This retreat of the Christians was fraught with miseries which baffle description. The women, the children, and the sick were stowed in the few boats that remained, and in the darkness of night drifted down the stream. The soldiers took up their perilous march along the banks. Some of the nobles, together with the papal legate, having secured a vessel, urged the king to embark. He refused, being determined, as he declared, to tramp with the last man that survived. The camp they were leaving was quickly assailed by the Moslems, who went through it slaughtering all they could find. Louis turned back and fought with the desperation of a tigress protecting her young. The cry, “Wait for the king!” rang along the banks, and the vessels stopped; but Louis forbade any to loiter. At length the rear-guard was in motion. The king was provided with a horse, and, without helmet or cuirass, arrayed only with his sword and surrounded by a handful of braves, brought up the rear of a mighty funeral procession, in which the living were moving to their own graves. The king afterwards spoke of the heroic fidelity of one of his attendants, Geoffrey de Sargines, “who protected me against the Saracens as a good servant protects his lord’s tankard against the flies.” The cortège—it was such rather than an army—moved along roads lined with the dead and dying. Horrible cries startled them on every side. Peering through the darkness, they saw the forms of comrades often deprived of hands and feet. As birds of prey follow the traveller in the desert and sometimes do not wait until he is dead before they attack his languishing form, so the Moslems pursued the band which they knew to be foredoomed to perish, and hastened the end by their murderous assault. Those who had embarked on boats met with a disaster equal to that of those who trudged on land. The enemy’s fleet stopped them near Mehallah. The Christian boats were huddled together so that they could not move. The crusaders could scarcely find foot room on the crowded decks; the Mussulman archers on the shore poured upon them a storm of arrows, many of which were tipped with the Greek fire. The Christians on the ships were no longer soldiers, but victims of slaughter.