midnight
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 .