Then the Russians came. How could this starved, benumbed, frightened wreck of a great army stand before the Cossacks? The story of that "retreat" could never be written. Men, hollow-eyed and gaunt with misery, flung away their arms and fought with each other like wolves for a morsel of bread or a dead horse. On the 5th of December Napoleon quietly slipped away, leaving the freezing, famishing victims of his ambition to make their own way back as they could; knowing that for all, save a fragment, of that mighty host the snow must be a winding sheet. When Frederick William III. accepted that last humiliation and sent a Prussian army in the train of the conqueror to fight his battles, while Frenchmen guarded Prussians at home, the indignation was deep and wide-spread. Three of his best generals, Blücher and two others, resigned. The Prussian contingent in the great invading army, which was under General York, had escaped many of the horrors of the retreat; and had returned with seventeen thousand out of the sixty thousand which had entered Russia. This Prussian commander, as soon as he crossed the line with his soldiers, on his own responsibility abandoned the French and arranged a treaty of neutrality with the Russian general. Frederick disavowed the act, but it was received by the people of Prussia with wild enthusiasm. York called an assembly together at Königsberg, and boldly ordered that all men capable of bearing arms should be mustered into the Prussian army. The force of public sentiment revealed by this was too overwhelming for the King to oppose. It swiftly swelled into a popular uprising in which all classes took part. It was the first great patriotic movement in Germany; and to Prussia belongs the glory of having initiated it. It was the Prussian people who converted their whole male population into an army and their country into an arsenal, and with one voice, and animated by one heart, refused longer to bear the degradation put upon them by their King. Hitherto the people had been led by their rulers. Now for a brief time they were going to be leaders, reluctantly followed by kings and princes. Within five months two hundred and seventy thousand men were under arms and Frederick had been obliged to declare war against the Emperor of the French, in alliance with Russia and Sweden. Austria remained neutral, but the Rheinbund, with only two exceptions, still held to France. Napoleon by the irresistible magic of his influence assembled an army nearly as large as the one he had just sacrificed in Russia. The campaign opened in April (1813). By June his star seemed to be waning, and Austria offered to mediate a peace. Napoleon insulted Metternich, who brought the proposals, and Francis II. joined the allies against his son-in-law. In October the end arrived.