Джеймс Миченер - The Source

At the head of this eastern force rode Count Volkmar of Gretz, and at the rear, obeying the advice he had given others, roved the captain-in-charge, Gunter of Cologne, with a cadre of picked knights whose job it was to protect the wagons containing French and German women. Ponderously the caravan groaned forward—one hundred and eighty tested knights, twice that number of mounted squires and freemen, seven thousand well-armed foot soldiers, and some two thousand stragglers, including Priest Wenzel and the Countess Volkmar. A wind puffed the dunes of Asia Minor and grass on the barren hilltops quivered.

On July 1, 1097, Babek was satisfied that his trap had been properly set, so when the day’s heat was approaching its apex he signaled his sixty thousand hard-trained troops to attack Gunter’s outnumbered Crusaders. With paralyzing speed and fury the Turkish hordes swept out from their hidden positions, dashing in on swift horses and loosing as they rode a blizzard of iron-tipped arrows which began to strike the Frankish horses. There was a wild whinnying, the harsh cries of the disorganized European knights, and the frenzied shrieks of the Turks as they struck at the soft middle of the army, hoping to demoralize all and to effect a complete rout in the first few moments of the battle.

But the Turk Babek had not foreseen that he would be encountering Gunter of Cologne, who took one sweeping look at the developing battle and made an immediate decision which would be long debated: he calculated accurately the number and power of the approaching Turkish army; he saw that if it followed its present trajectory it must overrun the wagons and thus cut the Crusader line in two, whereupon the superior numbers of the enemy could encircle first Volkmar’s forward group, then his own rear contingent, cutting each to pieces at leisure; but he also saw that if the two groups of knights were able to join now, this instant, they could present a front which not even Babek could penetrate. With no further calculation and with no wavering Gunter of Cologne shouted to his men, “To Volkmar! Now! Now!” And he led a furious charge through the first of the Turkish riders, bringing nine tenths of his force into union with Volkmar’s.

Of course, his decision left the women, the children and the baggage train exposed to the Turks, who, infuriated by the escape of the knights, swarmed into the abandoned wagons and launched a massacre which would forever haunt the Crusaders. Horses were lanced, old men were chopped down by a dozen swords, while from a distance the Crusaders had to watch as their women were carefully inspected. Any who might bring even a bezant in the slave markets of Damascus were shoved aside. The rest—the old, the not-so-old—were mercilessly slaughtered. Knives and hands ran red as heads were chopped off. The Countess Matwilda was stood against a wagon while five Turkish foot soldiers used her as a target for their arrows. She fell grotesquely.

The younger women, who for their fairness would bring prize money from men seeking to improve their harems, were stripped in the sunlight and raped repeatedly. Fulda, the daughter of Count Volkmar, was among them, and of her father’s agony Wenzel of Trier wrote in his chronicle:My Lord Volkmar, seeming to hear the screams of his naked daughter as the Turks dragged her from man to man, went as one crazy and would have ridden alone into the heart of the Turkish army, wreaking death, but the strong hand of Gunter restrained him and others argued, “Sir Volkmar, there is nothing we can do.” And Gunter said, “Save your fury for the Turks. They will be here for many days.” And so my Lord Volkmar was imprisoned by his own, and when the afternoon was upon us, Gunter led forth a foray of only forty knights, and the Turks thinking to overwhelm them launched pursuit; and when all was confusion my Lord Volkmar gave the signal and we who were left rode among the Turks like reapers in August rushing through a yellow field, and we killed and we killed until the end of day, and at night we counted only a few of our men dead but endless numbers of the infidel. And for the pity of my Lady Matwilda and her fair daughter I myself took a great mace and like the others I killed and killed.

General Babek reeled back from this crushing defeat. He could not understand how the blond knight at the rear had been so quick to appraise the situation nor how the German had succeeded in effecting a consolidation of the two halves of his army. He was similarly perplexed by the cunning strategy of the two leaders who later in the day had willfully separated their troops a second time, thereby operating a pincers which had crushed his demoralized footmen. Surveying the battle he found that he had annihilated the old men and the women but had not harmed the effective fighting force, whereas he had lost more than ten thousand of his best men. For the better part of an hour he considered launching a surprise attack at the still outnumbered Crusaders, but he decided against this and was about to order a retreat when his lookouts shouted that the Crusaders were attacking yet again. “They must be idiots!” he cried, hastily forming his men to meet the insane charge.For we had decided [wrote Wenzel of Trier] that the Turks would be trying to understand what had occurred in our victory, and Gunter argued, “Let us destroy them now, for they will not think we would dare,” and my Lord Volkmar, like one demented, shouted, “Aye! Aye!” and the charge was formed, but before we started down the hill toward the Turks, Sir Gunter took me aside and said, cunningly, “You must see that your master does not reach the Turks, for if he does we shall not stop him,” and it was my duty to hold the count back, but this I could not do, for as we launched the charge he sped to the fore and was first among the enemy, swinging his mighty arm and taking his black helmet into the very heart of the Turkish camp. That he was not killed was a miracle, and at the conclusion of our mighty victory we found a remarkable thing: my Lord Volkmar sitting alone on his horse, his sword dropped in the dust and his hands folded in his lap as he wept.

Babek retreated to the east, from whence he reported to his superiors: “These men are much different from what we were told,” and the Turks, who had been misled by their first easy victory over the peasantry that followed Peter the Hermit, began to consider seriously the new war that confronted them.

Between Volkmar and Gunter there could never again be peace, for Gunter had knowingly sacrificed the women to the infidels; but the leaders of the Crusade, Godfrey, Hugh, Baldwin and wild Tancred, listened to reports of the stirring battle and properly concluded that only the daring action of Gunter in the first moments accounted for the victory. And when they reviewed the manner in which he had organized the feint and the final charge, they announced that he was the hero of the day and that henceforth he must ride with them and help them plan their assault on the infidel. But Volkmar would never forget the sight of Gunter willfully abandoning his own sister. “To reach us,” Volkmar swore, “he had to gallop directly through the women’s camp. He almost ran down my daughter, his own niece, as he sped to us.” Nor could the Count of Gretz erase from his memory the vision of his wife standing against the broken wagon, nor of Fulda dragged from man to man.

A sullen bitterness took possession of the German leader. He stayed alone, would talk only with Wenzel, and then only of religious matters, and when his brother-in-law found some extra women in the entourage of Baldwin and brought Volkmar a fifteen-year-old French girl, advising him, “Go to bed and forget,” Volkmar rose in fury and would have killed him but for Wenzel’s interposing himself and sending the girl away. Some days later Volkmar saw the child, already a brazen, riding behind Gunter, her arms clasped over the blue cross, and he felt ashamed of the Crusade. How many women has this monster delivered to the enemy? he mused in disgust. In Hungary, in Bulgaria and in the first two great battles Gunter had succeeded in losing something like two thousand women, many of whom had been his temporary mistresses, but he was always hungry for more and always he found more.