The Walled Orchard (32 page)

When we were told of this, we didn’t know what to think; but the sheer cleverness of it all so caught our imaginations that we could scarcely wait until nightfall. Although most of us were exhausted from all the work we had done during the day, we couldn’t sit still to rest, for we were all too excited. One thing was certain; this was quite unlike any other campaign anyone had ever been on before. No marching all day with a heavy sack on one’s back, or building endless walls for no very good reason, or tramping up and down outside impregnable walls wishing one was somewhere else. There was a feeling of being involved in something very special and important, and everyone was talking, very quietly and intensely, to everyone else — not just their neighbours and friends and relatives, but people from the other side of Attica whom they had never met, or even to the foreigners. We all suddenly felt that Demosthenes was a friend of ours, someone we knew personally — and still our leader, of course; in charge and somehow incapable of failure. It was like being a child again, and being in one of those gangs of herd-boys who elect a king and execute daring raids on other people’s orchards; there was that same thrill of taking part in something daring and exciting, with a strong dash of danger about it but no real fear of death or injury. It’s hard to imagine grown men feeling that way. Perhaps it was because the whole City seemed to be there; it felt more like a festival or a holiday than a military expedition, with so many of one’s friends and neighbours present. There were plenty of strangers, of course, but you felt that you were bound to know someone who knew them. As it started to get dark, we lit our camp-fires and moved around like an army going to bed, and as we did so we kept running across people we knew, friends and distant cousins and the like; I met five or six men who had been in choruses of mine, and many neighbours, and (needless to say) Aristophanes son of Philip. He was creeping furtively round the back of a tent with what looked like a baby in his arms, and when I called out his name he jumped high in the air..

‘For God’s sake,’ he hissed, as he recognised me, ‘what did you want to do that for?’

‘What have you got there, Aristophanes?’ I demanded. ‘You’re acting very strangely.’

‘Since when have you added informing to your list of accomplishments?’ he muttered. ‘Go and play with the Syracusans, there’s a good boy.’

It suddenly occurred to me that Aristophanes’ baby might be a wineskin. ‘Let me guess what you’ve got under your cloak,’ I said loudly.

‘If you must know,’ he said, ‘it’s a dead play. One of yours, by the look of it. You know, stunted, off-colour, never expected it to last as long as it has. I’m going to give it a decent burial, if there are any compost-heaps in Sicily.’

‘Give me a cupful and you can bury it in peace,’ I offered.

‘Vampire,’ replied Aristophanes. I held out my cup and he filled it.

‘Where did you get this from?’ I asked.

‘Sicily,’ he replied. ‘Haven’t you got anything better to do?’

I drank the wine and left him to it. Then Demosthenes himself came hurrying by, in his red cloak and gilded armour, and I stepped aside to let him pass. He turned his head as he went past and said, ‘Hello, Eupolis,’ just as he had that day in Athens, when I went to see the Council. Before I could reply he had passed on, and I stood watching him in the light of the camp-fires; a man always busy, always doing something, always striving to be the best, as a true hero should. ‘Where the hell are those stone-masons?’ I heard him shouting. ‘And has anybody seen the Chief Carpenter? Come on, I haven’t got all night.’ Other men came running up to him, and their cloaked backs hid him from me. Then someone called my name from inside one of the tents. I put my head round.

‘I thought I recognised you,’ said Nicias. ‘It’s a long time since we met.’

I didn’t know what to say. Ever since we arrived in Sicily, Nicias had been a sort of bad joke that nobody could resist repeating, me least of all. It was very strange to see him, joint General of this mighty enterprise. He looked very ill, and he wasn’t wearing his armour. He was sitting on a little cedar wood stool with a pile of wax tablets on his lap, obviously working out some tiny discrepancy in the lists of supplies that nobody but he would have worried about.

‘Good evening, General,’ I said. ‘Aren’t you coming?’ I must have made it sound like a party, for he shook his head and said he hadn’t been invited.

‘I’m to stay here with the reserve and look after the camp,’ he said, and to my amazement there was bitterness in his voice. ‘It’s just as well,’ he went on. ‘I would only be in the way. Demosthenes would be sure to consult me on points of tactics, and what could I say to him?’

I was in much the same dilemma, and so I kept silent and fiddled with the buckle of my sword-belt.

‘It won’t work,’ he said at last. ‘Demosthenes is a fool.’

That was more than I could stand. ‘You should know,’ I blurted out — for I was an Athenian and a voter, and I could say what I liked. ‘It’s just as well you’re not coming,’ I went on. ‘Much better to let Demosthenes save your skin for you.’

He wasn’t angry or even offended. ‘Is that what your chorus will say when you get home?’ he asked. ‘That Nicias let the bull out of the pen, and Demosthenes had to get it back for him? Shall I tell you something, young man?’

‘If you like, General,’ I said insolently.

‘The Athenians elected a fool,’ said Nicias slowly, ‘for a fool’s errand, and the fool made a mess of it, for he could do nothing else. Then the Athenians elected a clever man for the fool’s errand, and he will be a greater fool than the experienced fool, since he does not know the work. They should have left the fool to fall over and break his neck.’

I began to feel very uncomfortable. There was obviously something very wrong with Nicias, to start him off talking like a drunken oracle, and I didn’t want to know. I backed away and hurried off, feeling as if I had just seen a ghost. Soon after I ran into Callicrates and Little Zeus, and we filled in the rest of the time until the first watch, which was when we were due to set off, by looking for Aristophanes’ wineskin. We found it in the end, as it happened, stuffed under a thorn bush, but by then it was too late to do much about it; so we emptied it out and filled it with water, and put it back exactly where we had found it.

CHAPTER THREE

O
ddly enough, I rarely have nightmares about Epipolae now. Shortly after my return I used to have them all the time, but they faded after a year or so and were replaced with a composite nightmare that dealt with a wide variety of issues. While they lasted, however, they were extraordinarily vivid, and were some of the few dreams that I have ever been able to remember after I have woken up. This is highly relevant to the account I am about to give of that adventure; for after all these years I cannot reliably distinguish between my actual recollections of the geography of the battle and the slightly amended and amplified version in the nightmare. So if one of you knows the place well and objects that I have put in a sheep-fold where no sheep-fold has ever stood, or littered an otherwise bare escarpment with gratuitous and wholly unfounded olive trees, I must ask you to keep your erudition to yourself. My Epipolae bears the same relationship to the real Epipolae as, say, Homer’s Achilles bears to the real man, whoever he was. The loss in accuracy is more than adequately compensated for by the author’s exquisite handling of the theme, and all alterations are strictly necessary for legitimate literary purposes.

Shortly after the first watch we received the order to move out, and we dragged our way up the steep sides of Euryalus, trying to make as little noise as possible. The sound of a large and excited army making as little noise as possible is quite deafening on a quiet evening, particularly if you are terrified, as we all were, and the prospects of getting such an enormous gathering of people past the enemy without being noticed seemed poor, to say the least. But I suppose we must have managed it somehow; certainly I saw no sign of any Syracusan forces. Mind you, I had enough trouble seeing my own feet, despite the relatively bright moonlight, so I am hardly qualified to pontificate on this point. Every time that I, personally, trod on something that made a noise or dislodged a loose stone, I expected to hear the roar of enemy voices all around me, but it was not so. Whether I would have been able to hear an enemy attack above the noise of several thousand Athenians trying to be quiet is another matter entirely.

We didn’t so much attack the Syracusan fort that was our primary objective as trip over it. In fact, we went past it twice looking for it and had to turn back, and the man next to me, a part-time carpenter from the north of Attica, was muttering something under his breath about sending someone down into Syracuse and asking the way when suddenly there it was, a vaguely circular pile of heaped-up stones like an overgrown goat-pen, outlined against the dark blue sky.

I had been expecting something slightly grander — the taxiarch had talked about ‘forts’, and I had conceived a picture of a miniature Persepolis, with castellated walls and gateways flanked by carved lions — and the sight of this ramshackle structure cheered me considerably. Anyway, I think Demosthenes was so delighted at finding the wretched thing, after all that frantic searching, that he abandoned his siegecraft (he was, as you will remember, the expert on assaulting fortified positions), yelled out something like ‘Right, let’s
get
the bastards!’ and went scampering off in the general direction of the wall. We followed him as best we could; and since it appeared that it was now permitted to make a noise, we started screaming and whooping like a Chorus of Furies.

I can well imagine how those Syracusans must have felt. They were almost certainly asleep; and you know what it’s like when you’re woken up unexpectedly and asked to take some frightfully important decision. Your mind refuses to operate; you stand there trying to collate certain preliminary facts, like who you are and what is going on. Then, as soon as a coherent scheme of action forms in your brain, you follow it, however inappropriate it may be. The Syracusans’ reaction, as it happens, was perfectly logical; they ran like hell. Unfortunately for them, they ran straight into a detachment of our forces under the general Eurymedon which had got separated and come up on the other side of the fort, apparently still trying to find it.

From what I have heard since, it seems that the Syracusans assumed that the mob of soldiers milling about below them were reinforcements of their own from the city, and so ran to meet them. The Athenians, for their part, took the men coming towards them to be Athenians sent out to find them — certainly they had no idea that they were Syracusans, the results of their searches for the fort having led them to believe that the species were extinct in those parts. So each unit trotted eagerly across to the other and asked it what was going on; and I am told that they had been chatting away for some time before one of the Syracusans noticed that the man he was talking to spoke with a funny accent and stuck a spear clean through him.

After that there was a disorganised sort of a fight, in which matters were not helped by the fact that by this stage nobody knew who anyone else was; then most of the Syracusans slipped away and ran down to the main Syracusan camps to wake up their colleagues. As soon as the taxiarchs managed to part the Athenian and Corcyrean contingents, who were beating hell out of each other under the impression that the other was the enemy, the detachment hurried up to the fort to see if there were any Syracusans left in it. Regrettably, Demosthenes had in the meantime got to the fort, discovered the way in (after several exasperated circuits), found it unoccupied and occupied it. Thus when the victorious Athenians came dashing up and found it full of human beings they quite naturally assumed that the position was still being vigorously defended and attacked it with arrows and javelins. Since we Athenians are not terribly handy with such weapons little actual harm was done, and the mess was quickly sorted out by the general Menander, who was about the only person on our side who could cope with the darkness. He was a great sportsman in peacetime, and his favourite occupation was long-netting hares at night, which trains a man for this sort of work.

My part in all this was fairly straightforward; I simply followed the man in front of me as if I was Eurydice being rescued from the Underworld by Orpheus, found myself inside the fort just as Eurymedon’s men came charging up at us, and sat down under the wall with my shield held over my head until somebody told me that it was safe to come out. Since several javelins and a large rock had come sailing over my part of the wall in the last few minutes I needed quite a deal of persuasion, which eventually the taxiarch administered with the toe of his boot.

Demosthenes had by now realised that night-fighting was rather different from day-fighting, and held a quick conference with his officers. It was no good (he said) just blundering about and hoping to identify the enemy by their Dorian accents. Not only was this method both time-consuming and unsoldierly, it was also unreliable, since many of our allies spoke in the Dorian dialect, while many of the Syracusans’ allies spoke Ionian like us.

What we needed, Demosthenes said, was a password, and the password would be
Victory!,
unless anyone had a better suggestion. The officers agreed that
Victory!
would do to be going on with and set off to tell the men. There was a great deal of sniggering from the soldiers, which did not bode well for the rest of the operation, and we reformed into files and set off to attack the Syracusan camps. By this time I had located Little Zeus and Callicrates, and we practised saying the password until we were word perfect.

I think Demosthenes’ idea had been to come down on the Syracusan camps without any warning and massacre them in their beds. This would have been a good idea had it worked, but unfortunately it required the presence of the Syracusans in their camps to be one-hundred-percent successful, and by this time the Syracusans had left their camps and come out to find us. In this they were not entirely successful. For our part, we had no trouble at all in finding the first Syracusan camp, and we charged it, in perfect formation and with remarkable cohesion, only to find there was nobody there. Of course, I had had many similar experiences of dropping in unexpectedly on empty houses after dinner-parties, and was not unduly distressed; I knew perfectly well that we would all meet up later on at someone else’s place. But Demosthenes seemed rather put out, and so we stayed where we were.

I gather that the Syracusans eventually got tired of looking for us, accused the survivors from the fort of making the whole thing up, and went home to bed. By this time, Demosthenes had resolved to go out and have another shot at finding the enemy, and the two armies bumped into each other a short way from the camp. We charged — what we charged I am not quite sure — and met with surprisingly little resistance. It transpired that we had missed the enemy completely, and as we were coming back the Syracusans charged us. Unluckily for them, they didn’t know the password, and so we were able to identify the mass of heavily armed men running towards us and throwing javelins as the enemy and beat them off. Of course when I say ‘we’, I am speaking collectively; the celebrated Eupolis was wedged in the middle of a file and only vaguely aware of what was going on. For a short while I was very frightened, for I could hear the screams of men being hurt and I had never heard that sort of sound before. Apart from my experience in Samos (which was entirely different) I knew nothing about what it was like in a grown-up battle, and I suddenly realised that a great many people were in danger of serious injury. I was reminded of the time when I had seen a nasty accident in the street — some men were knocking down a house and some bricks fell on to a group of men walking underneath; one of them was hit on the head and screamed quite horribly until they took him away, and it unnerved me for days afterwards. I found my first experience of an infantry action similarly distressing, and when the enemy had gone away I found that I was shaking all over. I particularly remember seeing a man who had had his hand cut off —accidentally, by one of our own men, which can’t have made it any more pleasant for him — and being struck by the unreality of it all. He looked so strange without a hand on the end of his arm where a hand should be, and he was shouting and sobbing quite terribly, saying that this couldn’t be happening to him, since he had a farm to work and nobody to help him. I felt a sort of impulse to say that he should be used to running the place single-handed by now; I’m glad I didn’t say it, but somehow it was very difficult not to. I suppose my terror was turning into jokes inside my head, which is what usually happens to me when I get frightened. Of course, the Spartans are great ones for this sort of humour (although they are rather better at it than me), and everyone says that it proves how brave they are, that they can crack jokes in the midst of suffering and death. I think it proves exactly the opposite; but I may well be wrong on this point.

Well, as soon as the Syracusans had gone away — they had got considerably the worst of the encounter — we pulled ourselves together and went plunging off after them. There was a great shouting of orders from our officers, and for all I knew these may have been very good, sensible and constructive orders; but I couldn’t hear a word of them through the padding of my helmet, and neither, I suspect, could anybody else. Nor could we see any signals or even the other parts of the army, let alone the enemy; so we did the logical thing and followed. the men in front of us. As a result, I suppose, the front of our lines was pushed forward and stumbled onwards in no particular direction, and soon the detachment I was with began to have a horrible feeling that nobody knew where we were or what precisely we were supposed to be doing. We blundered on, yelling out the password at the tops of our voices; and I guess that the Syracusans must have worked out the significance of the word
Victory!
bellowed loudly and with no great conviction by the all-conquering Athenian army, because they started shouting it too, from all sides. As soon as we heard it, we were delighted and moved off in that direction to meet up with our men, only to find small but ferocious groups of the enemy rushing down on our flanks and rear and making our lives distinctly uncomfortable. Thereafter we took the shouting of the password as conclusive proof of the shouter’s hostile intent, and charged immediately. The result of this was some extremely bitter fighting between the Athenians and the Athenians, which the Athenians eventually won.

They tell me that it was the enemy’s Theban allies who turned the battle, standing up to a powerful Athenian force and driving them back. If this is so, all credit to the Thebans, who are by and large a race of homicidal maniacs and quite capable of heroic action. Personally, I don’t believe there was any need for valour on the part of the enemy; their contribution to our defeat was, it seems, largely peripheral. As well as the password and the impossibility of hearing orders, there was the incredible mix-up over the Victory Song. As you know, whenever an army wins an action (and quite often when it doesn’t) it sings the Victory Song, and all Greek nations use more or less the same words and tune; but Dorian-speaking nations such as Syracuse naturally sing in Dorian, and Ionian-speaking nations like Athens in Ionian. Now our Argive and Gorcyrean allies were Dorian speakers, and quite early on they pulped a contingent of the Syracusans’ Siceliot allies — this was by no means difficult, as the Siceliots are a timid people — and lost no time in striking up the old, familiar melody. The Athenians behind them (of whom I was one) heard the sound of delighted, bloodthirsty Dorian singing, naturally assumed that the Syracusans had won a crushing victory over the men in front, and immediately formed themselves into a posture of belligerent terror. The Corcyreans, having disposed of all resistance in front of them, quite properly fell back on their own lines, and were greeted with an Athenian charge of considerable force — that was us, all resolving to die like men — accompanied by the Victory Song in Ionian combined with frequent reiterations of the password. The Victory Song confused our stout-hearted allies at first; but as soon as they heard the password they knew that the men coming towards them must be enemies, and retaliated with all their remaining strength. To add to all this, as soon as the taxiarchs had managed to part the two sides and formed them up to march onwards, one bright spark of an officer contrived to march his company off the edge of a cliff, with fatal results for most of his men.