all truth and honour had otherwise withered off the earth,
there would still remain enough of them so long as Duke Godfrey was alive.

Allied with Godfrey were Tancred the Italian, Raymond of Toulouse
with the southern French and Robert of Normandy, the adventurous
son of the Conqueror, with the Normans and the English.
But it would be an error, I think, and one tending to make the whole
subsequent story a thing not so much misunderstood as unintelligible,
to suppose that the whole crusading movement had been suddenly
and unnaturally stiffened with the highest chivalric discipline.
Unless I am much mistaken, a great mass of that army
was still very much of a mob. It is probable _a priori_,
since the great popular movement was still profoundly popular.
It is supported by a thousand things in the story of the campaign;
the extraordinary emotionalism that made throngs of men weep and
wail together, the importance of the demagogue, Peter the Hermit,
in spite of his unmilitary character, and the wide differences between
the designs of the leaders and the actions of the rank and file.
It was a crowd of rude and simple men that cast themselves
on the sacred dust at the first sight of the little mountain
town which they had tramped for two thousand miles to see.
Tancred saw it first from the slope by the village of Bethlehem,
which had opened its gates willingly to his hundred Italian knights;
for Bethlehem then as now was an island of Christendom in the sea
of Islam. Meanwhile Godfrey came up the road from Jaffa,
and crossing the mountain ridge, saw also with his living eyes
his vision of the world's desire. But the poorest men about him
probably felt the same as he; all ranks knelt together in the dust,
and the whole story is one wave of numberless and nameless men.
It was a mob that had risen like a man for the faith.
It was a mob that had truly been tortured like a man for the faith.
It was already transfigured by pain as well as passion.
Those that know war in those deserts through the summer months,
even with modern supplies and appliances and modern maps and calculations,
know that it could only be described as a hell full of heroes.
What it must have been to those little local serfs and peasants from
the Northern villages, who had never dreamed in nightmares of such
landscapes or such a sun, who knew not how men lived at all in such
a furnace and could neither guess the alleviations nor get them,
is beyond the imag