CHAPTER LVIII
Eleazar the Convert
The War of Extermination
I was not to escape! As I reached the gate a loud sound of trampling feet and many voices drove me back. By that curious texture of the feelings which prefers suffering to suspense I was almost glad to have the question decided for me by fortune, and flung myself on the ground among a heap of the undone, who lay enjoying a slumber that might be envied by thrones. The gate was thrown open and in another moment in burst a living mass of horror, a multitude of beings in whom the human face and form were almost obliterated; shapes gaunt with famine, black with dust, withered with deadly fatigue, and covered with gashes and gore.
The war had gone on from cruelty to cruelty. To the Roman the Jew was a rebel, and he had a rebel’s treatment; to the Jew the Roman was a tyrant, and dearly was the price of his tyranny exacted. Quarter was seldom given on either side. The natural generosity of the son of Vespasian had attempted for a while to soften this furious system. But the slaughter of the mission exasperated him; he declared the Jews a people incapable of faith, and proclaimed a war of extermination. The battle of the day had furnished the first opportunity of sweeping vengeance.
Salathiel among the Wounded
The people, stimulated by the arrival of Onias, had made a desperate effort to force the Roman lines. The attacks were reiterated with more than valor—with rage and madness; the Jews fought with a disregard of life that appalled and had nearly overwhelmed even the Roman steadiness. The loss of the legions was formidable; all their chief officers were wounded, many were killed. Titus himself, leading a column from the Decuman gate of the camp, was wounded by a blow from a sling; and the state of its ramparts, as I saw them at daybreak, torn down in immense breaches, and filling up the ditch with their ruins, showed the imminent hazard of the whole army. Another hour of daylight would probably have been its ruin. But Judea would not have been the more secure, for the factions, relieved from the presence of an enemy, would have torn each other to pieces.
The loss of the Jews was so prodigious[52] as to be accounted for only by their eagerness to throw away life. Not less than a hundred thousand corpses lay between the camp and Jerusalem. No prisoners were taken on either side, and the crowds that now approached were the wounded, gathered off the field, to be crucified in memory of the mission. The coming of those victims put an end to the possibility or the desire of sleep.
The immense and gloomy hall, one of those in use for the stately banquets customary among the leaders of Jerusalem, was suddenly a blaze of torches. The malefactors and captives were thrown together in heaps, guarded by strong detachments of spearmen that lined the sides, like ranges of iron statues, overlooking the mixed and moving confusion of wretched life between. Guilt, sorrow, and shame were there in their dreadful undisguise. The roof rang to oaths and screams of pain as the wounded tossed and rolled upon each other; rang to bitter lamentation, and more bitter still, to those self-accusing outcries which the near approach of violent death sometimes awakens in the most daring criminals. For stern as the justice was, it still was justice; the Jewish character had fearfully changed. Rapine and bloodshed had become the habits of the populace, and among the panting and quivering wretches before me begging a moment of life I recognized many a face that, seen in Jerusalem, was the sign of plunder and massacre.