The king was obliged to wait in silent impatience in his rooms at the Crown Hotel. The troops, in their quarters and cantonments, waited, and their impatience was not silent; on the contrary, the air resounded with good hearty oaths, and impatience was loudest and liveliest amongst the cavalry regiments, where the snorting horses pawed the ground, and the men thought they had but to spring into the saddle to be as ready to march as any cavalry in the world. They all waited. Count Platen waited for some relenting on the part of Prince Ysenburg. He had sent an explanation about the Prussian ultimatum from Göttingen to the prince, and he hoped it might be the means of recommencing negotiations; but on the second day the explanation itself came back, opened, it is true, but with the short and cold remark from Prince Ysenburg that after the declaration of hostilities all his diplomatic functions had ceased, and that he was no longer in a position to receive writings from the Hanoverian minister. So they all waited, and impatience waxed hotter in the army still unprepared to march; but so much had been neglected and left disorderly--so the new leaders of the army found and maintained--that, in spite of all this and all that, they still could not march. The courier Duve went on his way without meeting a Prussian soldier; he found the Hessian head-quarters not in Fulda, but in Hanau, and there General von Lossberg declared he could not alter the disposition of the army, as Prince Alexander of Hesse had already assumed the command,--besides the army of Hesse-Cassel was immovable. The courier hastened on; and in Frankfort he delivered to Baron Kübeck, the Austrian presidential ambassador to the confederacy, the despatches confided to him by Count Ingelheim, and he received from Herr von Kübeck an urgent memorial to Prince Alexander of Hesse, who was then in Darmstadt. Duve told the prince all about the position of the Hanoverian army, which was entirely unknown to him. Prince Alexander sent a message, that he would request the Bavarians, who were at Schweinfurth, to march towards the north, and that the eighth corps d'armée at Fulda should march upon Eschwege immediately, to stretch out a hand to the Hanoverian army; and finally, that the Hessian brigade should be pushed forwards from Hanau to Giessen as a demonstration. It was expected in Prince Alexander's head-quarters that the Hanoverian army would march immediately on the road to Fulda, there join the Hessian brigade, and unite with the eighth army corps. The road to Fulda was free, and only a portion of General Beyer's divided corps could have been met with, and it was improbable that it would have hazarded an encounter. This was the way they reckoned in Prince Alexander's head-quarters.