The 33 Strategies of War (65 page)

At first, as Sempronius had expected, his tough, disciplined legions fared well against the Carthaginians. But on one side the Roman lines were made up of Gallic tribesmen fighting for the Romans, and here, suddenly, the Carthaginians unleashed a group of elephants ridden by archers. The tribesmen had never seen such beasts; they panicked and fell into a chaotic retreat. At the same time, as if out of nowhere, some 2,000 Carthaginians, hidden in dense vegetation near the river, fell on the Romans' rear. The Romans fought bravely to get out of the trap that Hannibal had laid for them, but thousands of them drowned in the frigid waters of the Trebia.

The battle was a disaster, and back in Rome emotions turned from outrage to anxiety. Legions were quickly dispatched to block the most accessible passes in the Apennines, the mountains that run across central Italy, but once again Hannibal defied expectations: he crossed the Apennines at their most unlikely, most inhospitable point, one that no army had ever passed through before because of the treacherous marshes on the other side. But after four days of trudging through soft mud, Hannibal brought the Carthaginians to safe ground. Then, in yet another clever ambush, he defeated a Roman army at Lake Trasimene, in present-day Umbria. Now his path to Rome was clear. In a state of near panic, the Roman republic resorted to the ancient tradition of appointing a dictator to lead them through the crisis. Their new leader, Fabius Maximus, quickly built up the city's walls and enlarged the Roman army, then watched perplexed as Hannibal bypassed Rome and headed south into Apulia, the most fertile part of Italy, and began to devastate the countryside.

Determined first and foremost to protect Rome, Fabius came up with a novel strategy: he would post his legions in mountainous areas where Hannibal's cavalry would be harmless, and he would harass the Carthaginians in a guerrilla-style campaign, denying them supplies and isolating them in their position so far from home. Avoiding direct battle with their formidable leader at all costs, he would defeat them by exhausting them. But many Romans saw Fabius's strategy as disgraceful and unmanly. Worse, as Hannibal continued to raid the countryside, he hit none of Fabius's many properties, making it seem as if the two were in cahoots. Fabius became more and more unpopular.

Having razed Apulia, Hannibal entered a fertile plain in Campania, to Rome's south--terrain that Fabius knew well. Finally deciding he had to act or be thrown out of power, the dictator devised a trap: he stationed Roman armies at all the exit points from the plain, each army close enough to support the other. But Hannibal had entered Campania through the eastern mountain pass of Allifae, and Fabius had noticed that he never left by the same route he entered. Although Fabius kept a sufficiently large Roman garrison at Allifae just in case, he reinforced the other passes in greater numbers. The beast, he thought, was caged. Eventually Hannibal's supplies would run out, and he would be forced to try to break through. Fabius would wait.

In the weeks to come, Hannibal sent his cavalry north, perhaps trying to break out in that direction. He also plundered the richest farms in the area. Fabius saw through his tricks: he was trying to bait the Romans into a battle of his choice. But Fabius was determined to fight on his own terms, and only when the enemy tried to retreat from the trap. Anyway, he knew Hannibal would try to break through to the east, the only direction that afforded him a clean break, into country the Romans did not control.

One night the Roman soldiers guarding the pass at Allifae saw sights and heard sounds that made them think they were losing their minds: an enormous army, signaled by thousands of torches, seemed to be heading up the pass, covering its slopes, accompanied by loud bellowing sounds as if possessed by some evil demon. The army seemed irresistible--far larger than the maximum estimate of Hannibal's strength. Afraid that it would climb above them and surround them, the Romans fled from their garrison, abandoning the pass, too scared even to look behind them. And a few hours later, Hannibal's army came through, escaping from Fabius's cordon.

No Roman leader could figure out what Hannibal had conjured up on the slopes that night--and by the following year Fabius was out of power. The consul Terentius Varro burned to avenge the disgrace of Allifae. The Carthaginians were encamped near Cannae, in southeastern Italy not far from modern Bari. Varro marched to face them there, and as the two armies arrayed themselves in ranks to meet in battle, he could only have felt supremely confident: the terrain was clear, the enemy was in full view, there could be no hidden armies or last-minute tricks--and the Romans outnumbered the Carthaginians by two to one.

The battle began. At first the Romans seemed to have the edge: the center of the Carthaginian line proved surprisingly weak and easily gave ground. The Romans attacked this center with force, hoping to break through and indeed pushing forward--when, to their shock and horror, they looked behind them and saw the two outer ends of the Carthaginian lines moving around to encircle them. They were trapped in a lethal embrace; it was a slaughter. Cannae would go down in history as Rome's most devastating and humiliating defeat.

The war with Hannibal would drag on for years. Carthage never sent him the reinforcements that might have turned the tide, and the much larger and more powerful Roman army was able to recover from its many defeats at his hands. But Hannibal had earned a terrifying reputation. Despite their superior numbers, the Romans became so frightened of Hannibal that they avoided battle with him like the plague.

Interpretation

Hannibal must be considered the ancient master of the military art of the unorthodox. In attacking the Romans on their own soil, he never intended to take Rome itself; that would have been impossible. Its walls were high, its people fierce and united in their hatred of him, and his forces were small. Rather, Hannibal's goal was to wreak havoc on the Italian peninsula and to undermine Rome's alliances with neighboring city-states. Weakened at home, Rome would have to leave Carthage alone and put a stop to its imperial expansion.

To cross the sea without heaven's knowledge, one had to move openly over the sea but act as if one did not intend to cross it. Each military maneuver has two aspects: the superficial move and the underlying purpose. By concealing both, one can take the enemy completely by surprise....
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If
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it is highly unlikely that the enemy can be kept ignorant of one's actions, one can sometimes play tricks right under its nose.

T
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To sow this kind of chaos with the tiny army he had been able to bring over the Alps, Hannibal had to make his every action unexpected. A psychologist before his time, he understood that an enemy that is caught by surprise loses its discipline and sense of security. (When chaos strikes those who are particularly rigid and orderly to begin with, such as the people and armies of Rome, it has double the destructive power.) And surprise can never be mechanical, repetitive, or routine; that would be a contradiction in terms. Surprise takes constant adaptation, creativity, and a mischievous pleasure in playing the trickster.

So Hannibal always took the route that Rome least expected him to take--the road through the Alps, for example, considered impassable to an army and therefore unguarded. Eventually, inevitably, the Romans caught on and began to expect him to take the least obvious route; at that point it was the obvious that was unexpected, as at Allifae. In battle, Hannibal would fix the enemy's attention on a frontal assault--the ordinary, usual way armies fought at the time--then unleash the extraordinary in the form of elephants or a reserve force hidden to the enemy's rear. In his raids in the Roman countryside, he deliberately protected Fabius's property, creating the impression that the two men were in collusion and ultimately forcing the embarrassed leader to take action--an unorthodox use of politics and extramilitary means in war. At Allifae, Hannibal had bundles of kindling tied to the horns of oxen, then lit them and sent the terrified, bellowing animals up the slopes to the pass at night--creating an indecipherable image to the Roman sentries, literally in the dark, and a terrifying one.

At Cannae, where the Romans were by this time expecting the unorthodox, Hannibal disguised his stratagem in broad daylight, lining up his army like any other army of the period. The Roman force was already impelled by the violence of the moment and the desire for revenge; he let them make quick progress through his deliberately weak center, where they became crowded together. Then the swift-moving outer wings of his line closed in and choked them. On and on he went, each one of Hannibal's ingeniously unorthodox maneuvers flowering out of the other in a constant alternation between the uncanny and the banal, the hidden and the obvious.

Adapting Hannibal's method to your own daily battles will bring you untold power. Using your knowledge of your enemies' psychology and way of thinking, you must calculate your opening moves to be what they least expect. The line of least expectation is the line of least resistance; people cannot defend themselves against what they cannot foresee. With less resistance in your path, the progress you make will inflate their impression of your power; Hannibal's small army seemed to the Romans much larger than it really was. Once they come to expect some extraordinary maneuver on your part, hit them with the ordinary. Establish a reputation for the unconventional and you set your opponents on their heels: knowing to anticipate the unexpected is not the same thing as knowing what the unexpected will be. Before long your opponents will give way to your reputation alone.

2.
In 1962, Sonny Liston became the heavyweight boxing champion of the world by defeating Floyd Patterson. Shortly afterward he turned up to watch a young hotshot on the scene, Cassius Clay, take on and beat rather decisively the veteran Archie Moore. After the fight, Liston paid a visit to Clay's dressing room. He put his arm around the boy's shoulder--at twenty, Clay was ten years younger than Liston--and told him, "Take care, kid. I'm gonna need you. But I'm gonna have to beat you like I'm your daddy." Liston was the biggest, baddest fighter in the world, and to those who understood the sport, he seemed invincible. But Liston recognized Clay as a boxer just crazy enough to want to fight him down the road. It was best to instill a touch of fear in him now.

Chaos--where brilliant dreams are born.

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The fear did not take: as Liston had guessed he would, Clay soon began to clamor for a fight with the champion and to brag to one and all that he would beat him in eight rounds. On television and radio shows, he taunted the older boxer: maybe it was Liston who was afraid to take on Cassius Clay. Liston tried to ignore the upstart; "If they ever make the fight," he said, "I'll be locked up for murder." He considered Clay too pretty, even effeminate, to be a heavyweight champion.

Time passed, and Clay's antics provoked a desire for the fight in the public: most people wanted to see Liston beat the daylights out of Clay and shut him up. Late in 1963 the two men met to sign on for a championship fight in Miami Beach the following February. Afterward Clay told reporters, "I'm not afraid of Liston. He's an old man. I'll give him talking lessons and boxing lessons. What he needs most is falling-down lessons." As the fight grew closer, Clay's rhetoric became still more insulting and shrill.

Of the sportswriters polled on the upcoming fight, most of them predicted that Clay would not be able to walk on his own after it was over. Some worried that he would be permanently injured. "I guess it's quite hard to tell Clay not to fight this monster now," said the boxer Rocky Marciano, "but I'm sure he'll be more receptive after he's been there with Liston." What worried the experts most of all was Cassius Clay's unusual fighting style. He was not the typical heavyweight bruiser: he would dance in place with his hands down at his side; he rarely put his full body into his punches, instead hitting just from the arms; his head was constantly moving, as if he wanted to keep his pretty face unscathed; he was reluctant to go inside, to brawl and pummel the body--the usual way to wear down a heavyweight. Instead Clay preferred to dance and shuffle, as if his fights were ballet, not boxing. He was too small to be a heavyweight, lacked the requisite killer instinct--the press critique ran on.

At the weigh-in on the morning of the bout, everyone was waiting for Clay's usual prefight antics. He exceeded their expectations. When Liston got off the scales, Clay began to shout at him: "Hey, sucker, you're a chump. You've been tricked, chump.... You are too ugly.... I'm going to whup you so bad." Clay jumped and screamed, his whole body shaking, his eyes popping, his voice quivering. He seemed possessed. Was he afraid or downright crazy? For Liston this was quite simply the last straw. He wanted to kill Clay and shut the challenger up for good.

As they stood in the ring before the opening bell, Liston tried to stare down Clay as he had stared down others, giving him the evil eye. But unlike other boxers Clay stared back. Bobbing up and down in place, he repeated, "Now I've got you, chump." The fight began, and Liston charged forward at his prey, throwing a long left jab that missed by a mile. He kept coming, a look of intense anger on his face--but Clay shuffled back from each punch, even taunting Liston at one point by lowering his hands. He seemed able to anticipate Liston's every move. And he returned Liston's stare: even after the round ended and both men were in their corners, his eyes never left his opponent's.