And these Persians were a kindly people. That is one of the causes of their victories. In the great story we find this often repeated--that a people living in a mountainous country, in a severe climate, and in surroundings which make their lives difficult and their food hard to get, come down on the inhabitants of a country where the soil is more fertile, the climate milder, and life altogether easier, and drive these easy-going people out before them as if they were sheep running away before wolves. It is a happening which teaches the lesson that the strongest, the most effective, kind of men are those that are accustomed to hardship. But it is quite clear from all we have seen that those whom the Persians thus conquered were practised warriors. They were constantly fighting. The {116} Persians, however, seem to have come upon them with a kind of fighting to which they were not altogether accustomed. The difference between their methods was chiefly that the Persians were so much quicker in movement. They were fine archers, and they were very fine horsemen. It was this last, their horsemanship, which seems to have been one of the great secrets of their success. They had archers both on horse and on foot, but on horse especially. Their method was to dash down upon the enemy in a swift attack, the cavalry opening out to let the archers on foot shoot their arrows. Then, when they had harassed the enemy with this swift charge, it was not their way to come to close quarters with him, at all events at the first onset, but rather to retire as quickly as they came on, to re-form, and to come back to the attack again. The enemy, on their retirement, if he did not know their way of fighting, was rather apt to think that they were retreating altogether and were giving up the attack. Then the enemy was inclined to start off in pursuit. That was exactly what suited the Persians, for it meant that when they returned for the next attack they found the enemy more broken up than before and less able to resist. It was by repeated onsets of this nature that they got the formation of an opposing army knocked to pieces; and then, in a final attack, this time pressed closely home, they might, and they generally did, defeat him. But if it was thus a new style of fighting that the Persians brought with them from the east, they also found themselves encountering a mode of defence against their attack which was strange to them. And this mode of defence came from the west.