When the troops first made their appearance before the walls, Champagny was unwilling to grant them admittance.  The addle-brained Oberstein had confessed to him the enormous blunder which he had committed in his midnight treaty, and at the same time ingenuously confessed his intention of sending it to the winds.  The enemy had extorted from his dulness or his drunkenness a promise, which his mature and sober reason could not consider binding.  It is needless to say that Champagny rebuked him for signing, and applauded him for breaking the treaty.  At the same time its ill effects were already seen in the dissensions which existed among the German troops.  Where all had been tampered with, and where the commanders had set the example of infidelity, it would have been strange if all had held firm.  On the whole, however, Oberstein thought he could answer for his own troops:  Upon Van Ende’s division, although the crafty colonel dissembled his real intentions; very little reliance was placed.  Thus there was distraction within the walls.  Among those whom the burghers had been told to consider their defenders, there were probably many who were ready to join with their mortal foes at a moment’s warning.  Under these circumstances, Champagny hesitated about admitting these fresh troops from Brussels.  He feared lest the Germans, who knew themselves doubted, might consider themselves doomed.  He trembled, lest an irrepressible outbreak should occur within the walls, rendering the immediate destruction of the city by the Spaniards from without inevitable.  Moreover, he thought it more desirable that this auxiliary force should be disposed at different points outside, in order to intercept the passage of the numerous bodies of Spaniards and other mutineers, who from various quarters would soon be on their way to the citadel.  Havre, however, was so peremptory, and the burghers were so importunate, that Champagny was obliged to recede from his opposition before twenty-four hours had elapsed.  Unwilling to take the responsibility of a farther refusal, he admitted the troops through the Burgherhout gate, on Saturday, the 3rd of November, at ten o’clock in the morning.

The Marquis of Havre, as commander-in-chief, called a council of war.  It assembled at Count Oberstein’s quarters, and consulted at first concerning a bundle of intercepted letters which Havre had brought with him.  These constituted a correspondence between Sancho d’Avila with the heads of the mutiny at Alost, and many other places.  The letters were all dated subsequently to Don Sancho’s treaty with Oberstein, and contained arrangements for an immediate concentration of the whole available Spanish force at the citadel.