The military engines and machines were all burnt, and the Christians were about to yield themselves up to despair, when a Bedouin Arab offered, for a bribe of five hundred golden bezants, to show a safe ford. At dawn of day, on Shrove Tuesday, the French knights mounted on horseback to make trial of the ford of the Bedouin. “Before we set out,” says Joinville, “the king had ordered that the Templars should form the van, and the Count d’Artois, his brother, should command the second division after the Templars; but the moment the Count d’Artois had passed the ford, he and all his people fell on the Saracens, and putting them to flight, galloped after them. The Templars sent to call the Count d’Artois back, and to tell him that it was his duty to march behind and not before them; but it happened that the Count d’Artois could not make any answer by reason of my Lord Foucquault du Melle, who held the bridle of his horse, and my Lord Foucquault, who was a right good knight, being deaf, heard nothing the Templars were saying to the Count d’Artois, but kept bawling out, ‘_Forward! forward!_’ (‘Or a eulz! or a eulz!’) When the Templars perceived this, they thought they should be dishonoured if they allowed the Count d’Artois thus to take the lead; so they spurred their horses more and more, and faster and faster, and chased the Turks, who fled before them, through the town of Mansourah, as far as the plains towards Babylon.”[126] The Arabian writers, in their account of the entry of the Templars into Mansourah, tell us that 2,000 horsemen galloped into the place sword in hand and surprised Fakho’ddin Othman, commonly called Ibn Saif, the Moslem general, and one of the principal Mamlook emirs, in the bath, and barbarously cut him to pieces as he was painting his beard before a glass.[127] But the impetuous courage of the Count d’Artois and the Templars had led them far away from the support of the main body of the army, and their horsemen became embarrassed in the narrow streets of Mansourah, where there was no room to charge or manœuvre with effect. The infidels rallied; they returned to the attack with vast reinforcements; the inhabitants of the town mounted to their house-tops, and discharged stones and brickbats upon the heads of the christian knights, and the Templars were defeated and driven out of the city with dreadful carnage. “The Count d’Artois and the Earl of Leicester were there slain, and as many as three hundred other knights. The Templars lost, as their chief informed me, full fourteen score men-at-arms, and all their horsemen.” The Grand Master of the Temple also lost an eye, and cut his way through the infidels to the main body of the christian army, accompanied only by two Knights Templars. There he again mixed in the affray, took the command of a vanguard, and is to be found fighting by the side of the lord de Joinville at sunset.