In return for secret assurances that he might eventually regain his Illyrian provinces, the Emperor Francis had pledged himself by treaty to send 30,000 men to guard Napoleon's flank in Volhynia.

But everyone at St.Petersburg knew that this aid, along with that of Prussia, was forced and hollow.[255] The example of Spain and the cautious strategy of Wellington had dissolved the spell of French invincibility; and the Czar was resolved to trust to the toughness of his people and the defensive strength of his boundless plains.

The time of the Macks, the Brunswicks, the Bennigsens was past: the day of Wellington and of truly national methods of warfare had dawned.
Yet the hosts now moving against Alexander bade fair to overwhelm the devotion of his myriad subjects and the awful solitudes of his steppes.

It was as if Peter the Hermit had arisen to impel the peoples of Western and Central Europe once more against the immobile East.
Frenchmen to the number of 200,000 formed the kernel of this vast body: 147,000 Germans from the Confederation of the Rhine followed the new Charlemagne: nearly 80,000 Italians under Eugene formed an Army of Observation: 60,000 Poles stepped eagerly forth to wrest their nation's liberty from the Muscovite grasp; and Illyrians, Swiss, and Dutch, along with a few Spaniards and Portuguese, swelled the Grand Army to a total of 600,000 men.

Nor was this all.