George, and as the camp on the edge of the desert from which,
as it happened, I caught the first glimpse of the coloured
fields of Palestine that looked like the fields of Paradise.
Being an encampment of soldiers, it seems an appropriate place for
St. George; and indeed it may be said that all that red and empty land
has resounded with his name like a shield of copper or of bronze.
The name was not even confined to the cries of the Christians;
a curious imaginative hospitality in the Moslem mind, a certain innocent
and imitative enthusiasm, made the Moslems also half-accept a sort
of Christian mythology, and make an abstract hero of St. George.
It is said that Coeur de Lion on these very sands first invoked
the soldier saint to bless the English battle-line, and blazon his cross
on the English banners. But the name occurs not only in the stories
of the victory of Richard, but in the enemy stories that led up
to the great victory of Saladin. In that obscure and violent quarrel
which let loose the disaster of Hattin, when the Grand Master
of the Templars, Gerard the Englishman from Bideford in Devon,
drove with demented heroism his few lances against a host, there fell
among those radiant fanatics one Christian warrior, who had made
with his single sword such a circle of the slain, that the victorious
Moslems treated even his dead body as something supernatural;
and bore it away with them with honour, saying it was the body
of St.
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