It was a mob that had risen like a man for the faith.
It was a mob that had truly been tortured like a man for the faith.
It was already transfigured by pain as well as passion.
Those that know war in those deserts through the summer months,
even with modern supplies and appliances and modern maps and calculations,
know that it could only be described as a hell full of heroes.
What it must have been to those little local serfs and peasants from
the Northern villages, who had never dreamed in nightmares of such
landscapes or such a sun, who knew not how men lived at all in such
a furnace and could neither guess the alleviations nor get them,
is beyond the imagination of man. They arrived dying with thirst,
dropping with weariness, lamenting the loss of the dead that rotted
along their road; they arrived shrivelled to rags or already raving
with fever and they did what they had come to do.
Above all, it is clear that they had the vices as well as the virtues
of a mob. The shocking massacre in which they indulged in the sudden
relaxation of success is quite obviously a massacre by a mob.
It is all the more profoundly revolutionary because it must have
been for the most part a French mob.
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