By one of those surprising fatuities which distinguished this particular campaign almost above all others in which the English private soldier has been engaged, an attack which was ordered for black midnight was ready just in the grey of dawn, and Polson’s ear caught a whispered word of command here and there, and a noise of careful footsteps. The trench of the second parallel was ten feet deep, but there was a ladder of foot-holes just behind him, and he turned and climbed, digging his fingers into the half-frozen turf on the Russian side. There was the grim Redoubt at which the English guns had hammered in vain this many and many a day, still solidly silhouetted against the clearing sky of morning, dark and lowering, quiet as death and yet from old experience holding a threat in the entrails of it. The men--three or four thousand of them, as one might guess--climbed into the trench of the first parallel and were lost to sight. They emerged crouching, and raced across the space which intervened between them and the second, where Polson’s own post lay. They were down like a dumb wind on the one side and up again on the other, and raced, crouching, for the first, into which they again disappeared. The man who shouldered Polson from his place, and whose face as he went by might be distinctly seen, was Major de Blacquaire. ‘Leading a forlorn hope, you devil, are you?’ said the Sergeant to himself; but the words were silent, and he felt a simple throb of admiration for the set mouth and resolute eyes of the man who had climbed past him, and wished himself in his place.