On the 1st of March they camped at Ramleh—the ancient Rama, where Rachel gave way to her great despair, which the Bible describes in this nobly pathetic verse:
In Rama was there a voice heard, lamentations and weepings and great mourning; Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted because they were not.
Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and Joseph passed by Rama on their way to Egypt. The church which the monks gave Bonaparte for a hospital was built on the very spot where the holy family stopped to rest.
The well whose fresh, pure water slaked the thirst of the whole army was the very same which, seventeen hundred and ninety-nine years before, had refreshed the holy fugitives. He also was from Rama, that disciple Joseph, whose pious hand wrapped the body of our Lord Jesus Christ in the shroud.
Perhaps not one man in the whole vast multitude knew the sacred tradition. But one thing they did know, and that was that they were not more than eighteen miles from Jerusalem.
As they walked beneath the olive trees which are perhaps the most beautiful in all the East, and which the soldiers ruthlessly cut down to make their bivouac fires, Bourrienne asked Bonaparte: "General, shall you not go to Jerusalem?"
"Oh, no," he replied, carelessly; "Jerusalem is not within my line of operations. I do not care to get into trouble with the mountaineers on these bad roads; and then on the other side of the mountain I should be attacked by a large body of cavalry. I have no ambition to emulate the fate of Crassus."
Crassus, it will be remembered, was massacred by the Parthians.
There is this that is strange in Bonaparte's life, that while he was at one time within eighteen miles of Jerusalem (the cradle of Christ) and at another within eighteen miles of Rome (the cradle of the Papacy), he had no desire to see either Rome or Jerusalem.