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Some fifty Pani from the great ship had preceded our hundreds of mariners and armsmen ashore. There were, facing the enemy, some seven or eight lines of our men, strung across an arc of the beach, some seventy yards in width, defending frontally and on the flanks. Behind this wall of steel, its interwoven columns seething forward and backward, giving way, and pressing back, the men at the beach were seeking flight. Had these lines of skilled, hardened men, selected with care by the Pani, veterans, mercenaries, killers, bandits, brigands, and pirates, from enlisted crews, rural gangs, disbanded cohorts, and scattered free companies, not checked the enemy, few if any of our forces would have escaped death. To be sure, these particular men were not so different from the others. That these particular men were where they were was, I supposed, as much an accident of battle as anything else. It doubtless depended on where the enemy had first struck. - (Mariners of Gor, Chapter )