It is in his chariot, to which he had been carried when stunned by the boulder, that Hector now calls for a chariot charge on the fosse and wall, which Apollo makes possible by levelling the wall into the dyke.[16] After mixed fighting, the spear of Aias is lopped in twain by the sword of Hector, and fire is thrown into the ship of Protesilaus. This is the moment that Achilles has prayed and longed for since the first book of the poem. Addressing Agamemnon, he then swore a great oath by the sceptre that "longing for Achilles shall come upon the Achaeans one and all, when multitudes fall dying before manslaying Hector."[17] In the same book he bids Thetis pray to Zeus to "hem the Achaeans among the sterns of their ships, given over to slaughter."[18] When the Embassy sought Achilles in Book ix., with the offers of Agamemnon, this dire need had not fallen on the Achaeans, and Achilles rejected their prayers. But he promised to fight if Hector, as he burned the ships, came to those of the Myrmidons.[19] Hector never came so far; for[20] though Achilles kept the letter of his vow in Book ix., and did not arm, he sent Patroclus forth in Achilles' armour, at the head of the Myrmidons, and their charge on rear and flank drove the Trojans far from the ships and the wall. This is a brief summary of the main movements in the engagement, up to the moment when Achilles let slip the Myrmidons. We see that, setting aside the interferences of gods, and the pardonable exaggeration of the prowess of favourite heroes, we have a set of as natural pictures of the flux and reflux of battle-tides as if we were reading about Waterloo. The character of the engagements is conditioned by the use of dismounted men-at-arms as heavy infantry, whether employed in lines of resistance, in squares or schiltroms of levelled spears, or in columns of attack. The fighting men in view are the gentry, stiffening "the host," the _λαός_ of whose equipment we know little, while the archery of light-armed bowmen, such as the Locrians, is not without its effect. But the bows are short, and the arrow is drawn only to the breast, not, as by Egyptian and Assyrian archers, on the monuments, and by the archers of mediaeval England, to the ear. Chariots are not employed, in Homer, as on the Egyptian monuments, in charging squadrons, closely and neatly arranged, but in the flight and the pursuit, and to bear the prince rapidly to distant points of the field.[21]