early September, Saladin had realised that harassing the Frankish army with a limited portion of his troops was not going to stop its advance. In order to do this he needed to commit his entire army to a serious attack. Fortuitously for Saladin, the Crusaders had to traverse one of the few forested regions of Palestine, the "Wood of Arsuf", which ran parallel to the sea shore for more than . The woodland would mask the disposition of his army and allow a sudden attack to be launched. The Crusaders traversed half of the forest with little incident, and they rested on 6 September with their camp protected by the marsh lying inland of the mouth of the river Nahr-el-Falaik, called by them Rochetaillée. To the south of the camp, in the the Crusaders needed to march before gaining the ruins of Arsuf, the forest receded inland to create a narrow plain wide between wooded hills and the sea. This is where Saladin intended to make his decisive attack. While threatening and skirmishing along the whole length of the Crusader column, Saladin reserved his most sustained direct assault for its rear. His plan appears to have been to allow the Frankish van and centre to proceed, in the hope that a fatal gap might be created between them and the more heavily engaged rearmost units. Into such a gap Saladin would have thrown his reserves in order to defeat the Crusaders in detail. Battle Estimation of the size of the opposing armies The Itinerarium Regis Ricardi implies that the Ayyubid army outnumbered the Crusaders three-to-one. However, unrealistically inflated numbers, of 300,000 and 100,000 respectively, are described. Modern estimates of Saladin's army place it at around 25,000 soldiers, almost all cavalry (horse archers, light cavalry, and a minority of heavy cavalry). Based on the number of soldiers that the three kings brought to the Holy Land, as well as what troops the Kingdom of Jerusalem could muster, McLynn calculates the total Crusader forces at Arsuf as numbering 20,000: 9,000 troops brought by Richard from his dominions, 7,000 French troops left by Phillip, 2,000 troops from Outremer, and 2,000 more soldiers from every other source (Danes, Frisians, Genoese, Pisans, Turcopoles). Boas notes that this calculation doesn't account for losses in earlier battles or desertions, but that it is probable that the Crusader army had 10,000 men and perhaps more. The Cambridge Illustrated