At the foot of the hill lay wasteland over which a few groups of our Cossack scouts were moving.

Suddenly on the road at the top of the high ground, artillery and troops in blue uniform were seen.

These were the French.

A group of Cossack scouts retired down the hill at a trot.

All the officers and men of Denisov's squadron, though they tried to talk of other things and to look in other directions, thought only of what was there on the hilltop, and kept constantly looking at the patches appearing on the skyline, which they knew to be the enemy's troops.