All this may be fable, and probably is, but what we know of William tends to show it was likely. Even omens he turned to advantage. He fell on landing, but, rising with his hands full of English soil, he exclaimed, “What is the matter? I have thus taken seisin of this land, and so far as it reaches, by the splendour of God, it is yours and mine.” He put on his mailed shirt back in front, only to laughingly exclaim, as he reversed it, “A good sign and a lucky one: a duke shall this day be turned into a king.” All this evidences genius for war such as Harold never had. His bravery is undoubted, but mere bravery counts little against bravery _plus_ skill. So it was that, armed with sword and priest-blessed relics, protected by the “consecrated” banner of Pope Alexander, and bearing on his finger a ring set “with one of St. Peter’s hairs,” William went into battle with not merely an army of sixty thousand men, to whom success meant profit, but to whom death meant falling in a holy cause, and to whom the very battle itself was a crusade. Everything was in his favour, when, singing the battle hymn of Roland, he moved his three lines against the hill on which Harold’s royal standard was planted. The details of the battle are of little interest. It was one of hand-to-hand fighting. “The English axe, in the hand of King Harold, or any other strong man, cut down the horse and his rider by a single blow.” The personal element entered largely, as it did later, into the contest. The fall of the leader led to the fall of the army. Where Harold was, where his standard flew, there was the “tactical key” of the field of battle. True tactics do not depend on the death of the king, or the capture of so many yards of silk embroidery. But true tactics, rightly understood, were not in these days. The duke formed his army in two wings and a centre, each of which seems to have advanced covered by archers, supported by heavy infantry, and strengthened by the main arm of battle, then the mailed cavalry. The left wing, composed of men from Ponthieu, Maine, and Brittany, was led by Alan; the right, adventurers from Picardy and France, was directed by Roger de Montgomery; and the centre, comprising the flower of the Norman host, was commanded by William himself. The bowmen covered the advance by arrow fire, and seemed to have produced little effect; but towards the end of the day they, possibly and apparently from the flanks,[4] poured in a vertical fire, and so covered, without interfering with, the attack of the main bodies, and it was from this, in a sense, long-ranged fire that Harold received the wound that disabled him, caused his death and the ruin of the Saxon cause.