Witnesses of the sacking of Béziers say that while the chiefs of the besieging army were considering how to spare those in the city who were not Albigensian, an assault was started through the skirmish of lawless hangers-on of the crusading army and a few townspeople. In the confusion that followed, the northern knights rushed to arms and the city was captured. A XX-century wrecking of the Louvain-Dinant-Termonde type followed, and some twenty thousand perished. Modern scholars doubt that the famous _Tuez-les-tous_ remark, attributed to Abbot Arnaud of Cîteaux, who died archbishop of Narbonne, was ever uttered. He is accused of saying, "Kill them all, God will know his own," when asked how the orthodox were to be told from the heretics. No contemporary chronicle mentions it and Albigensian historians would certainly have flung such words at the crusaders; equally would an ardent admirer of Simon de Montfort, who wrote his _Gestes_, have lauded the sentiment, if one is to judge by other happenings he thought praiseworthy. Neither enemy nor friend mentions the _Tuez-les-tous_ phrase. It first occurs in the history of a German monk at Bonn, long after the Midi crusade, and the pages of that chronicler are so filled with discredited assertions that little he says should be taken seriously. MONTPELLIER AND MAGUELONNE[242] The tocsin sounded its lamentable notes of alarm over all the land of France. Fire? No. _War._ The voice of the bells long condemned to silence by the authorities suddenly rang out everywhere. From the high belfries spread the warning, and no one worried now to refuse to God, to the Inexplicable, the right of speech. From God's house alone came to France, waiting in tense agony, the announcement of the most terrible catastrophe that ever fell like an avalanche on humanity. Sunrise to sunset from east to west, from north to south rang out the coming of War, the world's misery.--JEAN AICARD, on how the World War opened in the Midi.[243] In Montpellier is a stately terrace called the Peyrou, built in the artificial, distinguished style of Louis XIV, from which one looks out on a most lovely landscape of Midi fertility.[244] Here Mistral in 1878 read his vibrant ode to the Latin race, _la race lumineuse, la race apostolique_, and a generation later the people gathered here to listen to the belfries far and near ring out over that peaceful Claude Lorraine scene the hour of unity in battle array, for all Frenchmen--Latin and Celt and Frank. No longer a Midi and a North. The time was past for race hate or conquest to pose as a crusade. The time had come to end the silencing of Christian steeples under the guise of freedom. As one man, Midi and North sprang up in answer to the tocsin of August, 1914.