In later years Napoleon confessed that during the interval between the first and second Saxon campaigns he had been outwitted. His antagonists had, in his own language, "changed for the better"; at least they secured the war they so earnestly desired under conditions vastly more favorable to themselves than to their opponent. Both parties had been arming with might and main during the prolonged truce, but each member of the dynastic coalition now had the backing of a growing national enthusiasm, while Napoleon had to deal with waning zeal and an exhausted people. Thus, then, at the opening of the second campaign in Saxony, the allies had four hundred and thirty-five thousand men, and Napoleon but three hundred and fifty thousand. With this inferiority, it behooved the Emperor to use all his strategic powers, and he did so with a brilliancy never surpassed by him. Choosing the Elbe as his natural defensive line, Hamburg stood almost impregnable at one end, flanked to the southward by Magdeburg, Wittenberg, and Torgau, three mighty fortresses. Dresden, which was necessarily the focal point, was intrenched and palisaded for the protection of the army which was to be its main bulwark. Davout and Oudinot, with seventy thousand men, were to threaten Berlin, and, thereby drawing off as many as possible of the enemy, liberate the garrisons of Stettin and Kuestrin; they were then to beleaguer Spandau, push the foe across the Oder, and stand ready to fall on the flank of the coalition army. Napoleon himself, with the remaining two hundred and eighty thousand, was to await the onset of the combined Russian, Prussian, and Austrian forces.