Meanwhile the First Consul was throwing his untiring energies into the enterprise of crushing his redoubtable foe.  He pushed on the naval preparations at all the dockyards of France, Holland, and North Italy; the great mole that was to shelter the roadstead at Cherbourg was hurried forward, and the coast from the Seine to the Rhine became “a coast of iron and bronze”—­to use Marmont’s picturesque phrase—­while every harbour swarmed with small craft destined for an invasion.  Troops were withdrawn from the Rhenish frontiers and encamped along the shores of Picardy; others were stationed in reserve at St. Omer, Montreuil, Bruges, and Utrecht; while smaller camps were formed at Ghent, Compiegne, and St. Malo.  The banks of the Elbe, Weser, Scheldt, Somme, and Seine—­even as far up as Paris itself—­rang with the blows of shipwrights labouring to strengthen the flotilla of flat-bottomed vessels designed for the invasion of England.  Troops, to the number of 50,000 at Boulogne under Soult, 30,000 at Etaples, and as many at Bruges, commanded by Ney and Davoust respectively, were organized anew, and by constant drill and exposure to the elements formed the tough nucleus of the future Grand Army, before which the choicest troops of Czar and Kaiser were to be scattered in headlong rout.  To all these many-sided exertions of organization and drill, of improving harbours and coast fortifications, of ship-building, testing, embarking, and disembarking, the First Consul now and again applied the spur of his personal supervision; for while the warlike enthusiasm which he had aroused against perfidious Albion of itself achieved wonders, yet work was never so strenuous and exploits so daring as under the eyes of the great captain himself.  He therefore paid frequent visits to the north coast, surveying with critical eyes the works at Boulogne, Calais, Dunkirk,

Ostend, and Antwerp.  The last-named port engaged his special attention.  Its position at the head of the navigable estuary of the Scheldt, exactly opposite the Thames, marked it out as the natural rival of London; he now encouraged its commerce and ordered the construction of a dockyard fitted to contain twenty-five battleships and a proportionate number of frigates and sloops.  Antwerp was to become the great commercial and naval emporium of the North Sea.  The time seemed to favour the design; Hamburg and Bremen were blockaded, and London for a space was menaced by the growing power of the First Consul, who seemed destined to restore to the Flemish port the prosperity which the savagery of Alva had swept away with such profit to Elizabethan London.  But grand as were Napoleon’s enterprises at Antwerp, they fell far short of his ulterior designs.  He told Las Cases at St. Helena that the dockyard and magazines were to have been protected by a gigantic fortress built on the opposite side of the River Scheldt, and that Antwerp was to have been “a loaded pistol held at the head of England.”