Pegram Battalion Association. 201
of war, and which will be the pabulum of inspiration for generations yet unborn.
My proposition is : That religion is an element of strength in the soldierly character. My proposition is : That the annals of religion will afford the best examplars of heroic action. In support of this proposition we are following those annals down the centuries, and noting the conspicuous figures of history; and we pass now from Judaic to Christian times.
I shall not weary you with instances ; but my discussion would surely be incomplete without passing notice of that outburst of re- ligious fervor, which moved all Europe to war, sent army after army against the Mohammedan power of the East, and was the occasion of such abandon of devotion, such prodigies of valor, and such hardly-won meed of glory as the world has scarcely seen the like, before or since.
The beginning of the Crusades was farcical enough. I know of no more ludicrous spectacle than Peter the Hermit, clad in his monk's cowl and astride of a diminutive donkey, leading a motley host of men, women and children, armed with sticks, stones, hammers and pitchforks, and other such weapons, across Europe to exterminate the Turk. An expedition farcical surely, if its termination were not so tragical. Cut off to a man ; the whole host of them slaughtered in heaps by the remorseless scimitar of the Saracen ; the spot where they fell marked for long years by their whitening bones.
But, if the beginning was ridiculous, the sequel was glorious ; when the flower of the chivalry of all the nations of Europe gathered to the standard of Godfrey, an army of the choicest spirits that ever assembled on a field of battle, sworn on the red cross of the Crusade to recover the sepulchre of the Son of God, or die in the effort.
Twenty thousand men, each man of them a hero in battle and an expert in arms, stormed at the walls and tower and gates of Jerusa- lem, reputed impregnable, and defended by an army of seventy thousand Saracens. The besieged more than three times the number of the besiegers. When was it ever heard that a walled and fortified city was carried by assault on such terms ? And yet Jerusalem was taken ; how, no man knows. The Arab chroniclers dismiss the whole matter curtly, saying : " It was the will of God that the city should be taken, and so the Christians, rushing on as one man, took it God curse them."
I have often tried to picture to myself the scene which a battle- array, in the times of the Crusades, would present to the eyes of a
