The first Crusaders set off with light and buoyant hearts; they were marching, they thought, to certain conquest; the walls would fall down before them: it was a privilege and a sacred pleasure to have taken the sign of the Cross. The second army started with gloomy forebodings of misery and suffering; they were going on a penitential journey; they were about to encounter perils which they knew to be terrible, an enemy whom they knew to be countless as the sands of their own deserts, not because they wanted to fight, but because Bernard, who could not err, told them that God Himself laid this penance on their shoulders. Every step that brought Peter’s rough and rude army nearer to Constantinople was a step of pleasure: every step that the second army took was an addition to the weariness and boredom of the whole thing. The most penitential of all was the young king, Louis VII. of France, upon whose conscience there lay the terrible crime of having burned the church at Vitry. For in the church, which he had fired himself, were thirteen hundred men, women, and children, who were all burned with it. The king would fain have saved them, but could not, and when he saw their blackened and half-burned bodies, his soul was sick within him for remorse and sorrow. It was a calamity—for which, however, the king was not, perhaps, wholly responsible—worse than that modern burning of the women of Santiago. In Germany they began to expiate their sins by murdering the Jews, a cheap and even profitable way of purifying the troubled conscience, because they plundered as well as murdered them. Bernard, to his infinite credit, stayed the hand of persecution, and showed the people that this was not, hateful as a Jew must always be to a Christian, the way pointed out by Heaven. The preaching of Bernard was seconded by the exhortations of the poets, who united in singing the praises of those who take the Cross, and in denouncing those who refused. “Rise,” says one bard, “Rise, ye who love with loyal heart; Awake, nor sleep the hours away: Now doth the darksome night depart, And now the lark leads in the day: Hear how he sings with joyous strain The morn of peace which God doth give To those who heed nor scathe nor pain; Who dare in peril still to live; Who, night or day, no rest may take, And bear the Cross for Christ’s own sake.” The Crusade consisted wholly of Germans and French. The former went first, headed by Conrad, King of the Romans, who left his son Henry in charge of his dominions. They got through the Greek emperor’s dominions with some difficulty, being unruly and little amenable to discipline, but were at last safely conveyed across the straits to Asia Minor, where they waited the arrival of King Louis.