nd. All the host
joined. Mardonius led straight against the Spartan right wing where
Pausanias's life-guard marched.

* * * * * * *

Old soldiers of Lacedaemon fighting their battles in the after days, when a
warrior of Plataea was as a god to each youth in Hellas, would tell how the
Persian cavalrymen rode their phalanx down.

"And say never," they always added, "the Barbarians know not how to fight
and how to die. Fools say it, not we of Plataea. For our first line seemed
broken in a twinkling. The Pitanate _mora_ was cut to pieces; Athena
Promachus and Ares the City-Waster alone turned back that charge when
Mardonius led the way."

But turned it was. And the thousand horse, no thousand now, drifted to the
cover of their shield wall, raging, undaunted, yet beaten back.

Then at last the phalanx locked with the Persian footmen and their rampart
of wicker shields. At short spear length men grinned in each other's
faces, while their veins were turned to fire. Many a soldier--Spartan,
Aryan--had seen his twenty fights, but never a fight like this. And the
Persians--those that knew Greek--heard words flung through their foemen's
helmets that made each Hellene fight as ten.

"Remember Leonidas! Remember Thermopylae!"

Orders there were none; the trumpets were drowned in the tumult. Each man
fought as he stood, knowing only he must slay the man before him, while
slowly, as though by a cord tighter and ever tighter drawn, the Persian
shield wall was bending back before the unrelenting thrusting of the
Spartans. Then as a cord snaps so broke the barrier. One instant down and
the Hellenes were sweeping the light-armed Asiatic footmen before them, as
the scythe sweeps down the standing grain. So with the Persian infantry,
for their scanty armour and short spears were at terrible disadvantage,
but the strength of the Barbarian was not spent. Many times Mardonius led
the cavalry in headlong charge, each repulse the prelude to a fiercer
shock.

"For Mazda, for Eran, for the king!"

The call of the Prince was a call that turned his wild horsemen into
demons, but demons who strove with gods. The phalanx was shaken, halted
even, broken never; and foot by foot, fathom by fathom, it brushed the
Barbarian horde back across the blood-bathed plain,--and to Mardonius's
shout, a more terrible always answered:--

"Remember Leonidas! Remember Thermopylae!"

The Prince seemed to bear a charmed life as