Hannibal (8 page)

The latter, not unnaturally, thought that the presence of Hannibal’s army on the east bank of the Rhône could only mean that the Carthaginian was preparing to give battle. It could be assumed that he had known of the Roman troop movements in Italy—such things could hardly be kept secret and the doors of the temple of Janus had stood open (indicating a state of war) ever since Saguntum. Hannibal must have known that a strike against Carthage was being prepared in Sicily while he, Scipio, was on his way by sea to attack the Carthaginian empire in Spain. What would be the response of Hannibal to such a threat? To march north, cross the Ebro, bring the tribes in the area between the river and the Pyrenees under his control, and then to invade southern France so as to secure Spain against attack from the north. Scipio’s duty was clear: he must attack as soon as possible, before Hannibal was able to seduce many of the Rome-hating Gauls to his army. He set out to cover the sixty miles from his base camp with two legions (4,500 to 6,000 men apiece), some fourteen thousand allied infantry and sixteen hundred horse. After only three days’ march (no mean feat since he was covering roughly the same distance that had taken Hannibal four days) he reached the point on the Rhône where the Carthaginians had been encamped.

It was deserted. His cavalry had not misled him, for here were all the traces of the camp, as well as local Gauls to confirm that the strange men from the south had been there only three days before. They had gone north following the banks of the great river…. There could only be one conclusion, for nothing lay to the north except further unmapped lands inhabited by savage Gauls. Hannibal must be attempting the unthinkable—to march as far as one of the Rhône’s tributary rivers that came down from the Alps, and then follow a route given him by the Gauls that would lead into Italy.

Scipio turned his legions about and made haste back to Massilia. It is a great tribute to his coolness and foresight that he did not embark at once with all his men and return to Italy. But he had been given Spain as his sphere of operations and he realised that, whatever happened, Spain still remained the key to the whole war. With Hannibal and his army away from his home base, Roman arms might well achieve victory there and destroy the heart of Carthaginian wealth and power. For himself, it was clear that he must return to Italy to take charge of the troops in the north. He sent his fleet and army on to Spain under the command of his brother Cnaeus and embarked for Italy. If, and it seemed unlikely at this season of the year, Hannibal’s troops managed to cross the Alps, they would find him waiting.
 

VIII

ISLAND, RIVER AND ALPS

With the elephants, and a rearguard of cavalry, following the main body of the troops, Hannibal’s invading army moved up on the Rhône. They would have been marching as fast as possible in order to lose the Romans, and they were clearly successful for there were no further reports to Scipio of the enemy being sighted. It is doubtful, in view of the restrictions such as the elephants and their impedimenta, if they can have made any more speed than they had in the early part of their march to the north, so one may assume that fourteen kilometres a day represents their average progress. From Polybius we learn that ‘Hannibal, marching steadily from the crossing-place for four days, reached a place called the “Island”, a populous district producing abundance of corn and deriving its name from its situation; for the Rhône and the Skaras running along each side of it meet at its point. It is similar in size and shape to the Egyptian Delta; only in that case the sea forms the base line uniting the two branches of the Nile, while here the base line is formed by a range of mountains difficult to climb or penetrate, and, one may say, almost inaccessible.’

Much scholarly controversy has arisen over the location of this area known as the ‘Island’, controversy which may never cease, although Sir Gavin de Beer, by combining scholarship with geography, would seem to have produced an answer which is more watertight than most of the theories previously expounded. The argument arose through the variant spellings in the manuscripts of Polybius and Livy of the name of the river forming the third side of the triangle. It need hardly have happened if scholars had been prepared to accept the text of Polybius, who gives the river’s name as Skaras. Polybius was not only writing a great deal earlier than Livy (the latter leaned heavily upon the Greek historian for his account of the Hannibalic War) but, unlike Livy, he had himself carefully covered the ground and followed in the footsteps of Hannibal on his great march. Polybius, furthermore, was a soldier as well as an historian and—unlike the study-bound Livy—it is most improbable that he would have made a gross geographical error.
 

Polybius states clearly that Hannibal marched a further four days up the Rh6ne after leaving the crossing-place. This makes his distance from the sea, after eight days’ march at fourteen kilometres a day, 112 kilometres—and at exactly this point there flows into the Rhône a large tributary, the Aygues. Not only does the Aygues lie at the appropriate distance from the sea but it forms, together with the Rhône and a mountain range called the Baronnies, a large fertile delta. It is well cultivated and populated today, as doubtless it was two thousand years ago since it has all the requirements for valley farming. Only in one respect does this triangular piece of land fail to match up to Polybius’ description and that is in its size, for it is nowhere near as large as the Nile Delta, but, to quote Sir Gavin de Beer: ‘As there is no piece of land whatever on the eastern side of the Rhône, enclosed between it and any river, approaching anything like the size of the Delta of the Nile, this must be an error somehow introduced in the texts.’ Over the centuries since the river was recorded in Latin as
Aqua Iquarum
(the
s
has become an
i
as is not uncommon in Romance philology),
Iquarum
subsequently fell away, leaving only
Aqua
which, as in many other place names, became
aigue
or
aygue
(‘water’ in Provencal). The river’s name today is the Aygues. Its position alone, relative to the Rhône and the Baronnies, and at exactly the right distance from Hannibal’s crossing-place and the sea, seems to confirm that this is Polybius’ Skaras.

On arrival at the ‘Island’, Hannibal found a great gathering of Gauls, divided into two parties and clearly on the point of taking arms against each other. Two brothers were in dispute as to the leadership of the tribe, and the elder (rather like a native chieftain appealing to some British general in a remote part of the world in the nineteenth century) came to Hannibal and asked him to resolve the issue. Having listened to the arguments, and carefully considered the rights and wrongs of the case, Hannibal pronounced in favour of the elder brother. Since it was clear that the weight of Hannibal’s army would be thrown on this side, the younger claimant was driven from the territory. The newly-confirmed chief now showed his gratitude to this dark-skinned leader of the strange foreign army by supplying him with corn and other provisions and, in particular, winter clothing and footwear which would be badly needed if they were set on crossing the Alps. Even more important, he provided Hannibal with a rearguard to protect the Carthaginians on their passage through the land ahead against attacks from the Allobroges, another tribe into whose territory they would be venturing as they made their way towards the foothills of the distant mountains.

After three or four days in the ‘Island’, Hannibal continued to march ‘along the river’ for ten days. Although the accounts of Polybius and Livy regarding the approach to the Alps vary somewhat, Livy being far more explicit in naming details of tribes and places, the two historians agree on the basic route. Where Polybius says that they marched ‘along the river’, Livy says that Hannibal was now ready for the Alps but, instead of marching directly towards them, ‘he turned to the left….’

Standing on the eastern bank of the Rhône and facing the Alps, the river descends from the north—that is to say, from the spectator’s left. There is no confusion here, although some commentators have found one. Livy detailed information about the tribes through whose lands he passed provides further clues. First, he came to ‘the country of the Tricastini, and thence proceeded through the outer territories of the Vocontii to the Tricorii….’ These tribal areas, as a distinguished French scholar, August Longnon, has shown, corresponded very closely to the dioceses of the early Christian church, which in their turn have changed little down to the present day. The Tricastini occupied the area north of the ‘Island’ along the Rhône bank, while the Vocontii were to the north-east in the area of the river Drôme, a tributary flowing into the Rhône from the Alps. It was almost certainly at the point where the Drôme enters the Rhône—where far in the blue distance the Alpes du Dauphine bar the horizon—that Hannibal turned east. The army still had its flank on the river, but this was now the clear swift-flowing, mountain-born Drôme.

After ten days, about 140 kilometres since leaving the ‘Island’, the army began to leave the rich valley and the ascent of the Alps began. So long as they were in relatively open land, where the cavalry could deploy, the Allobroges, against whom they had been warned, had left them strictly alone. When the friendly Gauls who had been acting as their guides and escort turned back for home, the Allobroges began to collect more men and to post lookouts on the heights towards which the army was advancing. They waited for the moment when their mountaineer skills could be deployed against this sluggishly approaching giant.

…The Allobrogian chieftains got together a considerable force and occupied advantageous positions on the road by which the Carthaginians would be obliged to ascend. Had they only kept their project secret, they would have utterly annihilated the Carthaginian army. But their scheme was discovered, and, though they inflicted considerable damage on Hannibal, they did more injury to themselves; for the Carthaginian general having learnt that the barbarians had seized on these critical positions, encamped himself at the foot of the pass and remaining there sent on some of his Gallic guides, to reconnoitre and report on the enemy’s plan and the whole situation.

Intelligence work was always one of Hannibal’s strong points. His Gauls came back with the news that the enemy stayed strictly on guard throughout the day but that at night they retired to a township nearby, being of the opinion that night warfare was an impossibility. Hannibal was to show them how wrong they were (something that he was also to show the Romans later in Italy). Having approached openly in daylight to the entrance to the narrow pass the army encamped and, as dusk came down, lit their camp fires and pitched tents and waited, passively—so it appeared—for the dawn. Hannibal, meanwhile, selected a task force, possibly Spaniards from mountain areas, and as soon as it was dark moved up to occupy the vantage points where they had seen the Gauls at their posts. They found that their information had been correct and the positions on the heights dominating the pass below were completely deserted. Here again, as is known from his earlier exploits in Spain, it is noticeable that Hannibal did not delegate the task of leading this commando force to any of the members of his staff. Personal leadership was all, and without it Hannibal would never have inspired his mercenary army the way he did—not only over these weeks on the march, and the months of his first campaign, but throughout year upon year of waging war in a hostile country.

There is one cliff-bound corridor on Hannibal’s probable route during the early stages of his advance towards the Alps which has been credibly identified with the place where the Carthaginians first came into conflict with the mountain Gauls. This is the Gorge de Gas—a passage so narrow in places that only about six men in column abreast could pass through it. The gorge was a potential death trap, and if it was by this route that the army came one can only assume that Hannibal had made no reconnaissance and was misled by his guides or that he took a chance. Neither of these suppositions seems likely, but the geography of Hannibal’s route has generated so many books and theses, none to be finally verified unless one day some archaeological evidence is found to prove that ‘the Carthaginians once passed this way’, that at best one can only say ‘It might have been’.

At daylight the army, confident that the commanding positions were held by Hannibal and his advance force, began to form up for the passage through the gorge. By this time the Allobroges had discovered that their vantage points had been occupied over night. ‘At first they desisted from their project,’ writes Polybius, ‘but afterwards on seeing the long string of sumpter-animals and horsemen slowly and with difficulty winding up the narrow path, they were tempted to molest their march.’

The Gauls, although aware that Hannibal commanded the heights above them, could not resist the sight of such plunder and stormed down the lower slopes to fall upon the advancing column. The Carthaginians were hard pressed to defend themselves; horses and mules plunged down the side of a steep escarpment, the wounded horses screaming and turning back caused chaos in the column, and within minutes the orderly advance turned into a panic-stricken mêlée. At this point, seeing that the destruction of the baggage train would mean the death of the army through starvation, Hannibal led the men with him down in a wild charge to come to the assistance of the head of the column. He fell upon the Gauls like an eagle from the heights, cutting them to pieces and, in the savage hand to hand battle that developed, proving that his men from the south were more than a match for these wild northerners. The Gauls scattered and fled with the Carthaginians in hot pursuit. While the baggage train was being sorted out and the army carried on through the pass Hannibal followed the Gauls.