the Empire sent forth a vast number.
But the majority were young, untrained troops; and it was remarked
that the conscripts born in the years of the Terror, 1793-4, had not
the stamina of the earlier levies. Brave they were, superbly brave;
and the Emperor sought by every means to breathe into them his own
indomitable spirit. One of them has described how, on handing them
their colours, he made a brief speech; and, at the close, rising in
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.[2