In France an enormous army had been collected, by help of the old cry of “Dieu le veut,” the magic of which had not yet died out; there must have been men, not very old, who remembered the preaching of Peter, and the frantic cries with which the Cross was demanded after one of his fiery harangues. Bernard wrote to the pope, with monkish exaggeration, that “the villages and the castles are deserted, and one sees none but widows and orphans whose husbands and fathers are yet living.” Most of them, alas! were to remain widows and orphans indeed, for the husbands and fathers were never destined to return. And, as in the First Crusade, many of those who joined ruined themselves in procuring the arms and money necessary for their outfit. The Church, as before, kindly came to their assistance by buying the lands of them at a nominal value. The gravest mistake was that made at the very outset when the barons were permitted to take with them their wives. Queen Eleanor, who afterwards married our Henry II., went with her husband, accompanied by a great number of ladies, and the presence of large numbers of women in the camp caused grave disorder, and subsequently great peril, both to the French and German armies. It was in the early winter of 1147 that the Crusaders crossed the Hellespont. Without waiting for the French, the Germans, divided into two bodies, had pushed on. They reckoned on the friendship of the Greeks, but they were grievously disappointed. Extravagant prices were demanded for the most inferior food; lime was put into the bread, which killed many; the Turcopoles hovered about and cut off the supplies; but, in spite of these obstacles, a portion of the army, under the Bishop of Freisingen, managed to reach Syria. As for the larger part, under Conrad, they were guided as far as Dorylæum, where the first Crusaders had so hard a battle. Here the guides ran away, and the Turks fell upon them. The army consisted of seventy thousand horse, and a vast multitude of foot soldiers, of women, and of children. About seven thousand horse escaped with King Conrad. All the rest were slaughtered. No greater calamity had ever happened to the Christian arms. Conrad got back to Nicæa, where Louis, who had just arrived, was encamped. The French resolved to take the way by the sea-shore. We need not follow through all the perils of their march. They fought their way to Ephesus; thence, crossing the Mæander, they came to a place called Satalia, at the western extremity of Cilicia; and here Louis left them, and went by sea to Antioch. The plague broke out among the troops: the Greeks refused them any help, which they got from the very Turks whom they came to fight, and finally, out of the hundreds of thousands who had left the West a year before, a few thousands only struggled into Syria. Of the women who went with them, their wives and mistresses, not one got to Palestine, save only Queen Eleanor and her suite.