Comparatively calm intervals he had throughout the fight, intervals in which for one reason or another, he was a momentary spectator of the scenes in progress all around him. It was these scenes that lived in his memory; even at the time they moved him more than those in which he had a hand. Once the Guards were fighting on the other side of the Sandbag Battery, between it and the long lip of the ravine; he had to wait for accounts of the battle long afterward to learn how they had got there, or what relation this phase of the action bore to the whole. At the time he was one of a handful of furious Grenadiers, fighting for their lives in the fresh fog which their powder had brought down upon them, and a moment came which Denis felt must be his last. He had tripped headlong over a dead Russian, and a quick Russian stood over him, aiming his bayonet with one hand while the other grasped the stock high above his head. But a British officer flung out his revolver within a few feet of the deliberate gray-coat, and it was the sensation of being shot from behind at such a moment that Denis anticipated more poignantly than that of being transfixed where he lay. The man fell dead on top of him. Anon he saw his friend the red-headed sergeant, being led captive down the hill by two of the enemy, suddenly wrest the carbine from one of them, club them both with it, and bayonet one after the other before they could rise. That also made Denis shudder. And yet he was biting a cartridge at the moment, having killed with his last, at arm's length, a splendid fellow who had grasped his bayonet while he poised his own. Now the Sandbag Battery seemed out of sight, because it was quite another thing from this side, and now they were back in it, sweeping the Russians out once more. Denis did not know that the work had changed hands, half-a-dozen times before his company came into action, but even he saw the uselessness of a redoubt from which our soldiers could only see one way, and that in the direction of their own lines. The dead, indeed, now lay piled to the height of any banquette. No wilful foot was set on them. It was only the living for whom there was neither shrift nor pity on that bloody field.