Besides, such advantages were not easily to be obtained over Buonaparte, who was not a man to be amused by words when the moment of action arrived. Four days before the delivery of the Prussian note to his minister, Buonaparte had left Paris, and was personally in the field collecting his own immense forces, and urging the contribution of those contingents which the Confederate Princes of the Rhine were bound to supply. His answer to the hostile note of the King of Prussia was addressed, not to that monarch, but to his own soldiers. "They have dared to demand," he said, "that we should retreat at the first sight of their army. Fools! could they not reflect how impossible they found it to destroy Paris, a task incomparably more easy than to tarnish the honour of the Great Nation! Let the Prussian army expect the same fate which they encountered fourteen years ago, since experience has not taught them, that while it is easy to acquire additional dominions and increase of power, by the friendship of France, her enmity, on the contrary, which will only be provoked by those who are totally destitute of sense and reason, is more terrible than the tempests of the ocean." The King of Prussia had again placed at the head of his armies the Duke of Brunswick. In his youth, this general had gained renown under his uncle Prince Ferdinand. But it had been lost in the retreat from Champagne in 1792, where he had suffered himself to be out-manœuvred by Dumouriez and his army of conscripts. He was seventy-two years old, and is said to have added the obstinacy of age to others of the infirmities which naturally attend it. He was not communicative, nor accessible to any of the other generals, excepting Mollendorf; and this generated a disunion of councils in the Prussian camp, and the personal dislike of the army to him by whom it was commanded. [Sidenote: PLANS OF THE CAMPAIGN.] The plan of the campaign, formed by this ill-fated prince, seems to have been singularly injudicious, and the more so, as it is censurable on exactly the same grounds as that of Austria in the late war. Prussia could not expect to have the advantage of numbers in the contest. It was, therefore, her obvious policy to procrastinate and lengthen out negotiation, until she could have the advantage of the Russian forces. Instead of this, it was determined to rush forward towards Franconia, and oppose the Prussian army alone to the whole force of France, commanded by their renowned Emperor.