Sport and Soldiering in the Crusades
IN a book like this no intelligent reader of history can fail to observe the gulf that seFarates the dry utility of facts and dates from the vivid casualness, of choses rues: the skeletons of libraries from the warm flesh of life. Both have .their uses. But much study of the Crusades will not bring back the " atmosphere " of twelfth century Syria with the same sense of actuality as a mere random dipping into these delightful memoirs.
Ousama was a well-to-do and well-read Arab (he had a library of four thousand volumes looted from him on a journey to Egypt) whose pen adorned everything it touched, from surgery to sociology. He was passionately devoted to hawking, hunting lions, and fighting the Frank ; but he does not bother much about the rights and wrongs of the Crusades. War was a form of sport with him : to spear a pig or a Christian was all one, provided the quarry fought well. And he had the brave man's regard for a gallant adversary. No wonder he became the friend and protégé of that other good sportsman, Saladin.
"It would be impossible to number all the hunts at which
have been present during the seventy years of my life," he says. "Besides, to waste time on futilities is one of the worst things that can happen." Posterity, however, has cause to be grateful for the use he made of his leisure, for Ousama's incidental detail is delightful. "I have noticed with regard to lions what I wouldn't have suspected and would never have believed, that, like men, some lions are brave and others cowardly." One day his hunting party found a lioness and two lions in a thicket. The first to break was the lioness, which was killed by his brother with a first spear. Then "We went back towards the thicket, when one of the two lions came out against us and drove off our horses. My brother Balla- ud-Baula and I waited in its path until it should return, for a lion when it leaves a place is compelled to return to it We turned the backs of the horses to it and turned our lances round to the rear in its direction, thinking it would attack us. But it paid no attention to us, and passed in front of our group as fast as the wind, to make for one of our comrades. It seized his horse and overthrew it. I struck it with my lance, which I plunged into the middle of its body. It died on the spot. The other lion came out. It was the largest of the three. It came forward and the Armenians stopped its path with their arrows. I stood by the side of the Armenians, waiting for it to spring on them and seize one of them, when I should be able to strike it with my lance. But it canie forward quietly. Every time an arrow struck it, it roared and moved its tail. I said to myself : 'Now is the time when it is going to jump.' But it continued walking forward and did not stop until it fell dead."
A disappointing brute from Ousama's point of view, but not from the Armenians '1 Here we see him splintering a lance against his Christian foes
"In the rear of the Franks was a knight mounted on a dark roan horse that looked like a camel. He wore his coat of mail and his cuirass. I was afraid Of him and did not worry about his not deigning to take the offensive against me. Suddenly he spurred his horse and I was delighted to see his tail glitter. It seemed exhausted. I hurled myself on the knight, struck him, and my lance pierced his body, coming out in front almost a cubit in length. The violence of the blow and the speed of my horse tumbled me out of my saddle. I got into it again, flourished my lance, quite convinced that I had killed the Frank.".
But he was wrong. Later, at his uncle's house, he met a Frankish knight (for between the skirmishes there appears to have been not a little fraternizing), who told him that his thrust had but grazed the skin of his adversary's hips, although it had twice passed through his mail and cuirass.
"Fate is an impregnable fortress" is Ousama's comment.
One of his soldiers had a lance driven right through his chest, and recovered of it ; another lusty fellow was pricked by a needle and died of the injury. "By Allah, he groaned so much in the town and was so tall and loud-voiced that he could be heard in the castle itself." Bleeding, in those days, was considered a cure for everything. One of his men, a Syrian, was unconscious from wounds, having lost about
twenty pints (sic) of blood. His brother asked him how he should be cured. "Bleed him ! " said Ousama. His brother
did so ; " then he returned in high spirits, saying : I have bled him and he has come to himself, sat up, eaten and drunk. His weakness has left him.' I exclaimed : GlorY be to Allah ! If I had not tried this method on myself more
than once, I should not have recommended it to you ! ' " We should like to recount how Ousama and a friend routed 'eight Frankish knights and were then driven away by a single foot-soldier ; how his father tried to teach him the
names of the stars ; how he enjoyed pigsticking when he should have been fasting ; how the ransoming of captives was carried out in the Crusades ; and of the charming girl, Rosedrop, rescued from the hands of negroes by a chieftain whose wife was jealous of her. But space forbids more than the bare mention of these incidents.
Professor Potter has given us a good translation, although there are a few blemishes such as " roan-coloured " and "male boar "—terms no horseman would use. A horse is roan, skewbald, iron-grey, black, white, bay, chestnut— never " coloured " ; and a boar is always male. We con- gratulate him, however, on a difficult piece of work, and the general editors on the selection of this charming old Arab's story, which illuminates a whole age and continent with its lively comment. As a sportsman Ousama ws a forerunner of Squire Osbaldeston ; as a writer, of Surtees.
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