TILSIT Even now matters were not hopeless for the allies.

Crowds of stragglers rejoined the colours at Tilsit, and Tartar reinforcements were near at hand.

The gallant Gneisenau was still holding out bravely at Kolberg against Brune's divisions; and two of the Silesian fortresses had not yet surrendered.

Moreover, Austria seemed about to declare against Napoleon, and there were hopes that before long England would do something.

But, above all, since the war was for Prussia solely an affair of honour,[134] it deeply concerned Alexander's good name not to desert an ally to whom he was now pledged by all the claims of chivalry until satisfactory terms could be gained.
But Alexander's nature had not as yet been strengthened by misfortune and religious convictions: it was a sunny background of flickering enthusiasms, flecked now and again by shadows of eastern cunning or darkened by warlike ambitions--a nature in which the sentimentalism of Rousseau and the passions of a Boyar alternately gained the mastery.
No realism is more crude than that of the disillusionized idealist; and for months the young Czar had seen his dream of a free and happy Europe fade away amidst the smoke of Napoleon's guns and the mists of English muddling.