ast. He remembered the
farewell banquet, when, standing at the head of his own table, perhaps
for the last time, he bade his guests speak if they had any grudge or
quarrel against him, and then courteously withdrew that they might say
their minds more freely. And then, when they had no fault to find, he
rode away at the head of his gallant company, not daring, he tells us,
to turn his eyes lest his courage should fail him at the sight of his
fair home and the thought of his two bonnie boys. It required courage
indeed to set sail in those days, when the travellers knew so little of
the lands whither they went, and our Crusader wondered how any man dared
trust himself to the ocean with unforgiven sin upon his conscience, not
knowing at night where the dawn of day might find him.

But after some delay from contrary winds, and a long wait at Cyprus, the
French army landed in Egypt, where the first attack was to be made; King
Louis leaped, fully armed, from his galley into the sea in his eagerness
to reach the shore. The Saracens fled at first before the invading army,
and the city of Damietta was taken almost without a blow. There the
Queen, who had followed her husband, as our good Queen Eleanor did a few
years later, was left with a sufficient garrison while the army moved
onwards up the Nile.

But now the tide of war began to turn. If the valour and devotion of
their leaders could have given victory to the Crusaders, they must have
carried all before them, but De Joinville himself owned that King Louis
was more of a dauntless soldier than a good general. The Saracens
harassed the troops with their terrible Greek fire, which, De Joinville
says, looked like a fiery flying dragon, and destroyed the wooden
defences, to make which the Crusaders had broken up their boats. The
King's brother, the Comte d'Artois, was killed in a desperate struggle
when fording the Nile. Worst of all, sickness was abroad in the camp,
killing more than the swords of the Saracens. Louis himself was
stricken, but refused to be removed to more comfortable quarters, with
the reply of a true king, 'God helping me, I will suffer with my
people.' He mounted his horse for a last desperate attack, the good
knight Geoffroi de Sergines riding at his bridle-rein, and, as the King
told De Joinville afterwards, cutting down the Saracens who attacked him
as a good servant brushes away the flies that annoy his master.

When the King could no longer keep his sad