Around this terrible spot the Franciscans have done something which will strike many good and thoughtful people as quite fantastically inadequate; and which strikes me as fantastically but precisely right. They have laid out the garden simply as a garden, in a way that is completely natural because it is completely artificial. They have made flower-beds in the shape of stars and moons, and coloured them with flowers like those in the backyard of a cottage. The combination of these bright patterns in the sunshine with the awful shadow in the centre is certainly an incongruity in the sense of a contrast. But it is a poetical contrast, like that of birds building in a temple or flowers growing on a tomb. The best way of suggesting what I for one feel about it would be something like this; suppose we imagine a company of children, such as those whom Christ blessed in Jerusalem, afterwards put permanently in charge of a field full of his sorrow; it is probable that, if they could do anything with it, they would do something like this. They might cut it up into quaint shapes and dot it with red daisies or yellow marigolds. I really do not know that there is anything better that grown up people could do, since anything that the greatest of them could do must be, must look quite as small. "Shall I, the gnat that dances in Thy ray, dare to be reverent?" The Franciscans have not dared to be reverent; they have only dared to be cheerful. It may be too awful an adventure of the imagination to imagine Christ in that garden. But there is not the smallest difficulty about imagining St. Francis there; and that is something to say of an institution which is eight hundred years old.
Immediately above this little garden, overshadowing and almost overhanging it, is a gorgeous gilded building with golden domes and minarets glittering in the sun, and filling a splendid situation with almost shameless splendour; the Russian church built over the upper part of the garden, belonging to the Orthodox-Greeks. Here again many Western travellers will be troubled; and will think that golden building much too like a fairy palace in a pantomime. But here again I shall differ from them, though perhaps less strongly. It may be that the pleasure is childish rather than childlike; but I can imagine a child clapping his hands at the mere sight of those great domes like bubbles of gold against the blue sky. It is a little like Aladdin's Palace, but it has a place in art as Aladdin has a place in literature; especially since it is oriental literature. Those wise missionaries in China who were not afraid to depict the Twelve Apostles in the costume of Chinamen might have built such a church in a land of glittering mosques. And as it is said that the Russian has in him something of the child and something of the oriental, such a style may be quite sincere, and have even a certain simplicity in its splendour. It is genuine of its kind; it was built for those who like it; and those who do not like it can look at something else. This sort of thing may be called tawdry, but it is not what I call meretricious. What I call really meretricious can be found yet higher on the hill; towering to the sky and dominating all the valleys.
The nature of the difference, I think, is worth noting.
The German Hospice, which served as a sort of palace for the
German Emperor, is a very big building with a very high tower,
planned I believe with great efficiency, solidity and comfort,
and fitted with a thousand things that mark its modernity
compared with the things around, with the quaint garden
of the Franciscans or the fantastic temple of the Russians.
It is what I can only describe as a handsome building; rather as
the more vulgar of the Victorian wits used to talk about a fine woman.
By calling it a handsome building I mean that from the top of its dizzy
tower to the bottom of its deepest foundations there is not one line
or one tint of beauty. This negative fact, however, would be nothing;
it might be honestly ugly and utilitarian like a factory or a prison;
but it is not. It is as pretentious as the gilded dome below it;
and it is pretentious in a wicked way where the other is pretentious
in a good and innocent way. What annoys me about it is that it
was not built by children, or even by savages, but by professors;
and the professors could profess the art and could not practice it.
The architects knew everything about a Romanesque building except
how to build it. We feel that they accumulated on that spot
all the learning and organization and information and wealth of
the world, to do this one particular thing; and then did it wrong.
They did it wrong, not through superstition, not through fanatical
exaggeration, not through provincial ignorance, but through pure,
profound, internal, intellectual incompetence; that intellectual
incompetence which so often goes with intellectual pride.
I will mention only one matter out of a hundred. All the columns
in the Kaiser's Chapel are in one way very suitable to their place;
every one of them has a swelled head. The column itself is slender
but the capital is not only big but bulging; and it has the air
of bulging And this is as true of the moral as of the artistic elements
in the modern Jerusalem. To show that I am not unjustly partisan,
I will say frankly that I see little to complain of in that common
subject of complaint, the mosaic portrait of the Emperor on the ceiling
of the chapel. It is but one among many figures; and it is not an unknown
practice to include a figure of the founder in such church decorations.
The real example of that startling moral stupidity which marked
the barbaric imperialism can be found in another figure of which,
curiously enough, considerably less notice seems to have been taken.
It is the more remarkable because it is but an artistic shadow of
the actual fact; and merely records in outline and relief the temporary
masquerade in which the man walked 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 surpremacy 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 it superstition or with Villehardouin in
calling it religion, at least both these very clear-headed Frenchmen
would agree that the motive did exist and did explain the facts.
But just as there is a clumsy German building with statues that at once
patronise and parody the Crusaders, so there is a clumsy German theory
that at once patronises and minimises the Crusades. According to this
theory the essential truth about a Crusade was that it was not a Crusade.
It was something that the professors, in the old days before the war,
used to call a Teutonic Folk-Wandering. Godfrey and St. Louis
were not, as Villehardouin would say, fighting for the truth;
they were not even, as Voltaire would say, fighting for what they
thought was the truth; this was only what they thought they thought,
and they were really thinking of something entirely different.
They were not moved either by piety or priestcraft, but by a new
and unexpected nomadism. They were not inspired either by faith
or fanaticism, but by an unusually aimless taste for foreign travel.
This theory that the war of the two great religions could be
explained by "Wanderlust" was current about twenty years ago among
the historical professors of Germany, and with many of their other
views was often accepted by the historical professors of England.
It was swallowed by an earthquake, along with other rubbish,
in the year 1914.
Since then, so far as I know, the only person who has been patient
enough to dig it up again is Mr. Ezra Pound. He is well known
as an American poet; and he is, I believe, a man of great talent
and information. His attempt to recover the old Teutonic theory
of the Folk-Wandering of Peter the Hermit was expressed, however,
in prose; in an article in the In plain words, this sort of theory is a blasphemy against
the intellectual dignity of man. It is a blunder as well as
a blasphemy; for it goes miles out of its way to find a bestial
explanation when there is obviously a human explanation.
It is as if a man told me that a dim survival of the instincts of a
quadruped was the reason of my sitting on a chair with four legs.
I answer that I do it because I foresee that there may be grave
disadvantages in sitting on a chair with one leg. Or it is as if I
were told that I liked to swim in the sea, solely because some early
forms of amphibian life came out of the sea on to the shore.
I answer that I know why I swim in the sea; and it is because
the divine gift of reason tells me that it would be unsatisfactory
to swim on the land. In short this sort of vague evolutionary
theorising simply amounts to finding an unconvincing explanation
of something that needs no explanation. And the case is really quite
as simple with great political and religious movements by which man
has from time to time changed the world in this or that respect
in which he happened to think it would be the better for a change.
The Crusade was a religious movement, but it was also a perfectly
rational movement; one might almost say a rationalist movement.
I could quite understand Mr. Pound saying that such a campaign for
a creed was immoral; and indeed it often has been, and now perhaps
generally is, quite horribly immoral. But when he implies that it
is irrational he has selected exactly the thing which it is not.
It is not enlightenment, on the contrary it is ignorance and insularity,
which causes most of us to miss this fact. But it certainly is the fact
that religious war is in itself much more rational than patriotic way.
I for one have often defended and even encouraged patriotic war,
and should always be ready to defend and encourage patriotic passion.
But it cannot be denied that there is more of mere passion,
of mere preference and prejudice, in short of mere personal accident,
in fighting another nation than in fighting another faith.
The Crusader is in every sense more rational than the modern
conscript or professional soldier. He is more rational in
his object, which is the intelligent and intelligible object
of conversion; where the modern militarist has an object much
more confused by momentary vanity and one-sided satisfaction.
The Crusader wished to make Jerusalem a Christian town;
but the Englishman does not wish to make Berlin an English town.
He has only a healthy hatred of it as a Prussian town.
The Moslem wished to make the Christian a Moslem; but even
the Prussian did not wish to make the Frenchman a Prussian.
He only wished to make the Frenchman admire a Prussian;
and not only were the means he adopted somewhat ill-considered for
this purpose, but the purpose itself is looser and more irrational.
The object of all war is peace; but the object of religious
war is mental as well as material peace; it is agreement.
In short religious war aims ultimately at equality, where national
war aims relatively at superiority. Conversion is the one sort
of conquest in which the conquered must rejoice.
In that sense alone it is foolish for us in the West to sneer
at those who kill men when a foot is set in a holy place,
when we ourselves kill hundreds of thousands when a foot is put
across a frontier. It is absurd for us to despise those who shed
blood for a relic when we have shed rivers of blood for a rag.
But above all the Crusade, or, for that matter, the Jehad,
is by far the most philosophical sort of fighting, not only
in its conception of ending the difference, but in its mere act
of recognising the difference, as the deepest kind of difference.
It is to reverse all reason to suggest that a man's politics matter
and his religion does not matter. It is to say he is affected
by the town he lives in, but not by the world he lives in.
It is to say that he is altered when he is a fellow-citizen walking
under new lamp-posts, but not altered when he is another creature walking
under strange stars. It is exactly as if we were to say that two people
ought to live in the same house, but it need not be in the same town.
It is exactly as if we said that so long as the address included
York it did not matter whether it was New York; or that so long
as a man is in Essex we do not care whether he is in England.
Christendom would have been entirely justified in the abstract
in being alarmed or suspicious at the mere rise of a great power
that was not Christian. Nobody nowadays would think it odd
to express regret at the rise of a power because it was Militarist
or Socialist or even Protectionist. But it is far more natural
to be conscious of a difference, not about the order of battle but
the battle of life; not about our definable enjoyment of possessions,
but about our much more doubtful possession of enjoyment;
not about the fiscal divisions between us and foreigners
but about the spiritual divisions even between us and friends.
These are the things that differ profoundly with differing views
of the ultimate nature of the universe. For the things of our country
are often distant; but the things of our cosmos are always near;
we can shut our doors upon the wheeled traffic of our native town;
but in our own inmost chamber we hear the sound that never ceases;
that wheel which Dante and a popular proverb have dared
to christen as the love that makes the world go round.
For this is the great paradox of life; that there are not only
wheels within wheels, but the larger wheels within the smaller.
When a whole community rests on one conception of life and death
and the origin of things, it is quite entitled to watch the rise
of another community founded on another conception as the rise
of something certain to be different and likely to be hostile.
Indeed, as I have pointed out touching certain political theories,
we already admit this truth in its small and questionable examples.
We only deny the large and obvious examples.
Christendom might quite reasonably have been alarmed if it had not
been attacked. But as a matter of history it had been attacked.
The Crusader would have been quite justified in suspecting the Moslem
even if the Moslem had merely been a new stranger; but as a matter
of history he was already an old enemy. The critic of the Crusade
talks as if it had sought out some inoffensive tribe or temple in the
interior of Thibet, which was never discovered until it was invaded.
They seem entirely to forget that long before the Crusaders had dreamed
of riding to Jerusalem, the Moslems had almost ridden into Paris.
They seem to forget that if the Crusaders nearly conquered Palestine,
it was but a return upon the Moslems who had nearly conquered Europe.
There was no need for them to argue by an appeal to reason, as I
have argued above, that a religious division must make a difference;
it had already made a difference. The difference stared them
in the face in the startling transformation of Roman Barbary
and of Roman Spain. In short it was something which must happen
in theory and which did happen in practice; all expectation
suggested that it would be so and all experience said it was so.
Having thought it out theoretically and experienced it practically,
they proceeded to deal with it equally practically. The first division
involved every principle of the science of thought; and the last
developments followed out every principle of the science of war.
The Crusade was the counter-attack. It was the defensive army taking
the offensive in its turn, and driving back the enemy to his base.
And it is this process, reasonable from its first axiom to its last act,
that Mr. Pound actually selects as a sort of automatic wandering
of an animal. But a man so intelligent would not have made a mistake
so extraordinary but for another error which it is here very essential
to consider. To suggest that men engaged, rightly or wrongly,
in so logical a military and political operation were only migrating
like birds or swarming like bees is as ridiculous as to say that
the Prohibition campaign in America was only an animal reversion
towards lapping as the dog lappeth, or Rowland Hill's introduction
of postage stamps an animal taste for licking as the cat licks.
Why should we provide other people with a remote reason for their
own actions, when they themselves are ready to tell us the reason,
and it is a perfectly reasonable reason?
I have compared this pompous imposture of scientific history to
the pompous and clumsy building of the scientific Germans on the Mount
of Olives, because it substitutes in the same way a modern stupidity
for the medieval simplicity. But just as the German Hospice after
all stands on a fine site, and might have been a fine building,
so there is after all another truth, somewhat analogous,
which the German historians of the Folk-Wanderings might possibly
have meant, as distinct from all that they have actually said.
There is indeed one respect in which the case of the Crusade does
differ very much from modern political cases like prohibition
or the penny post. I do not refer to such incidental peculiarities
as the fact that Prohibition could only have succeeded through
the enormous power of modern plutocracy, or that even the convenience
of the postage goes along with an extreme coercion by the police.
It is a somewhat deeper difference that I mean; and it may possibly be
what these critics mean. But the difference is not in the evolutionary,
but rather the revolutionary spirit.
The First Crusade was not a racial migration; it was something much
more intellectual and dignified; a riot. In order to understand this
religious war we must class it, not so much with the wars of, history as
with the revolutions of history. As I shall try to show briefly on
a later page, it not only had all the peculiar good and the peculiar
evil of things like the French Revolution or the Russian Revolution,
but it was a more purely popular revolution than either of them.
The truly modern mind will of course regard the contention that it
was popular as tantamount to a confession that it was animal.
In these days when papers and speeches are full of words like
democracy and self-determination, anything really resembling
the movement of a mass of angry men Is regarded as no better than
a stampede of bulls or a scurry of rats. The new sociologists
call it the herd instinct, just as the old reactionaries called it
the many-headed beast. But both agree in implying that it is hardly
worth while to count how many head there are of such cattle.
In face of such fashionable comparisons it will seem comparatively
mild to talk of migration as it occurs among birds or insects.
Nevertheless we may venture to state with some confidence
that both the sociologists and the reactionaries are wrong.
It does not follow that human beings become less than human because their
ideas appeal to more and more of humanity. Nor can we deduce that men
are mindless solely from the fact that they are all of one mind.
In plain fact the virtues of a mob cannot be found in a herd
of bulls or a pack of wolves, any more than the crimes of a mob
can be committed by a flock of sheep or a shoal of herrings.
Birds have never been known to besiege and capture an empty cage
of an aviary, on a point of principle, merely because it had kept a few
other birds in captivity, as the mob besieged and captured the almost
empty Bastille, merely because it was the fortress of a historic tyranny.
And rats have never been known to die by thousands merely in order
to visit a particular trap in which a particular rat had perished,
as the poor peasants of the First Crusade died in thousands for a
far-off sight of the Sepulchre or a fragment of the true cross.
In this sense indeed the Crusade was not rationalistic, if the rat
is the only rationalist. But it will seem more truly rational
to point out that the inspiration of such a crowd is not in such
instincts as we share with the animals, but precisely in such ideas
as the animals never (with all their virtues) understand.
What is peculiar about the First Crusade is that it was in quite
a new and abnormal sense a popular movement. I might almost say
it was the only popular movement there ever was in the world.
For it was not a thing which the populace followed; it was actually
a thing which the populace led. It was not only essentially
a revolution, but it was the only revolution I know of in which
the masses began by acting alone, and practically without any
support from any of the classes. When they had acted, the classes
came in; and it is perfectly true, and indeed only natural,
that the masses alone failed where the two together succeeded.
But it was the uneducated who educated the educated.
The case of the Crusade is emphatically not a case in which certain
ideas were first suggested by a few philosophers, and then preached
by demagogues to the democracy. This was to a great extent true
of the French Revolution; it was probably yet more true of the
Russian Revolution; and we need not here pause upon the fine shade
of difference that Rousseau was right and Karl Marx was wrong.
In the First Crusade it was the ordinary man who was right or wrong.
He came out in a fury at the insult to his own little images or
private prayers, as if he had come out to fight with his own domestic
poker or private carving-knife. He was not armed with new weapons
of wit and logic served round from the arsenal of an academy.
There was any amount of wit and logic in the academies of the Middle Ages;
but the typical leader of the Crusade was not Abélard or Aquinas
but Peter the Hermit, who can hardly be called even a popular leader,
but rather a popular flag. And it was his army, or rather
his enormous rabble, that first marched across the world to die
for the deliverance of Jerusalem.
Historians say that in that huge host of thousands there were only
nine knights. To any one who knows even a little of medieval
war the fact seems astounding. It is indeed a long exploded
fallacy to regard medievalism as identical with feudalism.
There were countless democratic institutions, such as the guilds;
sometimes as many as twenty guilds in one small town.
But it is really true that the military organization of the Middle Ages
was almost entirely feudal; indeed we might rather say that feudalism
was the name of their military organization. That so vast a military
mass should have attempted to move at all, with only nine of the natural
military leaders, seems to me a prodigy of popular initiative.
It is as if a parliament were elected at the next general election,
in which only two men could afford to read a daily newspaper.
This mob marched against the military discipline of the Moslems
and was massacred; or, might I so mystically express it, martyred.
Many of the great kings and knights who followed in their tracks
did not so clearly deserve any haloes for the simplicity and purity
of their motives. The canonization of such a crowd might be impossible,
and would certainly be resisted in modern opinion; chiefly because they
indulged their democratic violence on the way by killing various usurers;
a course which naturally fills modern society with an anger verging
on alarm. A perversity leads me to weep rather more over the many
slaughtered peasants than over the few slaughtered usurers;
but in any case the peasants certainly were not slaughtered in vain.
The common conscience of all classes, in a time when all had
a common creed, was aroused, and a new army followed of a very
different type of skill and training; led by most of the ablest
captains and by some of the most chivalrous gentlemen of the age.
For curiously enough, the host contained more than one cultured
gentleman who was as simple a Christian as any peasant,
and as recklessly ready to be butchered or tortured for the mere
name of Christ.
It is a tag of the materialists that the truth about history
rubs away the romance of history. It is dear to the modern mind
because it is depressing; but it does not happen to be true.
Nothing emerges more clearly from a study that is truly realistic,
than the curious fact that romantic people were really romantic.
It is rather the historical novels that will lead a modern
man vaguely to expect to find the leader of the new knights,
Godfrey de Bouillon, to have been merely a brutal baron.
The historical facts are all in favour of his having been much
more like a knight of the Round Table. In fact he was a far
better man than most of the knights of the Round Table, in whose
characters the fabulist, knowing that he was writing a fable,
was tactful enough to introduce a larger admixture of vice. Truth is
not only stranger than fiction, but often saintlier than fiction.
For truth is real, while fiction is bound to be realistic.
Curiously enough Godfrey seems to have been heroic even in those
admirable accidents which are generally and perhaps rightly regarded
as the trappings of fiction. Thus he was of heroic stature,
a handsome red-bearded man of great personal strength and daring;
and he was himself the first man over the wall of Jerusalem,
like any boy hero in a boy's adventure story. But he was also,
the realist will be surprised to hear, a perfectly honest man,
and a perfectly genuine practicer of the theoretical magnanimity
of knighthood. Everything about him suggests it; from his first
conversion from the imperial to the papal (and popular) cause, to his
great refusal of the kinghood of the city he had taken; "I will
not wear a crown of gold where my Master wore a crown of thorns."
He was a just ruler, and the laws he made were full of the plainest
public spirit. But even if we dismiss all that was written
of him by Christian chroniclers because they might be his friends
(which would be a pathetic and exaggerated compliment to the harmonious
unity of Crusaders and of Christians) he would still remain
sufficiently assailed crowned with the words of his enemies.
For a Saracen chronicler wrote of him, with a fine simplicity,
that if 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 ,
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 imagination 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 earthly city can be.
But the struggle which led to the scaling of Jerusalem in the
First Crusade was something much wilder and more incalculable than
anything that can be conceived in modern war. We can hardly wonder
that the crusading crowd saw the town in front of them as a sort
of tower full of demons, and the hills around them as an enchanted
and accursed land. For in one very real sense it really was so;
for all the elements and expedients were alike unknown qualities.
All their enemies' methods were secrets sprung upon them.
All their own methods were new things made out of nothing.
They wondered alike what would be done on the other side and what
could be done on their own side; every movement against them
was a stab out of the darkness and every movement they made
was a leap in the dark. First, on the one side, we have Tancred
trying to take the whole fortified city by climbing up a single
slender ladder, as if a man tried to lasso the peak of a mountain.
Then we have the flinging from the turrets of a strange
and frightful fiery rain, as if water itself had caught fire.
It was afterwards known as the Greek Fire and was probably petroleum;
but to those who had never seen (or felt) it before it may well have
seemed the flaming oil of witchcraft. Then Godfrey and the wiser
of the warriors set about to build wooden siege-towers and found
they had next to no wood to build them. There was scarcely anything
in that rocky waste but the dwarf trees of olive; a poetic fantasy
woven about that war in after ages described them as hindered
even in their wood-cutting by the demons of that weird place.
And indeed the fancy had an essential truth, for the very nature
of the land fought against them; and each of those dwarf trees,
hard and hollow and twisted, may well have seemed like a grinning goblin.
It is said that they found timbers by accident in a cavern;
they tore down the beams from ruined houses; at last they got into touch
with some craftsmen from Genoa who went to work more successfully;
skinning the cattle, who had died in heaps, and covering the timbers.
They built three high towers on rollers, and men and beasts
dragged them heavily against the high towers of the city.
The catapaults of the city answered them, the cataracts of
devouring fire came down; the wooden towers swayed and tottered,
and two of them suddenly stuck motionless and useless.
And as the darkness fell a great flare must have told them that
the third and last was in flames.
All that night Godfrey was toiling to retrieve the disaster.
He took down the whole tower from where it stood and raised
it again on the high ground to the north of the city which is
now marked by the pine tree that grows outside Herod's gate.
And all the time he toiled, it was said, sinister sorcerers sat
upon the battlements, working unknown marvels for the undoing
of the labour of man. If the great knight had a touch of such
symbolism on his own side, he might have seen in his own strife
with the solid timber something of the craft that had surrounded
the birth of his creed, and the sacred trade of the carpenter.
And indeed the very pattern of all carpentry is cruciform, and there
is something more than an accident in the allegory. The transverse
position of the timber does indeed involve many of those mathematical
that are analogous to moral truths and almost every structural
shape has the shadow of the mystic rood, as the three dimensions
have a shadow of the Trinity. Here is the true mystery of equality;
since the longer beam might lengthen itself to infinity, and never
be nearer to the symbolic shape without the help of the shorter.
Here is that war and wedding between two contrary forces, resisting and
supporting each other; the meeting-place of contraries which we,
by a sort of pietistic pun, still call the crux of the question.
Here is our angular and defiant answer to the self-devouring circle
of Asia. It may be improbable, though it is far from impossible
(for the age was philosophical enough) that a man like Godfrey
thus extended the mystical to the metaphysical; but the writer
of a real romance about him would be well within his rights in making
him see the symbolism of his own tower, a tower rising above
him through the clouds of night as if taking hold on the heaven
or showing its network of beams black against the daybreak;
scaling the skies and open to all the winds, a ladder and a labyrinth,
repeating till it was lost in the twilight the pattern of the sign
of the cross.
When dawn was come all those starving peasants may well have stood
before the high impregnable walls in the broad daylight of despair.
Even their nightmares during the night, of unearthly necromancers
looking down at them from the battlements and with signs and spells
paralysing all their potential toils, may well have been a sort
of pessimistic consolation, anticipating and accounting for failure.
The Holy City had become for them a fortress full of fiends, when Godfrey
de Bouillon again set himself sword in hand upon the wooden tower and gave
the order once more to drag it tottering towards the towers on either
side of the pastern gate. So they crawled again across the fosse
full of the slain, dragging their huge house of timber behind them,
and all the blast and din of war broke again about their heads.
A hail of bolts hammered such shields as covered them for a canopy,
stones and rocks fell on them and crushed them like flies in
the mire, and from the engines of the Greek Fire all the torrents
of their torment came down on them like red rivers of hell.
For indeed the souls of those peasants must have been sickened
with something of the topsy-turvydom felt by too many peasants of our
own time under the frightful flying batteries of scientific war;
a blasphemy of inverted battle in which hell itself has occupied heaven.
Something of the vapours vomited by such cruel chemistry may
have mingled with the dust of battle, and darkened such light
as showed where shattering rocks were rending a roof of shields,
to men bowed and blinded as they are by such labour of dragging
and such a hailstorm of death. They may have heard through
all the racket of nameless noises the high minaret cries
of Moslem triumph rising shriller like a wind in shrill pipes,
and known little else of what was happening above or beyond them.
It was most likely that they laboured and strove in that lower darkness,
not knowing that high over their heads, and up above the cloud
of battle, the tower of timber and the tower of stone had touched
and met in mid-heaven; and great Godfrey, alone and alive had leapt
upon the wall of Jerusalem.
--Gilbert Keith Chesterton
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Martin Ward,
De Montfort University, Leicester.
Email: martin@gkc.org.uk