Russia had, meanwhile, made preparations for a war unanticipated by Napoleon. As early as 1811, a great Russian army stood ready for the invasion of Poland, and might, as there were at that time but few French troops in Germany, easily have advanced as far as the Elbe. It remained, nevertheless, in a state of inactivity.[2] Napoleon instantly prepared for war and fortified Dantzig. His continual proposals of peace, ever unsatisfactory to the ambition of the czar, remaining at length unanswered, he declared war. The Rhenish confederation followed as usual in his train, and Austria, from an interested motive, the hope of regaining in the East by Napoleon's assistance all she had lost by opposing him in the West, or that of regaining her station as the third European power when the resources of the two ruling powers, whose coalition had threatened her existence, had been exhausted by war. Prussia also followed the eagles of Napoleon: the Hardenberg party, with a view of conciliating him, and, like the Rhenish confederation, from motives of gain: the _Tugendbund_, which predominated in the army, with silent but implacable hate. In the spring of 1812, Napoleon, after leaving a sufficient force to prosecute the war with activity in Spain and to guard France, Italy, and Germany,[3] led half a million men to the Russian frontiers. Before taking the field, he convoked all the princes of Germany to Dresden, where he treated them with such extreme insolence as even to revolt his most favored and warmest partisans. Tears were seen to start in ladies' eyes, while men bit their lips with rage at the petty humiliations and affronts heaped on them by their powerful but momentary lord. The empress of Austria[4] and the king of Prussia[5] appear, on this occasion, to have felt this most acutely.