his stirrups and stretching forth his hand, he shot at them the question:  “‘You swear to guard them?’ I felt, as we all felt, that he snatched from our very navel the cry, ‘Yes, we swear.’” Truly, the Emperor could make boys heroes, but he could never repair the losses of 1812.  Guns he possessed to the number of a thousand in his arsenals; but he lacked the thousands of skilled artillerymen:  youths he could find and horses he could buy:  but not for many a month had he the resistless streams of horsemen that poured over Prussia after Jena, or swept into the Great Redoubt at Borodino.  Nevertheless, the energy which embattled a new host within five months of a seemingly overwhelming disaster, must be considered the most extraordinary event of an age fertile in marvels.  “The imagination sinks back confounded,” says Pasquier, “when one thinks of all the work to be done and the resources of all kinds to be found, in order to raise, clothe, and equip such an army in so short a time.”

While immersed in this prodigious task, the Emperor heard, with some surprise but with no dismay, the news of Prussia’s armaments and disaffection.  At first he treats it as a passing freak which will vanish with firm treatment.  “Remain at Berlin as long as you can,” he writes to Eugene, March 5th.  “Make examples for the sake of discipline.  At the least insult, whether from a village or a town, were it from Berlin itself, burn it down.”  The chief thing that still concerns him is the vagueness of Eugene’s reports, which leave him no option but to get news about his troops in Germany from the English newspapers.  “Do not forget,” he writes again on March 14th, “that Prussia has only four millions of people.  She never in her most prosperous times had more than 150,000 troops.  She will not have more than 40,000 now.”  That, indeed, was the number to which he had limited her after Tilsit; and he was unable to conceive that Scharnhorst’s plan of passing men into a reserve would send triple that force into the field.[287] As for the Russians, he writes, they are thinned by disease, and must spread out widely in order to besiege the many fortresses between the Vistula and the Elbe.  Indeed, he assures his ally, the King of Bavaria, that it will be good policy to let them advance:  “The farther they advance, the more certain is their ruin.”  Sixty thousand troops were being led by Bertrand from Italy into Bavaria.[288] These, along with the corps of Eugene and Davoust, would crush the Russian columns.  And, while the allies were busy in Saxony, Napoleon proposed to mass a great force under the shelter of the Harz Mountains, cross the Elbe near Havelberg, make a rush for the relief of Stettin, and stretch a hand to the large French force beleaguered at Danzig.