The zigzags and trenches in which Jack held a proprietary interest were creeping nearer and nearer to the town, and he was well satisfied with the progress made. But on one other point he and his fellow Engineers were anything but content. The right flank of their position, opposite the Inkerman cliffs and caves and very close to the road by which the Russian forces got in and out of the town, seemed to their experienced eyes but ill-defended and not incapable of assault from the lower ground. And such assault, if successful, must of necessity entail the most serious consequences on the Allies. They spoke of the matter, harped on it, but nothing was done, save the erection of a small sand-bag battery on the slope of the hill, and no guns were mounted on it lest the sight of them should tempt the Russians to come up and take them; and so--that grim and deadly hand-to-hand struggle in the early morning fog, known as the Battle of Inkerman--which, for all who were in it, for ever stripped the fifth of November of its traditional glamour, and left in its place a blind, black horror--a nightmare struggle against overwhelming odds, which seemed as if it would never come to an end. Oh, we won; we won of course--but, as we do win, at most dreadful cost which foresight might have saved. Jack was in the midst of it. He had just come up from the front, soaked with rain and caked with mud, and was making a forlorn attempt at cold breakfast before lying down, when heavy firing, in the very place where they had all feared sooner or later to hear it, took him that way in haste to see what was up. He could see nothing for the fog and rain, but a hail of shot and shell was coming from the heights across the valley and he bent and ran for the shelter of the sand-bag battery. And for many hours--and every hour an age--the sandbag battery was "absolute hell," as he told Jim that night, with a very sober face and no enthusiasm. Endless hosts of gray-coats came surging up out of the fog, yelling like demons, and fighting with their bayonets as they had never fought before. They were slaughtered in heaps, but there always seemed just as many coming on, yelling and stabbing, and our men yelled and stabbed, and the piles of dead grew high. But Jack saw very little. It was all a wild pandemonium of clashing steel and yells and groans and curses, with streaming rain above, swirling fog all round, and what felt like a ploughed field heaped with dead bodies below. He picked up a rifle and bayonet, and jabbed and smashed at the gray-coats with the rest. Through the fog he could hear the same deadly sounds all round, but whether they were winning or losing, or indeed what was going on, he had not the slightest idea. All he knew was that hosts of Russians kept on coming up in front out of the fog, that they had to be stopped at any cost, and that, from the time it was lasting, the cost must be awful.