“It is their awful singing the Turks will turn and run from,” I said, shaking my head, “not their swords.”

Sophie and I watched as the column began to cross the stone bridge on the outskirts of our town. Young and old, men and women; some carrying axes and mallets and old swords, some old knights parading in rusty armor. Carts, wagons, tired mules and plow horses. Thousands of them.

[12] Everyone in town stood and stared. Children ran out and danced around the approaching monk. No one had ever seen anything like it before. Nothing ever happened here!

I was struck with a kind of wonderment. “Sophie, tell me, what do you see?”

“What do I see? Either the holiest army I’ve ever seen or the dumbest. In any case, it’s the worst equipped.”

“But look, not a noble anywhere. Just common men and women. Like us.”

Below us, the vast column wound into the main square and the queer monk at its head tugged his mule to a stop. A bearded knight helped him slide off. Father Leo, the town’s priest, went up to greet him. The singing stopped, weapons and packs were laid down. Everyone in our town was pressed around the tiny square. To listen.

“I am called Peter the Hermit,” the monk said in a surprisingly strong voice, “urged by His Holiness Urban to lead an army of believers to the Holy Land to free the holy sepulchre from the heathen hordes. Are there any believers here?”

He was pale and long nosed, resembling his mount, and his brown robes had holes in them, threadbare. Yet as he spoke, he seemed to grow, his voice rising in power and conviction.

“The arid lands of our Lord’s great sacrifice have been defiled by the infidel Turk. Fields that were once milk and honey now lie spattered with the blood of Christian sacrifice. Churches have been burned and looted, sainted sites destroyed. The holiest treasures of our faith, the bones of saints, have been fed to dogs; cherished vials filled with drops of the Savior’s own blood, poured into heaps of dung like spoiled wine.”