five hundred men fell in the engagement and the man who wanted to share the earth with Mahomet was killed. So order was restored, the waverers brought back into the fold, and Abu Beker left free to convert the world to Islam.
Forward then into Syria, into Persia and towards Damascus went the army, and a campaign commenced that was brilliant in the extreme. Booty was sent back to Medina as city after city fell, and men in thousands flocked to®the banners of the victorious armies. Mesopotamia was overrun and the people seem to have been perfectly unconcerned whether exactions were imposed upon them by conquerors from Byzantium or Arabia. The one plain fact stood out that they had to pay under whichever banner they toiled. So there seems to have been but little resistance.
Khaled was the soldier hero and his taking of Damascus is a story which Voltaire has said compared with the tale of the siege of Troy. It is a tale of bravery on the part of both besieged and besiegers, of strange, daring sallies, of fighting women, of dramatic parleys and hand to hand combats of great ferocity, and the glittering booty that went back to Medina meant new strength for the army. But on the day of the fall of Damascus, the wise Caliph and friend of Khaled breathed his last at Medina, so, for the soldier, the joy of victory Was lost in that he could not hand the glory of it to his master. On his deathbed, Abu Beker named as his successor Omar Ibn al Khatteb, a man of austere piety and great simplicity.
