Like the rest of us, I had to sleep in the open, without any more shelter than a horse-cloth. Even the Duke was without a tent that night. He slept in camp with us, to set an example to his men, though he might well have gone to some house in the town. I liked the notion of sleeping out in the open. In fine warm summer weather, when the dew is not too heavy, it is pleasant, until a little before the dawn, when one feels uneasy, for some reason, as though an enemy were coming. Perhaps our savage ancestors, the earliest ancient Britons, who lived in hill-camps, high up, with their cattle round them, expected the attacks of their enemies always at a little before the dawn; so that, in time, the entire race learned to be wakeful then, lest the enemy should catch the slumberers, with flint-axe heads in the skull. It may be that to this day we feel the fear felt by so many generations of our ancestors. On this first night in camp, I found that many of the men were sleeping uneasily, for they did not know the secret of sleeping in the open. They did not know that to sleep comfortably in the open one must dig a little hole in the ground, about as big as a porridge bowl, to receive one's hipbone. If you do this, you sleep at ease, feeling nothing of the hardness of the bed. If you fail to do it, you wake all bruised, after a wretched night's tumbling; you ache all the next day. After grubbing up a hollow with my knife, I swathed myself in my blanket with a saddle for pillow. I watched the stars for a while, as they drifted slowly over me. The horses stamped, shaking their picket-ropes. The sentries walked their rounds, or came to the camp-fires to call their reliefs. The night was full of strange noises. The presence of so many sleeping men was strange. It was very beautiful, very solemn. It gave one a kind of awe to think that thus so many famous armies had slept before the battles of the world, before Pharsalia, before Chalons, before Hastings. Presently the murmuring became so slight that I fell asleep, forgetting everything, only turning uneasily from time to time, to keep the cool night wind from blowing on my cheeks so as to wake me. It must have been two in the morning when I was wakened by some armed men, evidently our sentries, who rolled me over without ceremony. “Wake up, young master,” they said, grinning. “You'm wanted. You be to get up to go a errand. You be a soldier now. You does your sleeping in peace-times when you be a soldier,” I sat up blinking my eyes, in the early light, thinking how nice t'other forty winks would be. “Heigho,” I yawned. “All right. I'm awake. What is it? What's the matter?” “Lord Grey be a wanting you, young master,” said one of the men. “Down there, where them horses be in the road.” I picked myself up at that, wishing for a basin of water into which I might shove my head.