The men were wearied with all their marching and skirmishing, and in order to have them in fighting trim on the morrow, Charles had ordered all alike to turn in and refresh themselves. The exhausted troops gladly obeyed this injunction. Charles was disarmed and sleeping, so, too, were Philip de Commines and the few attendants that lay within the narrow ducal chamber. Only a dozen pickets mounted guard in the room over Charles's little apartment, and kept their tired eyes open by playing at dice. On that Saturday night when Charles was thus prudently gathering strength for the final tussle, the people of Liege also indulged in repose, counting on Sunday being a day of rest, that is, the major part of the burgher folk did within city limits. But another plan was on foot among some of the inhabitants of an outlying region. An attack on the Burgundian camp was planned by a band from Franchimont, a wild and wooded district, south of the episcopal see. The natives there had all the characteristics of mountaineers, although the heights of their rugged country reached only modest altitudes.[2] These invaders were fortunate in obtaining as guides the owners of the very houses requisitioned for the lodgings of the two princes. Straight to their goal they progressed through paths quite unknown to the foe, and therefore unwatched. The highlanders made a mistake in not rushing headlong to the royal lodgings, where in the first confusion they might have accomplished their design upon the lives of Louis and of Charles or at least have taken the two prisoners. But a pause at a French nobleman's tent created a disturbance which roused the archers in the granary. The latter sallied out, to meet with a fierce counter-attack. In order to confuse them the mountaineers echoed the Burgundian cries, _Vive Bourgogne, vive le roy et tuez, tuez_, and they were not always immediately identified by their harsh Liege accent. The highlanders were far outnumbered by the Burgundians, and it was only by dint of their desperate courage and by reason of the pitchy darkness and of the locality with its unknown roughness that the former inflicted the damage that they did. Commines and his fellows helped the duke into his cuirass, and stood by his person, while the king's bodyguard of Scottish archers "proved themselves good fellows, who never budged from their master's feet and shot arrow upon arrow out into the darkness, wounding more Burgundians than Liegeois." The first to fall was Charles's own host, the guide of the marauders to his own cottage door. There were many more victims and no mercy. It was, indeed, an encounter characterised by the passions of war and the conditions of a mere burglarious attack on private houses.