Not with Peter the Hermit, the hallucinated dwarf whose sobbing eloquence had led an innumerable motley host of unnamed peasants to certain disaster in the deserts of the East, went the hundred Gruyerian soldiers led by Guillaume, but with the knights and priests of Romand Switzerland, the Burgundian French and Lombard nobles who swelled the fabled hosts of Godfrey de Bouillon. With gifts of lands to churches and to priories and with the blessing of the lord bishop of their county the Gruyere pilgrims, eager to battle for the holy cause, obeyed with ardor the cry of _Dieu le veut, Diex le volt_, and leaving their country, faced without faltering, dangers and distant lands and carried their scarlet banner with its silver crane, bravely among the bravest. "The young bergeres of Gruyere," so runs the chronicle, "barred the gates of the city to prevent their departure, by force the gates were burst, and the poor maidens wept as they listened to the standard-bearers cry, a hundred times repeated, "_En Avant la Grue, S'agit d'aller, reviendra qui pourra._" How wide is the ocean we must cross," they asked as they galloped down the valleys, "as wide as the lake we must pass when we go to pray to our Lady of Lausanne?" Tasso, the poet of the Crusades, so well appreciated the valor of the Swiss soldiers that he chose their leader for the honor of first scaling the walls of Jerusalem. "Over the moat, on a sudden filled to the brim With a thousand thrown faggots, and with rolled trees stout and slim, Before all he ventured. On helmet and buckler poured floods of sulphurous fire. Yet scatheless he passed through the furnace of flame, And with powerful hand throwing the ladder high over the wall, mounted with pride." Again when the Christians were in want of wood for the catapults and rolling towers with which to scale and batter down resisting walls, Tasso leads this same undaunted servant of de Bouillon into the forest enchanted by the Satanic ally of the Musselmans. "Like all soldiers I must challenge fate-- Surprises, fears and phantoms know I not. Floods and roaring monsters, the terrors Of the common herd affright not me! The last realm of hell I would invade, Descending fearless, sword in hand."