The cold truth was that of the one hundred and forty knights who rode at the Saracens, some of them Templars and others merely carried along in the madness, only a handful escaped alive. Gerard of Ridefort, who ordered the charge, was badly wounded in the fighting but eventually left the battlefield, accompanied by three of his companions. Fifty to sixty knights died in a shower of their own gore; the rest were taken away to imprisonment and enslavement at Saladin’s pleasure.
