The racing, crouching crowd had dived into the foremost trench and had reappeared again before it was discerned by the Russian sentries; but a hundred yards away from the foot of the glacis, the whole advance was caught and swept and twisted, as by a whirlwind, by a hail of gunshot, canister and rifle fire. The half-melted, new-fallen snow clung to the sloping glacis of the Redoubt, and made a greyish background of dim light against which a watcher could perceive not only the whole motion of the line, but the gesture of any single figure in it. Hate and interest and admiration alike prompted Polson’s eyes to follow the slim, active figure with the waving sword which silently beckoned on his followers. The Redoubt opened, as it were, with an earthquake crash, and all the black front of it went fiery red and yellow, and at the first discharge of this inferno, the figure with the flourished sabre in his right hand fell prone. The double line of the invaders shook and wavered from right to left, and men dropped amongst them as if the scythe of Death were literally sweeping there. The lines advanced, wavered, paused, turned, turned again, advanced again with mad cheering, scarce heard amid the rattle of musketry and the roaring of the guns; and finally broke and ran, utterly routed. The onlooker had no part in this conflict except to bite and ram down a cartridge or two and to send a shot more or less at random into the black oblong of the opposing fort; but clinging with his feet on that precarious muddy ladder, and with his elbows to the frozen turf, he saw clearly the convulsive gesture with which De Blacquaire lifted his sabre in a last effort to wave on his men. Man is a very complex creature, and he will not be finally analysed and done with until this planet is very much older than it was in the nineteenth Christian century. Whether it was hate, or personal pride, or a sudden flash of admiration for a man whom he had hitherto despised, Polson Jervase could not have told you to his dying day.