. As soon as she could check her weeping, she told her boys all she knew about Prince Louis's death. " Do not only grieve for him. Be ready for Prussia's sake to meet death as he met it," and then, in burning, never-forgotten words, she bade them one day free their country and break the power of France. There seemed only a choice between utter destruction and utter submission, and yet when Napoleon demanded the cession of almost the whole kingdom, Friedrich Wilhelm and his wife agreed that "only determined resistance can save us." She was slowly rallying at Konigsberg from a fever caught in the crowded city, when the cry was raised of the coming French. Propped by pil- lows, swathed in shawls, she drove through blinding sleet to Memel, the one fortress still left to the king. At her first halting-place the wind whistled in through a broken window, and the melting snow dripped from the roof on to her bed. Her companions trembled for her, but she, calm and trustful, hailed as a good omen the sunshine which welcomed them within the walls of Memel. A week later Benningsen and his Russians, who had been wading knee-deep through Polish forests and fording swollen streams, always with 90,000 French- men in hot pursuit, turned to bay amid the frozen lakes and drifted snows of