Pride of Carthage (42 page)

When Imco lay down that evening, sleep eluded him completely, like a creature that knows it is being tracked. He tried to think only of his beautiful camp follower, but when she looked at him he heard her voice repeating the message he wished to avoid.

“It is coming. It is coming. . . .”

During the first two weeks of the march from Rome, the consuls shared a single intention. They had to cover the distance quickly, make contact with Hannibal, and find the right occasion on which to bring him to battle. There was no debate on this much, at least. But as they came nearer, the strains of their dueling commands began to show. Varro believed that they should pour forth over the Carthaginians in one great wave, unstoppable. He argued that the location and terrain had no strategic importance, considering the overwhelming shock the enemy would feel on the first sight of them. He imagined their wide-eyed horror, the slack mouths, and the thumping in their chests as they beheld their doom striding toward them in a cloud of dust. That was the true strength of the army they commanded. They should use it to best effect, wherever they found the invader hiding.

Paullus held a different view. If they were to learn but one thing from the lessons of the Ticinus, of Trebia, of Trasimene, it must be caution. They were marching toward Hannibal; and he appeared to be simply waiting for them. Paullus found something disquieting in this. They should approach slowly. They should carefully assess just what the enemy might have planned for them. They should learn beforehand everything they could as to the lay of the land and Hannibal's current numbers and the morale of his troops and their state of health and supply. All of these things should weigh in their decisions. War was not as straightforward as Varro seemed to think it was.

In keeping with this, on Paullus' days in command he slowed the pace of the march and sent out scouts and surveyors to detail the features of the land around Cannae. What he learned troubled him. He was sure Hannibal's chosen spot was not a favorable place for battle. The land was too open. Apart from the rise atop which Cannae sat, the land stretched for flat miles in all directions, dotted sparsely with brush and stunted trees and cut by shallow, easily fordable rivers. It favored the African cavalry in every way. He spoke cautiously of this with his fellow consul, for it was hard for a Roman horseman to acknowledge the supremacy of any other. But Paullus believed they had to do just that. The last few years had proven that the Africans, especially the Numidians, were superior to them when astride a horse. He proposed that they move elsewhere.

“Listen to me,” he said. He sat facing Varro in the war tent, between them the tribunes and officers of the horse and various others. Paullus had called the meeting toward the end of one of his days in command. He had opened it with his now familiar arguments and listened to the equally well-known rebuttals. But as he was giving up power on the morn he wished to do all he could to sway his fellow consul's opinion. They were so close to the Carthaginians now that any mistake could doom them.

He said, “Let us turn the column and march for more broken ground to the west, with hills enough to hamper the enemy's horsemen. We need someplace not of Hannibal's choosing but of our own instead.”

Varro could barely contain his loathing of this line of thinking. “If Hannibal is so brilliant,” he said, “how do we know that he is not hoping for just such a move? Perhaps he anticipates such cowardice. If we do as you say, we might simply be turning into another of his traps.”

“I do not think so,” Paullus said. He spoke gravely, with the fingers of both hands massaging his temples. “Varro, I beg you to temper your vigor with wisdom. Fabius fought hard to avoid situations that—”

“Fabius fought?” Varro asked, cutting in with a raised voice. He cocked his head at an angle, as if his hearing troubled him. “
Fought?
Never has that word been so misused. I was there beside Fabius and I can tell you that he never raised a hand against the enemy. Fighting is not in that man's nature. And now you, Paullus, would do the same as he. You're nothing more than the old man's puppet. You think not for yourself but do his bidding—just as he does Hannibal's. Do you really believe Rome could survive another year like the one Fabius inflicted upon us? He made us out to be fools, cowards, sheep trembling at the sight of an approaching wolf. Perhaps you are those things, but I am none of them. We have let half the summer pass already. Believe me, if we do not strike now we will start losing allies. It will take just one defector for them all to crumble. But why am I telling you these things? You know them already. You only lack the heart or courage to grasp them and act!”

Paullus had gone red under this barrage of insults. He glanced at the officers around the chamber, all of whom shifted uncomfortably, eyes lowered to suggest no particular allegiance, faces as expressionless as possible. “We should speak privately,” Paullus said. “It is not seemly for—”

“I don't care what is seemly!” Varro shouted.

“And I will not commit our troops to disaster!” Paullus roared back at him, his anger bursting out so suddenly that several of the officers started. “Truly, Terentius Varro, you're worthy of the butchers from whom you're descended. Would that your people had kept to their labors and left important matters to those suited to them!”

Varro shot to his feet; Paullus mirrored the motion. They stepped toward each other, first tentatively, and then, as if at some choreographed signal, they fell toward each other like two rams in the season of rut. The room was a flurry of motion. Some jumped back against the tent walls. A few sat frozen. More than one cowered as if the consuls' anger was meant for them. Only one person wedged himself between the two.

Publius Scipio was faster on his feet than either consul. He stepped forward and took the full brunt of the impact, Varro at his back, Paullus against his chest. He shouted to them to find reason. He batted their arms down and twirled to separate them with his shoulders. Heartened, others grappled the men and tried to calm them. Publius managed to get a hand to either consul's chest and push them to the full length of his outstretched arms.

“If you two were not the most important Romans in all of Italy right now I would sit and watch one of you overman the other,” he said. “But there is no place for dueling now. Rome depends on you; be worthy of her. By the gods, find your senses! Our enemy lies outside this tent, not within.”

Publius' fellow tribunes looked between him and the two senior officers, unsure just how his outburst would be received and therefore unsure how they would comment on it. He was the youngest among them and had up until that moment been the quietest. Varro seemed to be deciding just how best to take off Publius' head, but when Paullus withdrew a half-step he did likewise.

“The young tribune is imprudent, but he speaks some truth,” Varro said. “You call me rash, but will you hear my plan?”

“You have a plan?”

“I am not a fool, Paullus.”

“Tell me, then. I'd love to hear sensible words from your mouth.”

Varro glared at him a moment, then motioned that they should all sit again. “We command the largest army Rome has ever fielded,” he said, “perhaps the largest ever mustered by any civilized nation. This is our strength, and Hannibal will know it. We should show him from his first sighting of us that we are a hammer, and he the nail that we will drive into the soil of Cannae. We must use the full overwhelming grandeur of our numbers to best effect. To do this, we reduce the frontage of each maniple by a third and shrink the intervals between them. This will stretch the line so that the enemy will look out at an unending river heading toward him. Hannibal's men will shake at the sight of us, and some will run. Imagine it, Paullus. Remember that this is the first time we will meet them face-to-face and in the full light of day. You and I will command the cavalry on either wing. This is the weak point, but we need not defeat our counterparts. All we have to do is hold them for a time, keep them from flanking long enough to let the body of our infantry drive through. By then it will be too late for their horse to matter. We'll punch right through their center, divide them into two smaller forces, and attack each at will.”

Paullus stared at his fellow consul with an intensity that made the edges of his eyes quiver. “You may be right,” he said, “but I do not know that it is wise to modify our formations like this without first practicing it.”

“Impossible,” Varro said. “We are engaged already. And this plan works precisely because the troops are raw. Just as the enemy will see their uncountable numbers, so the troops in the front will take heart from the lines of men behind them. They will see that they are undefeatable. As a whole, they will become braver than they could be in thin ranks. This formation makes it impossible for cowardice to sway the battle. A man in the middle of this river will have nowhere to flee but forward, over the bodies of the enemy. Paullus, refrain from finding fault and be one with me.”

“I am unsure,” Paullus said, sincerely and without a trace of malice. Though they talked late into the night, he could offer no more than that.

As the day dawned the consuls were not exactly at odds, but neither were they of a single mind. Varro—in control—broke camp and moved even closer to Hannibal, so close, in fact, that it would be impossible for Paullus to retreat even if he wished to. He set up camp on the near side of the river Aufidus and ordered a small deployment to claim a spot on the far bank. He sent out units to harass the Carthaginian foragers, but ended the day more exasperated than vindicated. Numidian raiders ambushed the Roman water carriers instead, launching their spears at them so that the workers had to drop their jugs and run. And yet Varro had accomplished his main objective. He was locked in the preliminary stages of the struggle. The following day Paullus received word that the enemy was moving as if to offer battle, but he did not answer them. He shifted troops from one place to another, hesitating, trying to think of a way to better their position, knowing that on the morrow control went back to Varro. Wriggle as he might, he was pinned to the spot as surely as if his fellow consul had speared him through the foot. There was nothing to be done. The clash would come with the rising sun. Their fate was in Varro's hands.

Mago had already been up for hours by the time he met with Hannibal and a mounted contingent of his generals atop the rise of Cannae. Together they watched the armies assemble upon the wide plain. The sight approaching them was like nothing any of them had ever imagined. Mago had learned from his brother to approximate numbers of men by visual clues, to weigh on internal scales the density of troops and the area of land they covered, and to account for the receding scale of distance. But the number of Romans now before him was beyond his reckoning. Eighty thousand? Ninety? One hundred thousand? He could not possibly count them, and the exact number would have seemed arbitrary. What mattered was that the Romans' front line stretched to fill the entire field, so wide it would have daunted even the best of runners to sprint from one edge to the other. It was completely uniform, no portion lagging behind or preceding the others. This was all formidable enough, but it was the depth of the ranks that truly stunned him: they came row upon row with no end in sight, fading into the dust and distance so that it seemed they were marching out of the haze, an army born of the landscape itself.

“They have the wind in their eyes,” Hannibal said. A simple statement, acknowledged with nods and a few grunts. “And more of the sun's glare than we do. I like this advantage.”

Mago never ceased to be amazed by his brother's calm. Looking at him, he felt buoyed by his confidence. If Hannibal believed they would win this conflict, then who was he to doubt it? The day previous, the commander had presented his multiple strategies with calm, reasoned assurance. Even when he proposed the most improbable of maneuvers they sounded like testimony given after the events and not a plan suggested before. He had traced the bowed line the first ranks were meant to form, a convex front made up entirely of Gauls, headed by Mago and Hannibal himself. With this he intended to meet the first lines of the enemy. “We must keep this crescent from breaking,” he had said. “Let it not snap but instead slowly manage a retreat. So carefully that the Romans are fooled into feeling themselves winning. So gradually that the Gauls are not frightened into fleeing.”

When Mago questioned whether the Gauls would rebel against setting themselves up for slaughter, Hannibal answered, “You do not understand the Celtic mind, brother. These people do not conceive of the world as you and I do. Consider that they believe creation to be a balance between two worlds. Death in this one means rebirth in the other. Thus they mourn at a newborn's birth and celebrate upon that man's eventual demise. They have no fear of dying tomorrow; they run to death, headlong.”

Mago had sworn that he would do everything Hannibal instructed, but after a sleepless night the immensity of the day's challenges left him staring in awe. Even the cloud of dust stirred by the Romans' feet filled him with dread. It was a great brown shadow that rose up into the heavens and stretched so far as to all but obscure the horizon.

“Look at them,” he said. There was a tight quaver in his voice, as that of a man who has been punched in the abdomen but is trying to speak through the pain of the blow. “I never imagined there were so many of them.”

Hannibal straightened in his saddle. He spoke without a hint of irony. “Yes, they are many, but not one among them is my brother. Not one is named Mago.”

The others laughed, but it took a moment for this cool statement to roll over in Mago's mind, revealing its humor.

Monomachus was the first to respond, dry of voice, giving no indication that he spoke in jest. “They have among them few who would eat human flesh.”

“What is more,” Maharbal added, “they are not commanded by a man named Hannibal. I am sure this fact troubles them.”