Read Pearl-Maiden: A Tale of the Fall of Jerusalem Page 19

  CHAPTER XV

  WHAT PASSED IN THE TOWER

  Nearly four months had gone by. Perhaps, during the whole history of theworld there never has been and never will be more cruel suffering thanwas endured by the inhabitants of Jerusalem during that period, orrather by the survivors of the nation of the Jews who were crowdedtogether within its walls. Forgetting their internecine quarrels in theface of overwhelming danger, too late the factions united and foughtagainst the common foe with a ferocity that has been seldom equalled.They left nothing undone which desperate men could do. Again and againthey sallied forth against the Romans, slaughtering thousands of them.They captured their battering-rams and catapults. They undermined thegreat wooden towers which Titus erected against their walls, and burntthem. With varying success they made sally upon sally. Titus took thethird wall and the new city of Bezetha. He took the second wall andpulled it down. Then he sent Josephus, the historian, to persuade theJews to surrender, but his countrymen cursed and stoned him, and the warwent on.

  At length, as it seemed to be impossible to carry the place by assault,Titus adopted a surer and more terrible plan. Enclosing the firstunconquered wall, the Temple, and the fortress by another wall of hisown making, he sat down and waited for starvation to do its work. Thencame the famine. At the beginning, before the maddened, devil-inspiredfactions began to destroy each other and to prey upon the peacefulpeople, Jerusalem was amply provisioned. But each party squandered thestores that were within its reach, and, whenever they could do so, burntthose of their rivals, so that the food which might have supplied thewhole city for months, vanished quickly in orgies of wanton waste anddestruction. Now all, or almost all, was gone, and by tens and hundredsof thousands the people starved.

  Those who are curious about such matters, those who desire to know howmuch human beings can endure, and of what savagery they can be capablewhen hunger drives them, may find these details set out in the pages ofJosephus, the renegade Jewish historian. It serves no good purpose andwill not help our story to repeat them; indeed for the most part theyare too terrible to be repeated. History does not record, and the mindof man cannot invent a cruelty which was not practised by the famishedJews upon other Jews suspected of the crime of having hidden foodto feed themselves or their families. Now the fearful prophecy wasfulfilled, and it came about that mothers devoured their own infants,and children snatched the last morsel of bread from the lips of theirdying parents. If these things were done between those who were ofone blood, what dreadful torment was there that was not practised bystranger upon stranger? The city went mad beneath the weight of itsabominable and obscene misery. Thousands perished every day, and everynight thousands more escaped, or attempted to escape, to the Romans,who caught the poor wretches and crucified them beneath the walls, tillthere was no more wood of which to make the crosses, and no more groundwhereon to stand them.