sin of my oath, never will I believe that Heaven can punish millions
for the error of one man. Let the bones of the dead war against us; in
life, they were men like ourselves, and no saints in the calendar so holy
as the freemen who fight for their hearths and their altars. Nor do I
see aught to alarm us even in these grave human odds. We have but to
keep fast these entrenchments; preserve, man by man, our invincible line;
and the waves will but split on our rock: ere the sun set to-morrow, we
shall see the tide ebb, leaving, as waifs, but the dead of the baffled
invader."

"Fare ye well, loving kinsmen; kiss me, my brothers; kiss me on the
cheek, my Haco. Go now to your tents. Sleep in peace and wake with the
trumpet to the gladness of noble war!"

Slowly the Earls left the King; slowest of all the lingering Gurth; and
when all were gone, and Harold was alone, he threw round a rapid,
troubled glance, and then, hurrying to the simple imageless crucifix that
stood on its pedestal at the farther end of the tent, he fell on his
knees, and faltered out, while his breast heaved, and his frame shook
with the travail of his passion:

"If my sin be beyond a pardon, my oath without recall, on me, on me, O
Lord of Hosts, on me alone the doom. Not on them, not on them--not on
England!"

CHAPTER VII.

On the fourteenth of October, 1066, the day of St. Calixtus, the Norman
force was drawn out in battle array. Mass had been said; Odo and the
Bishop of Coutance had blessed the troops; and received their vow never
more to eat flesh on the anniversary of that day. And Odo had mounted
his snow-white charger, and already drawn up the cavalry against the
coming of his brother the Duke. The army was marshalled in three great
divisions.

Roger de Montgommeri and William Fitzosborne led the first; and with them
were the forces from Picardy and the countship of Boulogne, and the fiery
Franks; Geoffric Martel and the German Hugues (a prince of fame); Aimeri,
Lord of Thouars, and the sons of Alain Fergant, Duke of Bretagne, led the
second, which comprised the main bulk of the allies from Bretagne, and
Maine, and Poitou. But both these divisions were intermixed with
Normans, under their own special Norman chiefs.

The third section embraced the flower of martial Europe, the most
renowned of the Norman race; whether those knights bore the French titles
into which their ancestral Scandinavian names had been transformed--Sire