actions united and fought
against the common foe with a ferocity that has been seldom equalled.
They left nothing undone which desperate men could do. Again and again
they sallied forth against the Romans, slaughtering thousands of them.
They captured their battering-rams and catapults. They undermined the
great wooden towers which Titus erected against their walls, and burnt
them. With varying success they made sally upon sally. Titus took the
third wall and the new city of Bezetha. He took the second wall and
pulled it down. Then he sent Josephus, the historian, to persuade the
Jews to surrender, but his countrymen cursed and stoned him, and the war
went on.

At length, as it seemed to be impossible to carry the place by assault,
Titus adopted a surer and more terrible plan. Enclosing the first
unconquered wall, the Temple, and the fortress by another wall of his
own making, he sat down and waited for starvation to do its work. Then
came the famine. At the beginning, before the maddened, devil-inspired
factions began to destroy each other and to prey upon the peaceful
people, Jerusalem was amply provisioned. But each party squandered the
stores that were within its reach, and, whenever they could do so, burnt
those of their rivals, so that the food which might have supplied the
whole city for months, vanished quickly in orgies of wanton waste and
destruction. Now all, or almost all, was gone, and by tens and hundreds
of thousands the people starved.

Those who are curious about such matters, those who desire to know how
much human beings can endure, and of what savagery they can be capable
when hunger drives them, may find these details set out in the pages of
Josephus, the renegade Jewish historian. It serves no good purpose and
will not help our story to repeat them; indeed for the most part they
are too terrible to be repeated. History does not record, and the mind
of man cannot invent a cruelty which was not practised by the famished
Jews upon other Jews suspected of the crime of having hidden food
to feed themselves or their families. Now the fearful prophecy was
fulfilled, and it came about that mothers devoured their own infants,
and children snatched the last morsel of bread from the lips of their
dying parents. If these things were done between those who were of
one blood, what dreadful torment was there that was not practised by
stranger upon stranger? The city went mad beneath the weight of its
abominable