The fourth hour was the hour that the battle turned.
Not because one side achieved a dramatic breakthrough. Not because a commander fell or a formation shattered in a single moment of catastrophic failure. The battle turned because the mathematics of attrition reached the threshold where the combined force's numerical advantage could no longer compensate for the Horde's qualitative advantage, and the threshold expressed itself not as a single event but as a hundred simultaneous events across the battle's three-mile front.
Soldiers at the spear wall who had been pressing forward for four hours stopped pressing. Not retreated. Stopped. The specific moment when a soldier's body decided that the forward direction contained nothing but death and the body's survival instinct overrode the mind's professional discipline. One soldier stopping was nothing. A hundred soldiers stopping across a hundred positions simultaneously was the threshold.
