But also on King Lazar's side, many Serbs, Bosnians, and Albanians were banded together. They must have made a formidable array, for legends record that at the last moment, Amurath hesitated to attack the allied hosts, and that his doubts were only allayed by a dream which came to one of his counsellors, bidding him to "conquer the infidels." Lazar, also, seems to have been in touch with the heavenly powers. They, metaphorically, rang him up just before the battle should have begun, and asked him if he would rather have a heavenly, or an earthly kingdom. If he chose the latter, he would be victorious over the Sultan, but he could not have both, and if he wanted a heavenly kingdom, he must submit to being defeated by the Sultan. Lazar appears to have asked the exchange to hold the line whilst he made up his mind; he finally decided upon the Kingdom of Heaven. The poets seem universally to have approved his choice, but though it may have been wisdom for himself, it was bad luck for his army, his dukes, and his nine brothers-in-law, who perished with him. He should either not have fought, or he should have fought meaning to win. And now, when we set foot upon that steppe, it seemed that those 500 years that had passed since the first Kossovo day, had been expunged. For the Serbian Army, now defeated by the allies of those same Turks, was still, like a ghost from the past, fleeing across the silent plain. The panoplies had fallen from their horses, the armour from their men: it was now a skeleton army, in skeleton clothes, but it was carrying the same soul, of the same nation, to guard as a holy treasure, till the day of the Lord shall come. In the darkness, the physical wonders of the place would have been hidden, but for the white snow which outlined the low hills, and transformed their rolling ridges into the foamy waves of a tempestuous sea, which seemed, on both sides of the narrow road, to be advancing in tidal waves to engulf us, as we moved slowly onwards, co-partners in that spectral flight. At every few yards, corpses of oxen and of horses, and bodies of oxen and of horses not yet dead, but unable to rise, kept the image of Death foremost in the mind; and then, as though to give her cold, green-blooded sanction to the scene, the moon rose over the hillocks, sailed defiantly across the sky, revealed dead horrors of the present, and recalled to the eye of the imagination, horrors which had lain hidden during 500 years.