Against this ever-rising tide of national enthusiasm Napoleon pitted the resources which Gallic devotion still yielded up to his demands. They were surprisingly great. In less than half a year, after the loss of half a million of men, a new army nearly as numerous was marshalled under the imperial eagles. Thirty thousand tried troops were brought from Spain, thereby greatly relieving the pressure on Wellington. Italy and the garrison towns of the Empire sent forth a vast number. But the majority were young, untrained troops; and it was remarked that the conscripts born in the years of the Terror, 1793-4, had not the stamina of the earlier levies. Brave they were, superbly brave; and the Emperor sought by every means to breathe into them his own indomitable spirit. One of them has described how, on handing them their colours, he made a brief speech; and, at the close, rising in his stirrups and stretching forth his hand, he shot at them the question: "'You swear to guard them?' I felt, as we all felt, that he snatched from our very navel the cry, 'Yes, we swear.'" Truly, the Emperor could make boys heroes, but he could never repair the losses of 1812. Guns he possessed to the number of a thousand in his arsenals; but he lacked the thousands of skilled artillerymen: youths he could find and horses he could buy: but not for many a month had he the resistless streams of horsemen that poured over Prussia after Jena, or swept into the Great Redoubt at Borodino. Nevertheless, the energy which embattled a new host within five months of a seemingly overwhelming disaster, must be considered the most extraordinary event of an age fertile in marvels. "The imagination sinks back confounded," says Pasquier, "when one thinks of all the work to be done and the resources of all kinds to be found, in order to raise, clothe, and equip such an army in so short a time."