This was the feeling which the Emperor ruthlessly exploited. He decreed the enrolment of a great force of National Guards, exacted further levies for the regular army, and ordered a _levée en masse_ for the eastern Departments. The difficulties in his way were enormous. But he flung himself at the task with incomparable _verve_. Soldiers were wanting: youths were dragged forth, even from the royalist districts of the extreme north and west and south. Money was wanting: it was extorted from all quarters, and Napoleon not only lavished 55,000,000 francs from his own private hoard, but seized that of his parsimonious mother.[397] Cannon, muskets, uniforms were wanting: their manufacture was pushed on with feverish haste: Napoleon ordered his War Office to "procure all the cloth in France, good and bad," so as to have 200,000 uniforms ready by the end of February; and he counted on having half a million of effectives in the field at the close of spring. Among these he reckoned--so, at least, he wrote to Melzi--"nearly 200,000" French soldiers from Arragon, Catalonia, and at Bayonne. Even if we allow for his desire to encourage his officials in Italy, the estimate is curious. Wellington at that time, it is true, had lessened his numbers by sending back across the Pyrenees all his Spanish troops, whose atrocities endangered that good understanding with the French peasantry which our great leader, for political motives, was determined to cultivate.[398] Yet, despite the shrinkage in numbers, he drove the French from the banks of the River Nive, and inflicted on them severe losses in desperate conflicts near Bayonne (December 9th-13th). In fact, the intrenched camp in front of that town was now the sole barrier to Wellington's advance northwards, and it was with difficulty that Soult clung to this position. The peasantry, too, finding that they were far better treated by Wellington's troops than by their own soldiers, began to favour the allied cause, with results that will shortly appear. Yet these disquieting symptoms did not daunt Napoleon; for he now based his hopes of resisting the British advance on a compact which he had concluded with Ferdinand VII., the rightful King of Spain.