Since early morning Prosper had done nothing but urge on his horse, continually marching and counter-marching from one to the other end of the plateau of Illy. He and his comrades had been wakened one by one at dawn, without any trumpet call; and in order that they might make their coffee they had ingeniously contrived to screen each fire with a cloak so as not to set the Prussians on the alert. After that they had remained in ignorance of everything. They could certainly hear the guns, see the smoke, espy distant movements of infantry, but in the complete inaction in which they were left by the generals they knew nothing of the incidents of the battle, its importance and its results. Prosper, for his own part, was so sleepy that he could hardly keep up. Fatigue was the great suffering: bad nights, an accumulation of weariness, followed by invincible somnolence when the men rocked in the saddle. Prosper himself became a prey to hallucinations--fancied at times that he was on the ground, snoring on a mattress of pebbles; or dreamt that he was in a comfortable bed with clean white sheets. Sometimes he actually slept in the saddle for minutes together, becoming a mere moving thing, carried along according to the chances of the trot. In this way some of his comrades had occasionally fallen from their mounts. They were all so weary that the trumpet calls no longer awoke them; it was only by dint of kicking that they could be roused from oblivion and set upon their legs. 'What game are they having, what game are they having with us?' Prosper kept on saying, in the hope that by doing so he might shake off his irresistible torpor. The cannon had been thundering since six o'clock. A couple of comrades had been killed by a shell beside him while they were ascending a hill, and, farther on, three others had fallen to the ground, riddled with bullets which had come no one knew whence. This useless, dangerous military promenade across the battlefield was altogether exasperating. At last, however, at about one o'clock, he realised that the commanders had decided to get them killed in a decent fashion, at any rate. The whole of General Margueritte's division, three regiments of Chasseurs d'Afrique, one of Chasseurs de France, and one of Hussars had just been assembled in a fold of the ground, on the left of the road, and slightly below the Calvary. The trumpets had sounded 'Dismount,' and the officers thereupon gave orders to tighten the girths and secure the kits.