The Christian host should have profited by the enemy’s discomfiture, and immediately have penetrated into the interior of the country, instead of remaining, as it did, stationary for five months, either on account of the periodic inundations of the river, or in expectation of the reinforcements which were due from Europe. This long delay, which fostered idleness, dissipation, and insubordination, was fatal to the expedition. When the king at last gave the order to advance, he had under his orders none but effeminate, enervated troops, without obedience and without discipline; and the Saracens, who had had plenty of time to forget their panic and overcome their discouragement, found, in the demoralization of their enemies, a still further ground for comfort, and a fresh motive for confidence. [Illustration: Fig. 107.--Disembarkation of the Crusaders at Damietta.--Fac-simile of a Woodcut in the “Grand Voyage de Hiérusalem,” printed in Paris in 1522 by François Regnault, in the Library of M. Ambr. Firmin-Didot.] Thenceforward the Christian cause proceeded from bad to worse. After several engagements in which they were worsted, after several battles, the effect of which was merely to sacrifice life--particularly after the battle of Mansourah, in which Robert of Artois, the king’s brother, was killed, with the flower of the nobility--the Crusaders found themselves surrounded in their camp, a prey to a pestilential epidemic produced by want, which daily made considerable ravages in their ranks. French valour, however, was not to be daunted, and over and over again the soldiers, though exhausted by fatigue and disease and dying of hunger, put forth fresh efforts, and defeated the Saracens; at a cost to themselves, however, that each victory made them less able to endure. At last they were forced to retreat on Damietta, where the Queen with some reserve troops was awaiting them, and where they hoped to reorganize themselves. After they had been three or four days on the march, during which this weary host of sick and wounded had been ceaselessly harassed by the enemy, the king--who was seriously ill himself, but who always rode and fought in the rear to protect the remnant of his _ost_, whose safety, he said, he valued far more than his own life--was forced to halt in a village, which the Saracens surrounded and attacked on all sides, while the bravest and most devoted of Louis’s knights allowed themselves to be cut to pieces to prevent their _good sire_ from falling into the hands of the infidels.