ination of man. They arrived dying with thirst,
dropping with weariness, lamenting the loss of the dead that rotted
along their road; they arrived shrivelled to rags or already raving
with fever and they did what they had come to do.

Above all, it is clear that they had the vices as well as the virtues
of a mob. The shocking massacre in which they indulged in the sudden
relaxation of success is quite obviously a massacre by a mob.
It is all the more profoundly revolutionary because it must have
been for the most part a French mob. It was of the same order
as the Massacre of September, and it is but a part of the same truth
that the First Crusade was as revolutionary as the French Revolution.
It was of the same order as the Massacre of St. Bartholomew,
which was also a piece of purely popular fanaticism, directed
against what was also regarded as an anti-national aristocracy.
It is practically self-evident that the Christian commanders were
opposed to it, and tried to stop it. Tancred promised their lives
to the Moslems in the mosque, but the mob clearly disregarded him.
Raymond of Toulouse himself saved those in the Tower of David,
and managed to send them safely with their property to Ascalon.
But revolution with all its evil as well as its good was loose
and raging in the streets of the Holy City. And in nothing do we
see that spirit of revolution more clearly than in the sight
of all those peasants and serfs and vassals, in that one wild
moment in revolt, not only against the conquered lords of Islam,
but even against the conquering lords of Christendom.

The whole strain of the siege indeed had been one of high and even
horrible excitement. Those who tell us to-day about the psychology
of the crowd will agree that men who have so suffered and so succeeded
are not normal; that their brains are in a dreadful balance which may
turn either way. They entered the city at last in a mood in which they
might all have become monks; and instead they all became murderers.
A brilliant general, who played a decisive part in our own recent
Palestinian campaign, told me with a sort of grim humour that he hardly
wondered at the story; for he himself had entered Jerusalem in a sort
of fury of disappointment; "We went through such a hell to get there,
and now it's spoilt for all of us." Such is the heavy irony that
hangs over our human nature, making it enter the Holy City as if it
were the Heavenly City, and more than any