We may trace the same motive again in the figures of fierce birds or beasts depicted on flags and shields and helmets, whence they have descended with less harmful purpose to crests and armorial bearings. Thus the Cimbri, whom Marius defeated, wore on their plume-covered helmets the head of some fierce animal with its mouth open, vainly hoping thereby to intimidate the Romans. The latter, before it became customary to display the images of their emperors on their standards, reared aloft the menacing representations of dragons, tigers, wolves, and such like; and the figure of a dragon in use among the Saxons at the time of the Conquest, and after that event retained by the early Norman princes among the ensigns of war,[285] may reasonably be attributed to the same motive. The legend of St. George killing the Dragon, if it is not a survival of Theseus and the Minotaur, very likely originated as a myth, intended to be explanatory of the custom. Lastly, under this head should be mentioned Villani’s account of the English armour worn in the thirteenth century, where he describes how the pages studied to keep it clean and bright, so that when their masters came to action their armour shone like looking glass and gave them a more terrifying appearance.[286] Was the result here again the motive, and must we look for the primary cause of the great solicitude still paid to the brightness of accoutrements to the hope thereby to add a pang the more to the terror desirable to instil into an enemy? Such were some of the artificial supports supplied to bravery in former times. But there is all the difference in the world between the bravery appealed to by our ancestors and that required since the revolution effected in warfare by the invention of gunpowder. Before that epoch, the use of catapults, bows, or other missiles did not deduct from the paramount importance of personal valour. The brave soldier of olden times displayed the bravery of a man who defied a force similar or equal to his own, and against which the use of his own right hand and intellect might help him to prevail; but his modern descendant pits his bravery mainly against hazard, and owes it to chance alone if he escape alive from a battle. However higher in kind may be the bravery required to face a shower of shrapnel than to contend against swords and spears, it is assuredly a bravery that involves rather a blind trust in luck than a rational trust in personal fortitude.