and resolute eyes of the man who had
climbed past him, and wished himself in his place.

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.

But though the motives which inspired him were very wildly mixed and
very uncertain in their origin, there is no doubt whatever as to the
deed to which amongst themselves they inspired him that Christmas
morning. The Malakoff belched hell. The flying crowds hustled him and
threw him twice or thrice. But he was on his feet again, racing to