about in broad daylight.
I mean the really astounding trick of dressing himself up as a Crusader.
That was, under the circumstances, far more ludicrous and lunatic
a proceeding than if he had filled the whole ceiling with cherub
heads with his own features, or festooned all the walls with one
ornamental pattern of his moustaches.

The German Emperor came to Jerusalem under the escort of the Turks,
as the ally of the Turks, and solely because of the victory
and supremacy of the Turks. In other words, he came to
Jerusalem solely because the Crusaders had lost Jerusalem;
he came there solely because the Crusaders had been routed,
ruined, butchered before and after the disaster of Hattin:
because the Cross had gone down in blood before the Crescent,
under which alone he could ride in with safety. Under those
circumstances to dress up as a Crusader, as if for a fancy dress ball,
was a mixture of madness and vulgarity which literally stops the breath.
There is no need whatever to blame him for being in alliance with
the Turks; hundreds of people have been in alliance with the Turks;
the English especially have been far too much in alliance with them.
But if any one wants to appreciate the true difference, distinct from all
the cant of newspaper nationality, between the English and the Germans
(who were classed together by the same newspapers a little time
before the war) let him take this single incident as a test.
Lord Palmerston, for instance, was a firm friend of the Turks.
Imagine Lord Palmerston appearing in chain mail and the shield
of a Red Cross Knight.

It is obvious enough that Palmerston would have said that he cared
no more for the Crusade than for the Siege of Troy; that his diplomacy
was directed by practical patriotic considerations of the moment;
and that he regarded the religious wars of the twelfth century
as a rubbish heap of remote superstitions. In this he would be
quite wrong, but quite intelligible and quite sincere; an English
aristocrat of the nineteenth century inheriting from the English
aristocrats of the eighteenth century; whose views were simply
those of Voltaire. And these things are something of an allegory.
For the Voltairian version of the Crusades is still by far
the most reasonable of all merely hostile views of the Crusades.
If they were not a creative movement of religion, then they were
simply a destructive movement of superstition; and whether we agree
with Voltaire in calling