It may be doubted whether 14,000 pressed men, even though some of them might otherwise have found their way to the enemy, compensated Prussia for the loyal veterans who fell at Lobositz. Throughout the war Frederick found no servants less reliable than the Saxons whom he had impressed and no foes more bitter than their countrymen who escaped. As for Saxony itself, it is true that if war must come, which Podewils regarded as dubious, Prussia derived much strength from her possession of it. But Frederick’s treatment of Saxony removed all possibility of escaping not only from a war, but from war upon the scale that he professed to expect. The spectacle of the suffering King inflamed all his enemies. As an exile in Warsaw Augustus was a more valuable ally to Austria than he could have been in Dresden. He made it absurd for Frederick to pose as the defender of German princes against the Hapsburg. In January, 1757, a majority of those princes, assembled in Diet at Ratisbon, solemnly commissioned the Hapsburg to marshal their corporate might against the Prussian aggressor. Frederick had treated the defensive alliance between the two Empresses as a conspiracy against himself. Early in February it became such; save that what he might once have termed a conspiracy now wore the aspect of a crusade. All the North was summoned to unite with Austria in curbing Prussia for ever, and Russia bound herself to keep 80,000 men in the field until the lost provinces had been regained. Frederick had even performed what Kaunitz and the Pompadour could not completely accomplish. France now gave in her whole-hearted adhesion to the league for the recovery of Silesia and Glatz. She pledged herself to pay Austria a heavy annual subsidy, to place 105,000 French troops in the field, and to enlist 10,000 Germans. The history of the negotiations, which were prolonged till May 1, 1757, shows how real were the difficulties to be overcome before Bourbon and Hapsburg could unite. In May, 1757, when the new campaign began, Frederick thus stood face to face with what it is hardly an exaggeration to term a world in arms. He, and no other, had brought Prussia to this pass. A coalition unprecedented in history was the result of the aggressions of 1740 and 1756. All the world believed that the hour of reckoning had struck and that the Third Silesian War would bring the punishment from which chance had delivered the King who made the First.