In the teeth of the terrible news coming daily to Paris, Napoleon began preparations for another campaign. To every one he talked of victory as certain. Those who argued against the enterprise he silenced temporarily. “You should say,” he wrote Eugène, “and yourself believe, that in the next campaign I shall drive the Russians back across the Nieman.” With the first news of the passage of the Beresina chilling them, the Senate voted an army of three hundred and fifty thousand men; the allies were called upon; even the marine was obliged to turn men over to the land force. But something besides men was necessary. An army means muskets and powder and sabres, clothes and boots and headgear, wagons and cannon and caisson; and all these it was necessary to manufacture afresh. The task was gigantic; but before the middle of April it was completed, and the emperor was ready to join his army. The force against which Napoleon went in 1813 was the most formidable, in many respects, he had ever encountered. Its strength was greater. It included Russia, England, Spain, Prussia, and Sweden, and the allies believed Austria would soon join them. An element of this force more powerful than its numbers was its spirit. The allied armies fought Napoleon in 1813 as they would fight an enemy of freedom. Central Europe had come to feel that further French interference was intolerable. The war had become a crusade. The extent of this feeling is illustrated by an incident in the Prussian army. In the war of 1812 Prussia was an ally of the French, but at the end of the year General Yorck, who commanded a Prussian division, went over to the enemy. It was a dishonorable action from a military point of view, but his explanation that he deserted as “a patriot acting for the welfare of his country” touched Prussia; and though the king disavowed the act, the people applauded it. Throughout the German states the feeling against Napoleon was bitter. A veritable crusade had been undertaken against him by such men as Stein, and most of the youth of the country were united in the _Tagendbund_, or League of Virtue, which had sworn to take arms for German freedom. When Alexander followed the French across the Nieman, announcing that he came bringing “deliverance to Europe,” and calling on the people to unite against the “common enemy,” he found them quick to understand and respond. Thus, in 1813 Napoleon did not go against kings and armies, but against _peoples_. No one understood this better than he did himself, and he counselled his allies that it was not against the foreign enemy alone that they had to protect themselves. “There is one more dangerous to be feared—the spirit of revolt and anarchy.” CHAPTER XX CAMPAIGN OF 1813—CAMPAIGN OF 1814—ABDICATION