Our motley ranks were already scattering, when I cried out my name and defied him to the combat. He stooped over his charger’s neck to discover his adversary, and seeing before him a being as blackened and beggared as the most dismantled figure of the crowd, gave a laugh of fierce derision, and was turning away, when our roar of scorn recalled him. He struck in the spur, and couching his lance, bounded toward me. To have waited his attack must have been destruction; I sprang aside, and with my full vigor flung my javelin; it went through his buckler. He reeled, and a groan rose from the legionaries who were rushing forward to his support. He stopped them with a fierce gesture, and casting off the entangled buckler, charged again. But the hope of the imperial diadem was not to be thus cheaply hazarded. The whole circle of cavalry rolled in upon us; I was dragged down by a hundred hands, and Titus was forced away, indignant at the zeal which had thwarted his fiery valor.
In the confusion I was forgotten, burst through the concourse, and rejoined my countrymen, who had given me over for lost, and now received me with shouts of victory. The universal cry was to advance, but I felt that the limit of triumph for that night was come; the engagement had become known to the whole range of the enemy’s camps, and troops without number were already pouring down. I ordered a retreat, but there was one remaining exploit to make the night’s service memorable.
Leaving a few hundred pikemen outside the circumvallation, to keep off any sudden attempt, I set every hand at work to gather the dry weeds, rushes, and fragments of trees from the low grounds into a pile. It was laid against the rampart. I flung the first torch, and pile and rampart were soon alike in a blaze. Volumes of flame, carried by the wind, rolled round its entire circuit. The Romans rushed down in multitudes to extinguish the fire. But this became continually more difficult. Jerusalem had been roused from its sleep, and the extravagant rumors that a great victory was obtained, Titus slain, and the enemy’s camp taken by storm, stimulated the natural spirit of the people to the most boundless confidence. Every Jew who could find a lance, an arrow, or a knife hurried to the gates, and the space between the walls and the circumvallation was crowded with an army which, in that crisis of superhuman exultation, perhaps no disciplined force on earth could have outfought.
Nothing could now save the rampart. Torches innumerable, piles of faggots, arms, even the dead, all things that could burn, were flung upon it. Thousands, who at other times might have shrunk, forgot the name of fear, leaped into the very midst of the flames, and tearing up the blazing timbers, dug to the heart of the rampart and filled the hollows with sulfur and bitumen; thousands struggled across the tumbling ruins, to throw themselves among the Roman spearsmen and see the blood of an enemy before they died.
The Rampart’s Illumination
War never had a bolder moment. Human nature, roused to the wildest height of enthusiasm, was lavishing life like dust. The ramparts spread a horrid light upon the havoc; every spot of the battle, every group of the furious living, and the trampled and deformed dead, was keenly visible. The ear was deafened by the incessant roar of flame, the falling of the huge heaps of the rampart, and the agonies and exultations of men, reveling in mutual slaughter.
The Phenomenon in the Sky
In that hour came one of those solemn signs that marked the downfall of Jerusalem. The tempest, that had blown at intervals with tremendous violence, died away at once; and a surge of light ascended from the horizon and rolled up rapidly to the zenith. The phenomenon instantly fixed every eye. There was an indefinable sense in the general mind that a sign of power and providence was about to be given. The battle ceased; the outcries were followed by utter silence; the armed ranks stood still, in the very act of rushing on each other; all faces were turned on the heavens.
The light rose pale and quivering like the meteors of a summer evening. But in the zenith, it spread and swelled into a splendor that distinguished it irresistibly from the wonders of earth or air. It swiftly eclipsed every star. The moon vanished before it; the canopy of the sky seemed to be dissolved, for a view into a bright and infinite region beyond, fit for the career of those mighty beings to whom man is but the dust on the gale.
As we gazed, this boundless field was transformed into a field of battle; multitudes seemed to crowd it in the fiercest combat; horsemen charged and died under their horses’ feet; armor and standards were trampled in blood; column and line burst through each other. At length the battle stooped toward the earth, and with hearts beating with indescribable feelings we recognized in the fight the banners of the tribes. It was Jew and Roman struggling for life; the very countenances of the combatants became visible, and each man below saw a representative of himself above. The fate of Jewish war was there written by the hand of Heaven; the fate of the individual was there predicted in the individual triumph or fall. What tongue of man can tell the intense interest with which we watched every blow, every movement, every wound, of those images of ourselves?