My first care was to relieve the anxieties of my family, and Constantius, with triumph in every feature, and love and honor glowing in his heart, was made the bearer of the glad tidings. The duties of command now devolved rapidly on me. An army to be raised, a plan of operations to be determined on, the chieftains of the country to be combined, and the profligate feuds of Jerusalem to be extinguished, were the difficulties that lay before my first step. It is in preliminaries like these that the burning spirit of a man, full of the manliest resolutions and caring no more for personal safety than he cares for the weed under his feet, is fated to feel the true troubles of enterprise. I soon experienced the disgust of having to contend with the indolent, the artful, and the base. My mind, eager to follow up the first success, was entangled in tedious and intricate negotiation with men whom no sense of right or wrong could stimulate to integrity. Rival interests to be conciliated, gross corruption to be crushed, paltry passions to be stigmatized, family hatreds to be reconciled, childish antipathies, grasping avarice, giddy ambition, savage cruelty, to be rectified, propitiated, or punished, were among my tasks before I could plant a foot in the field. If those are the fruits that grow round even the righteous cause, what must be the rank crop of conspiracy? [Sidenote: The Value of Councils] But one point I speedily settled. The first assemblage of the chieftains satisfied me as to the absurdity of councils of war. Every man had his plan, and every plan had some personal object in view. I saw that to discuss them would be useless and endless. I had already begun to learn the diplomatic art of taking my own way with the most unruffled aspect. I desired the proposers to reduce their views to writing, received their memorials with perfect civility, took them to my cabinet, and gave their brilliancy to add to the blaze of my fire. High station is soon compelled to dissemble. A month before I should have spoken out my mind and treated the plans and the proposers alike with scorn. But a month before I was neither general nor statesman. Freed now from the encumbrance of many councilors, I decided on a rapid march to Jerusalem[34]—there was power and glory in the word. By this measure I should be master of all that final victory could give, the popular mind, the national resources, and the highest prize of the most successful war.