So unconquerable was the ferocity of the Jewish soldiery,[24] that it may be doubted whether even the stern discipline, the high military spirit, and the overwhelming numbers of the Romans would not have been compelled ultimately to give way before them, if it had not been that Rome now acquired two new allies, more terrible than any they had yet brought into the field. Jerusalem, at all times a populous city, was now crowded to excess by strangers, who had come over to keep the Jewish Passover, and had been unable to withdraw. The supplies of food soon began to fail, and the famine which ensued grew every hour more pressing. The soldiers had to supply their own wants by making the round of the houses, and tearing their daily meals from the mouths of their starving fellow-citizens. Numbers of these were driven by hunger to steal out of the city by night, to gather herbs and roots, which might afford temporary relief. Titus, hoping to terrify the besieged by a display of severity which would save in the end more lives than he sacrificed, ordered these unhappy wretches to be crucified in the sight of their countrymen; and the city in which the Lord of Life had undergone the same form of death was surrounded by a multitude of crosses, on which the agonized sufferers slowly yielded up their lives in torment. Others, who implored the protection of the Romans, were ruthlessly ripped open in vast numbers by the barbarous soldiery, who believed that the fugitives had swallowed gold, which they would find in their entrails. The fate of these, dreadful as it was, was less terrible than that of the wretches who remained to perish of famine. Scenes almost too shocking for belief have yet been recorded on authority which cannot be disputed. Husbands saw their wives perishing before their eyes, and were unable to save them; parents snatched the food from the mouths of their starving children; hungry wretches crawled to the walls, and entreated the soldiers to slay them, and failing to obtain this last mercy, lay down by hundreds in the streets, and died. Nay, the last horror of all but too surely was accomplished, and mothers slew and ate their own nursing children! The numbers of the dead lying unburied soon bred pestilence, and added to the horrors of the time. An attempt was made to bury the corpses at the public expense; but the accumulating numbers rendered this impossible, and they were thrown by thousands over the walls in the sight of the horror-stricken Romans.