. Surely there was the sound
of church bells, and there was a rush towards the pleasant noise. It was
only a man from the smithy who happened to have a musical ear and had
rigged up a kind of gallows from which he had hung carbine and rifle
barrels of varying lengths and calibre, on the which he was beating with
an iron rod. The sulky dull beginning of the dawn on Christmas Day, and
there in the trenches the Christmas bells ringing as they might have
rung in any village church in old England, two thousand miles away. And
the hearts of the listeners rose to their throats, and men were quiet
whilst the music sounded. The notes reached far, and fell on many a
drowsy ear, conjuring up visions in the half-slumbering minds of humble
whitewashed village steeples, far and far away. Polson's contingent,
drawn from a distance of some two hundred yards, stuffed that ingenious
musician with half-cold roast pork, and left him well rewarded for his
toils.

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