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