The Meaning of the Crusade
By G.K. Chesterton
From “The New Jerusalem” 1920
There are three examples of Western work on the great eastern slope
of the Mount of Olives; and they form a sort of triangle illustrating
the truth about the different influences of the West on the East.
At the foot of the hill is the garden kept by the Franciscans
on the alleged site of Gethsemane, and containing the hoary olive
that is supposed to be the terrible tree of the agony of Christ.
Given the great age and slow growth of the olives, the tradition
is not so unreasonable as some may suppose. But whether or not it
is historically right, it is not artistically wrong. The instinct,
if it was only an instinct, that made men fix upon this strange
growth of grey and twisted wood, was a true imaginative instinct.
One of the strange qualities of this strange Southern tree is
its almost startling hardness; accidentally to strike the branch
of an olive is like striking rock. With its stony surface,
stunted stature, and strange holes and hollows, it is often more
like a grotto than a tree. Hence it does not seem so unnatural
that it should be treated as a holy grotto; or that this strange
vegetation should claim to stand for ever like a sculptured monument.
Even the shimmering or shivering silver foliage of the living
olive might well have a legend like that of the aspen; as if it
had grown grey with fear from the apocalyptic paradox of a divine
vision of death. A child from one of the villages said to me,
in broken English, that it was the place where God said his prayers.
I for one could not ask for a finer or more defiant statement
of all that separates the Christian from the Moslem or the Jew;
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.
The Meaning of the Crusade
By G.K. Chesterton
From “The New Jerusalem” 1920
There are three examples of Western work on the great eastern slope
of the Mount of Olives; and they form a sort of triangle illustrating
the truth about the different influences of the West on the East.
At the foot of the hill is the garden kept by the Franciscans
on the alleged site of Gethsemane, and containing the hoary olive
that is supposed to be the terrible tree of the agony of Christ.
Given the great age and slow growth of the olives, the tradition
is not so unreasonable as some may suppose. But whether or not it
is historically right, it is not artistically wrong. The instinct,
if it was only an instinct, that made men fix upon this strange
growth of grey and twisted wood, was a true imaginative instinct.
One of the strange qualities of this strange Southern tree is
its almost startling hardness; accidentally to strike the branch
of an olive is like striking rock. With its stony surface,
stunted stature, and strange holes and hollows, it is often more
like a grotto than a tree. Hence it does not seem so unnatural
that it should be treated as a holy grotto; or that this strange
vegetation should claim to stand for ever like a sculptured monument.
Even the shimmering or shivering silver foliage of the living
olive might well have a legend like that of the aspen; as if it
had grown grey with fear from the apocalyptic paradox of a divine
vision of death. A child from one of the villages said to me,
in broken English, that it was the place where God said his prayers.
I for one could not ask for a finer or more defiant statement
of all that separates the Christian from the Moslem or the Jew;
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
Il significato della Crociata
Di G.K. Chesterton
Da “The New Jerusalem” 1920
Vi sono tre esempi di opera occidentale sul grande pendio orientale del Monte degli Ulivi; ed essi formano una sorta di triangolo che illustra la verità intorno alle diverse influenze dell’Occidente sull’Oriente. Ai piedi del colle sta il giardino tenuto dai francescani sul presunto sito del Getsemani, e che racchiude il canuto olivo che si suppone sia il terribile albero dell’agonia di Cristo. Data la grande età e la lenta crescita degli olivi, la tradizione non è tanto irragionevole quanto alcuni potrebbero credere. Ma che sia o no storicamente giusta, essa non è artisticamente sbagliata. L’istinto, se era soltanto un istinto, che spinse gli uomini a fissarsi su questa strana crescita di legno grigio e contorto, era un vero istinto immaginativo. Una delle strane qualità di questo strano albero meridionale è la sua durezza quasi sconcertante; colpire accidentalmente il ramo di un olivo è come colpire la roccia. Con la sua superficie petrosa, la statura stentata, e i suoi strani fori e cavità, esso somiglia spesso più a una grotta che a un albero. Perciò non pare tanto innaturale che venga trattato come una santa grotta; o che questa strana vegetazione pretenda di ergersi per sempre come un monumento scolpito. Persino lo scintillante o tremulo fogliame argenteo dell’olivo vivente potrebbe bene avere una leggenda come quella del pioppo tremulo; come se fosse ingrigito di paura dinanzi all’apocalittico paradosso di una divina visione di morte. Un bambino di uno dei villaggi mi disse, in inglese stentato, che era il luogo dove Dio diceva le sue preghiere. Io per primo non saprei chiedere un’affermazione più bella o più fiera di tutto ciò che separa il cristiano dal musulmano o dall’ebreo;
Attorno a questo terribile luogo i francescani hanno fatto qualcosa che colpirà molte persone buone e riflessive come fantasticamente inadeguato; e che colpisce me come fantasticamente ma precisamente giusto. Hanno disposto il giardino semplicemente come un giardino, in un modo che è del tutto naturale perché del tutto artificiale. Hanno fatto aiuole a forma di stelle e di lune, e le hanno colorate con fiori come quelli nel cortile di una casetta. La combinazione di questi vividi motivi al sole con la terribile ombra al centro è certamente un’incongruenza nel senso di un contrasto. Ma è un contrasto poetico, come quello di uccelli che nidificano in un tempio o di fiori che crescono su una tomba. Il modo migliore di suggerire ciò che io per primo provo al riguardo sarebbe qualcosa di simile a questo; supponiamo d’immaginare una compagnia di bambini, come quelli che Cristo benedisse in Gerusalemme, poi posti permanentemente a custodia di un campo colmo del suo dolore; è probabile che, se potessero farne qualcosa, farebbero qualcosa di simile a questo. Potrebbero ritagliarlo in bizzarre forme e punteggiarlo di rosse pratoline o di gialle calendule. Davvero non so se vi sia nulla di meglio che gli adulti potrebbero fare, poiché qualunque cosa il più grande di essi potesse fare dovrebbe, dovrebbe apparire altrettanto piccola. “Oserò io, il moscerino che danza nel Tuo raggio, di essere reverente?” I francescani non hanno osato essere reverenti; hanno osato soltanto essere allegri. Può essere un’avventura troppo tremenda dell’immaginazione immaginare Cristo in quel giardino. Ma non c’è la minima difficoltà a immaginarvi san Francesco; e questo è qualcosa da dire di un’istituzione che ha ottocento anni.
Immediatamente sopra questo piccolo giardino, che lo sovrasta e quasi lo incombe, sta uno sfarzoso edificio dorato con cupole d’oro e minareti scintillanti al sole, che colma una posizione splendida con quasi spudorato splendore; la chiesa russa costruita sulla parte superiore del giardino, appartenente ai greco-ortodossi. Anche qui molti viaggiatori occidentali saranno turbati; e penseranno che quell’edificio dorato somigli troppo a un palazzo fatato di una pantomima. Ma anche qui io dissentirò da loro, benché forse meno fermamente. Può darsi che il piacere sia puerile piuttosto che infantile; ma posso immaginare un bambino battere le mani alla sola vista di quelle grandi cupole simili a bolle d’oro contro il cielo azzurro. È un po’ come il Palazzo di Aladino, ma ha un posto nell’arte come Aladino ha un posto nella letteratura; specialmente poiché si tratta di letteratura orientale. Quei saggi missionari in Cina che non ebbero timore di raffigurare i Dodici Apostoli in costume da cinesi avrebbero potuto costruire una chiesa simile in una terra di scintillanti moschee. E poiché si dice che il russo abbia in sé qualcosa del bambino e qualcosa dell’orientale, uno stile così può essere assai sincero, e avere persino una certa semplicità nel suo splendore. È genuino nel suo genere; fu costruito per coloro cui piace; e coloro cui non piace possono guardare qualcos’altro. Questa sorta di cosa può dirsi pacchiana, ma non è ciò che io chiamo meretricio. Ciò che io chiamo veramente meretricio si può trovare ancora più in alto sul colle; che torreggia verso il cielo e domina tutte le valli.
La natura della differenza, io penso, merita d’essere notata. L’Ospizio Tedesco, che servì da una sorta di palazzo per l’Imperatore tedesco, è un edificio assai grande con una torre assai alta, progettato, credo, con grande efficienza, solidità e comodità, e dotato di mille cose che ne segnano la modernità rispetto alle cose circostanti, rispetto al bizzarro giardino dei francescani o al fantastico tempio dei russi. È ciò che posso solo descrivere come un bell’edificio; piuttosto come i più volgari degli spiriti vittoriani solevano parlare di una bella donna. Chiamandolo un bell’edificio intendo che dalla cima della sua vertiginosa torre al fondo delle sue più profonde fondamenta non vi è una sola linea o una sola tinta di bellezza. Questo fatto negativo, tuttavia, non sarebbe nulla; potrebbe essere onestamente brutto e utilitaristico come una fabbrica o una prigione; ma non lo è. È pretenzioso quanto la cupola dorata al di sotto; ed è pretenzioso in modo malvagio là dove l’altra è pretenziosa in modo buono e innocente. Ciò che mi irrita in esso è che non fu costruito da bambini, e nemmeno da selvaggi, ma da professori; e i professori potevano professare l’arte ma non praticarla. Gli architetti sapevano ogni cosa su un edificio romanico tranne come costruirlo. Sentiamo che accumularono su quel luogo tutta la dottrina e l’organizzazione e l’informazione e la ricchezza del mondo, per fare questa unica cosa particolare; e poi la fecero male. La fecero male, non per superstizione, non per esagerazione fanatica, non per ignoranza provinciale, ma per pura, profonda, interiore, intellettuale incompetenza; quell’incompetenza intellettuale che tanto spesso va di pari passo con l’orgoglio intellettuale. Menzionerò una sola cosa su un centinaio. Tutte le colonne nella Cappella del Kaiser sono per un verso assai adatte al loro posto; ognuna di esse ha la testa gonfia. La colonna in sé è snella ma il capitello non solo è grande bensì rigonfio; e ha l’aria di rigonfiarsi
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
E questo è vero degli elementi morali quanto di quelli artistici nella Gerusalemme moderna. Per mostrare che non sono un ingiusto partigiano, dirò francamente che vedo poco da lamentare in quel comune motivo di lamentela, il ritratto a mosaico dell’Imperatore sul soffitto della cappella. È solo una fra molte figure; e non è una pratica ignota includere una figura del fondatore in simili decorazioni ecclesiastiche. Il vero esempio di quella sconcertante stupidità morale che contrassegnò l’imperialismo barbarico si può trovare in un’altra figura di cui, per quanto curioso, sembra essersi presa assai minor nota. È tanto più notevole in quanto è solo un’ombra artistica del fatto reale; e registra soltanto, in linea e rilievo, la temporanea mascherata in cui quell’uomo se ne andava in giro in pieno giorno. Intendo la trovata davvero sbalorditiva di travestirsi da Crociato.
Questo era, date le circostanze, un procedimento assai più ridicolo e folle che se avesse riempito l’intero soffitto di teste di cherubino con i propri lineamenti, o festonato tutte le pareti con un unico motivo ornamentale dei suoi baffi.
L’Imperatore tedesco venne a Gerusalemme sotto la scorta dei turchi, come alleato dei turchi, e unicamente in virtù della vittoria e della supremazia dei turchi. In altre parole, venne a Gerusalemme unicamente perché i Crociati avevano perduto Gerusalemme; vi venne unicamente perché i Crociati erano stati messi in rotta, rovinati, macellati prima e dopo il disastro di Hattin; perché la Croce era andata giù nel sangue dinanzi alla Mezzaluna, sotto la quale soltanto egli poteva entrare in sella con sicurezza. In tali circostanze travestirsi da Crociato, come per un ballo in maschera, era una mescolanza di follia e di volgarità che letteralmente toglie il fiato. Non v’è alcun bisogno di biasimarlo per essere in alleanza con i turchi; centinaia di persone sono state in alleanza con i turchi; gli inglesi in particolare sono stati fin troppo in alleanza con loro. Ma se qualcuno vuol cogliere la vera differenza, distinta da tutta la retorica giornalistica delle nazionalità, tra gli inglesi e i tedeschi (che erano accomunati dagli stessi giornali un poco tempo prima della guerra), prenda questo singolo episodio come banco di prova. Lord Palmerston, per esempio, era un saldo amico dei turchi. Si immagini Lord Palmerston comparire in cotta di maglia e con lo scudo di un Cavaliere della Croce Rossa.
È abbastanza ovvio che Palmerston avrebbe detto che della Crociata gli importava non più che dell’assedio di Troia; che la sua diplomazia era guidata da pratiche considerazioni patriottiche del momento; e che considerava le guerre religiose del dodicesimo secolo come un cumulo di rifiuti di remote superstizioni. In ciò avrebbe avuto del tutto torto, ma sarebbe stato del tutto comprensibile e del tutto sincero; un aristocratico inglese del diciannovesimo secolo erede degli aristocratici inglesi del diciottesimo secolo; le cui vedute erano semplicemente quelle di Voltaire. E queste cose hanno qualcosa di un’allegoria. Poiché la versione voltairiana delle Crociate è tuttora di gran lunga la più ragionevole di tutte le vedute meramente ostili sulle Crociate. Se esse non furono un movimento creativo di religione, allora furono semplicemente un movimento distruttivo di superstizione; e sia che concordiamo con Voltaire nel chiamarla superstizione, sia con Villehardouin nel chiamarla religione, almeno entrambi questi lucidissimi francesi concorderebbero che il movente esistette davvero e davvero spiegava i fatti. Ma proprio come vi è un goffo edificio tedesco con statue che a un tempo omaggiano e parodiano i Crociati, così vi è una goffa teoria tedesca che a un tempo omaggia e minimizza le Crociate. Secondo questa teoria la verità essenziale su una Crociata era che non era una Crociata. Era qualcosa che i professori, ai vecchi tempi prima della guerra, solevano chiamare una Migrazione di Popoli teutonica. Goffredo e san Luigi non stavano, come direbbe Villehardouin, combattendo per la verità; non stavano nemmeno, come direbbe Voltaire, combattendo per ciò che ritenevano fosse la verità; questo era solo ciò che pensavano di pensare, mentre in realtà stavano pensando a tutt’altro. Non erano mossi né da pietà né da inganno sacerdotale, ma da un nuovo e inatteso nomadismo. Non erano ispirati né da fede né da fanatismo, ma da un gusto insolitamente senza scopo per i viaggi all’estero. Questa teoria, secondo cui la guerra delle due grandi religioni potesse spiegarsi con la “Wanderlust”, era corrente circa vent’anni fa tra i professori di storia della Germania, e con molte delle loro altre vedute veniva spesso accolta dai professori di storia dell’Inghilterra. Fu inghiottita da un terremoto, insieme ad altri rifiuti, nell’anno 1914.
Da allora, per quanto ne so, l’unica persona abbastanza paziente da dissotterrarla di nuovo è il signor Ezra Pound. Egli è ben noto come poeta americano; ed è, credo, un uomo di grande talento e sapere. Il suo tentativo di recuperare la vecchia teoria teutonica della Migrazione di Popoli di Pietro l’Eremita fu espresso, tuttavia, in prosa; in un articolo sul
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.
In parole povere, questa sorta di teoria è una bestemmia contro la dignità intellettuale dell’uomo. È un errore oltre che una bestemmia; poiché fa miglia di strada fuori dal suo cammino per trovare una spiegazione bestiale là dove vi è ovviamente una spiegazione umana. È come se un uomo mi dicesse che una fosca sopravvivenza degli istinti di un quadrupede fosse la ragione del mio sedermi su una sedia a quattro gambe. Io rispondo che lo faccio perché prevedo che possano esservi gravi svantaggi nel sedersi su una sedia a una gamba sola. Oppure è come se mi si dicesse che mi piace nuotare nel mare, unicamente perché qualche forma primitiva di vita anfibia uscì dal mare sulla riva. Io rispondo che so perché nuoto nel mare; ed è perché il divino dono della ragione mi dice che sarebbe poco soddisfacente nuotare sulla terraferma. In breve, questa sorta di vago teorizzare evoluzionistico equivale semplicemente a trovare una spiegazione poco convincente di qualcosa che non ha bisogno di spiegazione. E il caso è davvero altrettanto semplice per i grandi movimenti politici e religiosi con cui l’uomo ha di tempo in tempo mutato il mondo in questo o quel rispetto in cui gli accadeva di pensare che sarebbe stato meglio con un cambiamento. La Crociata fu un movimento religioso, ma fu anche un movimento perfettamente razionale; si potrebbe quasi dire un movimento razionalista. Potrei benissimo capire il signor Pound se dicesse che una tale campagna per un credo fosse immorale; e in effetti spesso lo è stata, e ora forse generalmente lo è, in modo assai orribilmente immorale. Ma quando egli insinua che sia irrazionale ha scelto esattamente la cosa che essa non è. Non è l’illuminazione, al contrario è l’ignoranza e l’insularità, a far sì che i più di noi manchino di cogliere questo fatto. Ma è certamente il fatto che la guerra religiosa è in sé assai più razionale della guerra patriottica. Io per primo ho spesso difeso e persino incoraggiato la guerra patriottica, e sarei sempre pronto a difendere e incoraggiare la passione patriottica. Ma non si può negare che vi sia più di mera passione, di mera preferenza e pregiudizio, in breve di mero accidente personale, nel combattere un’altra nazione che nel combattere un’altra fede. Il Crociato è in ogni senso più razionale del moderno coscritto o soldato professionale. È più razionale nel suo obiettivo, che è l’intelligente e intelligibile obiettivo della conversione; laddove il moderno militarista ha un obiettivo assai più confuso da momentanea vanità e da soddisfazione unilaterale. Il Crociato desiderava fare di Gerusalemme una città cristiana; ma l’inglese non desidera fare di Berlino una città inglese. Ne prova soltanto un sano odio in quanto città prussiana. Il musulmano desiderava fare del cristiano un musulmano; ma persino il prussiano non desiderava fare del francese un prussiano. Desiderava soltanto fare in modo che il francese ammirasse un prussiano; e non solo i mezzi che adottò furono alquanto mal ponderati per questo scopo, ma lo scopo stesso è più vago e più irrazionale. L’obiettivo di ogni guerra è la pace; ma l’obiettivo della guerra religiosa è la pace mentale oltre che materiale; è l’accordo. In breve, la guerra religiosa mira in ultimo all’uguaglianza, là dove la guerra nazionale mira relativamente alla superiorità. La conversione è l’unica sorta di conquista in cui il conquistato deve rallegrarsi.
In quel senso soltanto è sciocco per noi in Occidente schernire coloro che uccidono uomini quando un piede è posto in un luogo santo, mentre noi stessi ne uccidiamo centinaia di migliaia quando un piede è posto oltre una frontiera. È assurdo per noi disprezzare coloro che versano sangue per una reliquia quando noi abbiamo versato fiumi di sangue per uno straccio. Ma soprattutto la Crociata, o, se è per questo, la Jehad, è di gran lunga la più filosofica specie di combattimento, non solo nella sua concezione di porre fine alla differenza, ma nel suo mero atto di riconoscere la differenza, come la più profonda specie di differenza. È rovesciare ogni ragione suggerire che la politica di un uomo conti e la sua religione non conti. È dire che egli è influenzato dalla città in cui vive, ma non dal mondo in cui vive. È dire che egli è mutato quando è un concittadino che cammina sotto nuovi lampioni, ma non mutato quando è un’altra creatura che cammina sotto strane stelle. È esattamente come se dicessimo che due persone devono vivere nella stessa casa, ma non è necessario che sia nella stessa città. È esattamente come se dicessimo che, purché l’indirizzo includa York, non importa se si tratta di New York; o che, purché un uomo sia nell’Essex, non c’importa se sia in Inghilterra.
La cristianità sarebbe stata del tutto giustificata in astratto nell’allarmarsi o insospettirsi al solo sorgere di una grande potenza che non fosse cristiana. Nessuno oggigiorno troverebbe strano esprimere rammarico per il sorgere di una potenza perché militarista o socialista o persino protezionista. Ma è assai più naturale essere consapevoli di una differenza, non riguardo all’ordine di battaglia bensì alla battaglia della vita; non riguardo al nostro definibile godimento dei possessi, ma al nostro assai più dubbio possesso del godimento; non riguardo alle divisioni fiscali tra noi e gli stranieri, ma alle divisioni spirituali persino tra noi e gli amici. Queste sono le cose che differiscono profondamente col differire delle vedute sull’ultima natura dell’universo. Poiché le cose della nostra patria sono spesso lontane; ma le cose del nostro cosmo sono sempre vicine; possiamo chiudere le nostre porte al traffico su ruote della nostra città natale; ma nella nostra più intima stanza udiamo il suono che mai cessa; quella ruota che Dante e un proverbio popolare hanno osato battezzare come l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle. Poiché questo è il grande paradosso della vita; che non vi sono solo ruote dentro le ruote, ma le ruote più grandi dentro quelle più piccole. Quando un’intera comunità si fonda su una sola concezione della vita e della morte e dell’origine delle cose, essa è pienamente autorizzata a osservare il sorgere di un’altra comunità fondata su un’altra concezione come il sorgere di qualcosa di certamente diverso e verosimilmente ostile. Anzi, come ho fatto notare a proposito di certe teorie politiche, noi già ammettiamo questa verità nei suoi esempi piccoli e discutibili. Neghiamo soltanto gli esempi grandi e ovvi.
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.
La Cristianità avrebbe potuto con ragione allarmarsi se non fosse stata attaccata. Ma come fatto di storia era già stata attaccata. Il crociato sarebbe stato pienamente giustificato nel sospettare il mussulmano anche se questi fosse stato semplicemente uno straniero nuovo; ma come fatto di storia egli era già un vecchio nemico. Il critico della Crociata parla come se questa avesse cercato fuori qualche tribù o tempio inoffensivo nell’interno del Tibet, che non venne mai scoperto finché non fu invaso. Sembra dimentichino completamente che molto prima che i crociati avessero sognato di cavalcare fino a Gerusalemme, i mussulmani erano quasi arrivati a Parigi. Sembrano dimenticare che se i crociati conquistarono quasi la Palestina, fu solo un ritorno sui mussulmani che avevano quasi conquistato l’Europa. Non c’era bisogno che argomentassero facendo appello alla ragione, come ho fatto io sopra, che una divisione religiosa doveva fare la differenza; essa aveva già fatto la differenza. La differenza li fissava in volto nella sorprendente trasformazione della Barberia romana e della Spagna romana. In breve era qualcosa che doveva succedere in teoria e che è successo in pratica; ogni aspettativa suggeriva che sarebbe stato così ed ogni esperienza diceva che lo fosse. Avendo pensato la cosa teoricamente ed essendosene fatta l’esperienza praticamente, procedettero a trattarla altrettanto praticamente. La prima divisione coinvolgeva ogni principio della scienza del pensiero; e gli ultimi sviluppi seguivano ogni principio della scienza della guerra. La Crociata fu il contrattacco. Fu l’esercito difensivo che prendeva l’offensiva a sua volta, respingendo l’invasore alla sua base. Ed è questo processo, ragionevole dal suo primo assioma al suo ultimo atto, che Mr. Pound in realtà sceglie come una specie di vagabondaggio automatico di un animale. Ma un uomo così intelligente non avrebbe fatto uno sbaglio così straordinario se non fosse stato per un altro errore che qui è molto essenziale considerare. Suggerire che uomini impegnati, giustamente o ingiustamente, in una operazione militare e politica tanto logica stessero solo migrando come uccelli o formando uno sciame come api è altrettanto ridicolo che dire che la campagna del Proibizionismo in America fosse stata solo una regressione animale verso il leccarsi come fa un cane, o l’introduzione dei francobolli da Rowland Hill un gusto animale per il leccarsi come fa un gatto. Perché dovremmo fornire agli altri una ragione remota delle loro azioni quando essi stessi sono pronti a dircene la ragione, e questa è una ragione perfettamente ragionevole?
Ho paragonato questa pomposa impostura della storia scientifica al pomposo e goffo edificio dei tedeschi scientifici sul Monte degli Ulivi, perché sostituisce allo stesso modo una stupidità moderna alla semplicità medievale. Ma proprio come l’Ospizio Tedesco in fin dei conti si trova su un sito magnifico e avrebbe potuto essere un edificio magnifico, così c’è pure un’altra verità, abbastanza analoga, che gli storici tedeschi delle Migrationsvölker forse intendevano dire, a parte tutto quello che hanno effettivamente detto. C’è infatti un aspetto in cui il caso della Crociata si differenzia molto dai casi politici moderni come la proibizione o l’affrancatura postale di un penny. Non mi riferisco a peculiarità occasionali, come il fatto che la Proibizione avrebbe potuto avere successo solo grazie all’enorme potere della plutocrazia moderna, o che anche la comodità del servizio postale va di pari passo con una coercizione estrema da parte della polizia. È una differenza un po’ più profonda quella a cui mi riferisco; e forse è quello che intendono questi critici. Ma la differenza non sta nello spirito evolutivo, bensì piuttosto in quello rivoluzionario.
La Prima Crociata non fu una migrazione razziale; fu qualcosa di molto più intellettuale e dignitoso: un tumulto. Per comprendere questa guerra religiosa dobbiamo classificarla, non tanto con le guerre della storia quanto con le rivoluzioni della storia. Come cercherò di dimostrare brevemente in una pagina successiva, essa aveva non solo tutto il bene peculiare e il male peculiare di eventi come la Rivoluzione Francese o la Rivoluzione Russa, ma era una rivoluzione popolare più puramente popolare di entrambe. La mente veramente moderna considererà naturalmente l’affermazione che fosse popolare come equivalente a una confessione che fosse animalesca. In questi giorni in cui i giornali e i discorsi sono pieni di parole come democrazia e autodeterminazione, qualsiasi cosa assomigli veramente al movimento di una massa di uomini arrabbiati è considerata non migliore di una fuga di tori o di un’incursione di ratti. I nuovi sociologi la chiamano istinto gregario, proprio come i vecchi reazionari la chiamavano bestia dalle molte teste. Ma entrambi concordano nell’implicare che non vale quasi la pena contare quante teste ci sono di tali bestie. Di fronte a simili paragoni alla moda sembrerà relativamente mite parlare di migrazione come avviene tra uccelli o insetti. Tuttavia possiamo osare di affermare con una certa sicurezza che sia i sociologi che i reazionari hanno torto. Non segue che gli esseri umani diventino meno che umani perché le loro idee fanno appello sempre più all’umanità. E neppure possiamo dedurre che gli uomini siano privi di mente solo dal fatto che sono tutti della stessa opinione. In chiaro, le virtù di una folla non possono essere trovate in un branco di tori o in un pacchetto di lupi, tanto quanto i crimini di una folla non possono essere commessi da uno stormo di pecore o da uno scalo di aringhe. Gli uccelli non sono mai stati noti per aver assediato e catturato una gabbia vuota di un voliera, su un principio, solo perché aveva tenuto in cattività alcuni altri uccelli, come la folla ha assediato e catturato la quasi vuota Bastiglia, solo perché era la fortezza di una tirannia storica. E i ratti non sono mai stati noti per essere morti a migliaia solo per visitare una particolare trappola in cui un particolare ratto era perito, come i poveri contadini della Prima Crociata morirono a migliaia per uno sguardo lontano al Sepolcro o per un frammento della vera croce. In questo senso infatti la Crociata non era razionalistica, se il ratto è l’unico razionalista. Ma sembrerà più veramente razionale sottolineare che l’ispirazione di una tale folla non sta in tali istinti che condividiamo con gli animali, ma precisamente in idee come quelle che gli animali non capiscono mai (con tutte le loro virtù).
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.
Ciò che vi è di singolare nella Prima Crociata è che essa fu, in un senso del tutto nuovo e anomalo, un movimento popolare. Direi quasi che fu l’unico movimento popolare che vi sia mai stato al mondo. Perché non fu una cosa che il popolo seguì; fu anzi una cosa che il popolo guidò. Non solo fu essenzialmente una rivoluzione, ma fu l’unica rivoluzione di cui io sappia in cui le masse cominciarono ad agire da sole, e praticamente senza alcun sostegno da parte di nessuna delle classi. Quando ebbero agito, le classi si unirono; ed è perfettamente vero, e anzi del tutto naturale, che le masse da sole fallirono là dove le due insieme riuscirono. Ma furono gli ignoranti a istruire gli istruiti. Il caso della Crociata non è affatto un caso in cui certe idee furono dapprima suggerite da pochi filosofi, e poi predicate dai demagoghi alla democrazia. Ciò fu in gran parte vero per la Rivoluzione francese; fu probabilmente ancor più vero per la Rivoluzione russa; e non occorre qui soffermarci sulla sottile sfumatura di differenza per cui Rousseau aveva ragione e Karl Marx torto. Nella Prima Crociata fu l’uomo comune ad avere ragione o torto. Egli si levò furibondo per l’offesa alle proprie piccole immagini o preghiere private, come se fosse uscito a combattere col proprio attizzatoio domestico o col proprio trinciante. Non era armato di nuove armi d’arguzia e logica distribuite dall’arsenale di un’accademia. Vi era arguzia e logica a volontà nelle accademie del Medioevo; ma il capo tipico della Crociata non fu Abelardo o Aquino, bensì Pietro l’Eremita, che a stento si può dire persino un capo popolare, ma piuttosto una bandiera popolare. E fu il suo esercito, o meglio la sua enorme accozzaglia, a marciare per primo attraverso il mondo per morire per la liberazione di Gerusalemme.
Gli storici dicono che in quell’immensa schiera di migliaia vi erano soltanto nove cavalieri. A chiunque conosca anche solo un poco la guerra medievale il fatto pare sbalorditivo. È infatti un errore da tempo sfatato considerare il Medioevo come identico al feudalesimo. Vi erano innumerevoli istituzioni democratiche, come le corporazioni; talvolta fino a venti corporazioni in una sola piccola città. Ma è davvero vero che l’organizzazione militare del Medioevo era quasi interamente feudale; anzi potremmo piuttosto dire che il feudalesimo era il nome della loro organizzazione militare. Che una massa militare così vasta abbia potuto tentare di muoversi, con soli nove dei capi militari naturali, mi pare un prodigio d’iniziativa popolare. È come se un parlamento venisse eletto alle prossime elezioni generali, nel quale solo due uomini potessero permettersi di leggere un quotidiano.
Questa folla marciò contro la disciplina militare dei Musulmani e fu massacrata; o, se posso esprimermi tanto misticamente, martirizzata. Molti dei grandi re e cavalieri che ne seguirono le orme non meritavano così chiaramente alcuna aureola per la semplicità e la purezza dei loro moventi. La canonizzazione di una tale moltitudine sarebbe forse impossibile, e certamente incontrerebbe resistenza nell’opinione moderna; soprattutto perché durante il cammino sfogarono la loro violenza democratica uccidendo vari usurai; una condotta che naturalmente riempie la società moderna di uno sdegno che rasenta l’allarme. Una perversità mi induce a piangere piuttosto più sui molti contadini trucidati che sui pochi usurai trucidati; ma in ogni caso i contadini di certo non furono trucidati invano. La comune coscienza di tutte le classi, in un tempo in cui tutti avevano un credo comune, si destò, e ne seguì un nuovo esercito di ben diversa abilità e addestramento; guidato dai più valenti capitani e da alcuni fra i gentiluomini più cavallereschi dell’epoca. Perché, curiosamente, la schiera conteneva più di un colto gentiluomo che era cristiano tanto semplice quanto qualsiasi contadino, e temerariamente pronto a farsi scannare o torturare per il solo nome di Cristo.
È un ritornello dei materialisti che la verità sulla storia cancelli il romanzesco della storia. Esso è caro alla mente moderna perché è deprimente; ma dà il caso che non sia vero. Nulla emerge più chiaramente da uno studio veramente realistico del curioso fatto che le persone romantiche erano davvero romantiche. Sono piuttosto i romanzi storici a indurre l’uomo moderno ad aspettarsi vagamente che il capo dei nuovi cavalieri, Goffredo di Buglione, sia stato un mero e brutale barone. I fatti storici depongono tutti a favore di un uomo assai più simile a un cavaliere della Tavola Rotonda. Anzi, egli fu un uomo assai migliore della maggior parte dei cavalieri della Tavola Rotonda, nei cui caratteri il favolista, sapendo di scrivere una favola, ebbe il tatto d’introdurre una maggior mescolanza di vizio. La verità non è soltanto più strana della finzione, ma spesso più santa della finzione. Perché la verità è reale, mentre la finzione è costretta a essere realistica. Curiosamente, Goffredo pare essere stato eroico persino in quei mirabili accidenti che generalmente, e forse a ragione, si considerano orpelli della finzione. Così era di statura eroica, un bell’uomo dalla barba rossa, di grande forza e ardimento; e fu lui stesso il primo uomo a scavalcare le mura di Gerusalemme, come un eroe ragazzo in una storia d’avventura per ragazzi. Ma fu anche, il realista sarà sorpreso di apprenderlo, un uomo perfettamente onesto, e un praticante perfettamente genuino della magnanimità teorica della cavalleria. Tutto in lui lo suggerisce; dalla sua prima conversione dalla causa imperiale a quella papale (e popolare), fino al suo grande rifiuto della regalità della città che aveva conquistato: «Non porterò una corona d’oro là dove il mio Signore portò una corona di spine». Fu un sovrano giusto, e le leggi che promulgò erano piene del più schietto spirito pubblico. Ma anche se scartassimo tutto ciò che di lui scrissero i cronisti cristiani perché potevano essergli amici (il che sarebbe un patetico ed esagerato omaggio all’armoniosa unità dei Crociati e dei Cristiani), egli resterebbe comunque abbastanza incoronato dalle parole dei suoi nemici. Perché un cronista saraceno scrisse di lui, con bella semplicità, che se ogni verità e onore fossero altrimenti appassiti dalla terra, ne resterebbe ancora abbastanza finché il duca Goffredo fosse vivo.
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.
Alleato con Goffredo c’era Tancredi l’italiano, Raimondo di Tolosa con i francesi del sud e Roberto di Normandia, il figlio avventuroso del Conquistatore, con i normanni e gli inglesi. Ma sarebbe un errore, credo, e uno che tenderebbe a rendere tutta la storia successiva non tanto incompresa quanto inintelligibile, supporre che l’intero movimento crociato fosse stato improvvisamente e innaturalmente irrigidito con la più alta disciplina cavalleresca. A meno che non mi sbagli, una gran parte di quell’esercito era ancora molto simile a una folla. È probabile , poiché il grande movimento popolare era ancora profondamente popolare. È sostenuto da mille cose nella storia della campagna; l’eccezionale emotività che faceva piangere e piangere insieme folle di uomini, l’importanza del demagogo, Pietro l’Eremita, nonostante il suo carattere poco militaresco, e le ampie differenze tra i disegni dei capi e le azioni della truppa. Era una folla di uomini rozzi e semplici che si gettò sulla sacra polvere alla prima vista del piccolo paese montano che avevano percorso duemila miglia per vedere. Tancredi lo vide per primo dalla pendenza vicino al villaggio di Betlemme, che aveva aperto le porte volentieri ai suoi cento cavalieri italiani; perché Betlemme allora come ora era un’isola della cristianità nel mare dell’Islam. Nel frattempo Goffredo salì per la strada da Giaffa, e attraversando il crinale della montagna, vide anche lui con i suoi occhi viventi la sua visione del desiderio del mondo. Ma gli uomini più poveri intorno a lui probabilmente provavano la stessa cosa; tutte le classi si inginocchiarono insieme nella polvere, e tutta la storia è un’onda di innumerevoli e senza nome. Era una folla che si era sollevata come un uomo per la fede. Era una folla che era stata veramente torturata come un uomo per la fede. Era già trasfigurata dal dolore così come dalla passione. Coloro che conoscono la guerra in quei deserti durante i mesi dell’estate, anche con forniture e apparecchiature moderne e mappe e calcoli moderni, sanno che poteva essere descritta solo come un inferno pieno di eroi. Quello che deve essere stato per quei piccoli servi locali e contadini dei villaggi del Nord, che non avevano mai sognato in incubi paesaggi simili o un tale sole, che non sapevano come vivessero gli uomini in una tale fornace e non potevano nemmeno indovinare le attenuazioni né ottenerle, è oltre l’immaginazione dell’uomo. Arrivarono morendo di sete, cadendo per la stanchezza, lamentando la perdita dei morti che marcivano lungo il loro cammino; arrivarono ridotti a stracci o già deliranti per la febbre e fecero quello per cui erano venuti.
Soprattutto è chiaro che avevano i vizi così come le virtù di una folla. La scioccante strage nella quale si abbandonarono nel rilassamento improvviso del successo è chiaramente una strage da folla. È ancor più profondamente rivoluzionaria perché deve essere stata per la maggior parte opera di una folla francese. Era dello stesso ordine della Strage di Settembre, e fa parte della stessa verità che la Prima Crociata fu tanto rivoluzionaria quanto la Rivoluzione Francese. Era dello stesso ordine della Strage di San Bartolomeo, che era anch’essa un puro fanatismo popolare, diretto contro ciò che veniva considerato come una aristocrazia antinazionale. È praticamente auto-evidente che i comandanti cristiani vi si opposero e cercarono di fermarla. Tancredi promise la vita ai musulmani nella moschea, ma la folla chiaramente lo ignorò. Raimondo di Tolosa stesso salvò coloro nel Torrione di Davide, e riuscì a mandarli in salvo con i loro beni ad Ascalona. Ma la rivoluzione col suo male così come il suo bene era scatenata e infuriava nelle strade della Santa Città. E non vediamo quello spirito di rivoluzione più chiaramente che nella vista di tutti quei contadini e servi e vassalli, in quel momento selvaggio, in rivolta non solo contro i signori conquistati dell’Islam, ma anche contro i signori conquistatori della Cristianità.
La tensione dell’assedio era stata davvero di un’eccitazione intensa e persino orribile. Coloro che oggi ci parlano della psicologia della folla saranno d’accordo nel dire che uomini che hanno tanto sofferto e tanto vinto non sono normali; che i loro cervelli si trovano in uno squilibrio terribile che può inclinare da una parte o dall’altra. Entrarono infine nella città con un umore tale per cui avrebbero potuto tutti diventare monaci; invece divennero tutti assassini. Un brillante generale, che ebbe un ruolo decisivo nella nostra recente campagna in Palestina, mi disse con una sorta di cupo umorismo che non si meravigliava affatto della storia; perché lui stesso era entrato a Gerusalemme in preda a una specie di furia delusa: “Abbiamo attraversato un tale inferno per arrivare lì, e ora è rovinata per tutti noi.” Tale è la pesante ironia che grava sulla nostra natura umana, facendoci entrare nella città Santa come se fosse la città Celeste, e più di quanto qualsiasi città terrena possa essere. Ma la lotta che portò all’espugnazione di Gerusalemme nella Prima Crociata fu qualcosa di molto più selvaggio e imprevedibile di tutto ciò che si può concepire in una guerra moderna. Non ci stupiamo se la folla dei crociati vedeva il borgo davanti a loro come una sorta di torre piena di demoni, e le colline intorno come un paese incantato e maledetto. Perché in un senso molto reale era proprio così; poiché tutti gli elementi e i mezzi erano altrettante qualità sconosciute. I metodi dei loro nemici erano segreti che li colpivano di sorpresa. Tutti i loro metodi erano cose nuove fatte dal nulla. Si chiedevano allo stesso modo cosa avrebbero fatto gli altri e cosa si poteva fare dalla loro parte; ogni movimento contro di loro era un pugnale uscito dall’oscurità, e ogni mossa che facevano era un salto nel buio. Prima, da una parte, abbiamo Tancredi che cerca di prendere l’intera città fortificata arrampicandosi su una sola fragile scala, come se uno cercasse di catturare con la laccia la vetta di una montagna. Poi abbiamo il lancio dalle torrette di una strana e spaventosa pioggia infuocata, come se acqua stessa fosse presa da fuoco. In seguito divenne nota come il Fuoco Greco ed era probabilmente petrolio; ma per coloro che non l’avevano mai vista (o sentita) prima, poteva ben sembrare l’olio infuocato della stregoneria. Poi Goffredo e i guerrieri più saggi si misero a costruire torri d’assedio di legno e scoprirono di non avere quasi legname per farle. Non c’era praticamente nulla in quel deserto roccioso se non gli alberi nani dell’ulivo; una fantasia poetica intessuta su quella guerra nelle età successive li descriveva ostacolati persino nel taglio del legno dai demoni di quel luogo strano. E in effetti la fantasia aveva una verità essenziale, perché la stessa natura della terra combatteva contro di loro; e ciascuno di quegli alberi nani, duri, vuoti e contorti, poteva ben sembrare come un goblin che ghigna. Si dice che trovarono travi per caso in una caverna; strapparono i travetti da case in rovina; alla fine entrarono in contatto con alcuni artigiani di Genova che si misero all’opera più efficacemente; scorticando il bestiame, morto a mucchi, e coprendo le travi. Costruirono tre torri alte su ruote, e uomini e bestie le trainarono faticosamente contro le alte torri della città. Le catapulta della città risposero loro, i cataratti di fuoco divorante scesero; le torri di legno ondeggiarono e vacillarono, e due di esse si fermarono improvvisamente immobili e inutili. E mentre calava l’oscurità, un grande bagliore deve aver loro detto che la terza ed ultima era in fiamme.
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.
Tutta quella notte Godfrey si affannò per rimediare al disastro. Abbatté l’intera torre dal luogo dove sorgeva e la ricostruì sulle alture a nord della città, che oggi sono segnate dalla pianta di pino che cresce fuori dalle porte di Erode. E tutto il tempo in cui si affannò, si diceva che sinistri maghi sedessero sui merli, operando ignote meraviglie per disfare il lavoro dell’uomo. Se il grande cavaliere avesse avuto un barlume di tale simbolismo dalla sua parte, avrebbe potuto vedere nella propria lotta con la solida trave qualcosa del mestiere che aveva circondato la nascita della sua fede e il sacro lavoro del carpentiere. E in effetti lo stesso schema di tutta la carpenteria è a forma di croce, e c’è più di un caso nell’allegoria. La posizione trasversale della trave implica infatti molte di quelle verità matematiche che sono analoghe alle verità morali e quasi ogni struttura ha l’ombra della mistica croce, come le tre dimensioni hanno un’ombra della Trinità. Ecco il vero mistero dell’uguaglianza; poiché la trave più lunga potrebbe allungarsi fino all’infinito e non avvicinarsi mai alla forma simbolica senza l’aiuto della più corta. Ecco quella guerra e quel matrimonio tra due forze opposte, che si resistono e si sostengono a vicenda; il luogo d’incontro dei contrari che noi, con una sorta di pietistico gioco di parole, chiamiamo ancora la croce della questione. Ecco la nostra angolare e provocatoria risposta al se-devorante cerchio dell’Asia. Può essere improbabile, sebbene sia tutt’altro che impossibile (perché quell’epoca era abbastanza filosofica) che un uomo come Godfrey abbia così esteso il mistico al metafisico; ma lo scrittore di una vera romanzo su di lui sarebbe bene nei suoi diritti nel farlo vedere il simbolismo della sua torre, una torre che si ergeva sopra di lui attraverso le nuvole della notte come se volesse afferrare il cielo o mostrare la sua rete di travi nera contro l’alba; che scalava i cieli ed era aperta a tutti i venti, una scala e un labirinto, ripetendo fino a perdersi nel crepuscolo lo schema del segno della croce.
Quando l’alba giunse, tutti quei contadini affamati poterono benissimo trovarsi di fronte alle alte mura inespugnabili alla piena luce del giorno dell’disperazione. Anche i loro incubi durante la notte, con negromanti sovrumani che li guardavano dall’alto dei merli e con segni e incantesimi paralizzavano tutti i loro potenziali sforzi, poterono benissimo essere una sorta di consolazione pessimistica, anticipando e giustificando il fallimento. La Santa Città era diventata per loro una fortezza piena di demoni, quando Goffredo di Buglione si mise nuovamente all’opera con la spada in pugno sulla torre di legno e diede ancora l’ordine di trascinarla vacillante verso le torri su entrambi i lati della porta dei cavalli. Così strisciarono nuovamente attraverso il fossato pieno di cadaveri, trainando la loro enorme casa di legno dietro di sé, e tutto lo scoppio e il fragore della guerra si abbatterono ancora sulle loro teste. Una grandinata di dardi martellò gli scudi che li coprivano come un baldacchino, pietre e massi caddero su di loro e li schiacciarono come mosche nel fango, e dalle macchine del Fuoco greco tutti i torrenti della loro tortura si riversarono su di loro come fiumi rossi dell’inferno. Perché invero le anime di quei contadini devono essersi sentite nauseate da qualcosa dello sconvolgimento provato da troppi contadini del nostro tempo sotto le spaventose batterie volanti della guerra scientifica; un’empia inversione della battaglia in cui l’inferno stesso ha occupato il cielo. Qualcosa dei vapori vomitati da tale crudele chimica poté aver mescolato la polvere della battaglia, e oscurato quella luce che mostrava dove le rocce frantumanti stavano squarciando un tetto di scudi, agli uomini curvi e accecati com’erano da tale fatica di trascinamento e da tale grandine di morte. Poterono aver udito attraverso tutto il frastuono dei rumori senza nome le alte grida dai minareti del trionfo musulmano che si facevano più acute come un vento in flauti acuti, e sapere ben poco di ciò che accadeva sopra o oltre loro. Fu molto probabile che lavorassero e lottassero in quella bassa oscurità, ignorando che alto sopra le loro teste, e al di sopra della nuvola della battaglia, la torre di legno e la torre di pietra si erano toccate e incontrate nel mezzo del cielo; e il grande Goffredo, solo e vivo era balzato sulla muraglia di Gerusalemme.