Tides of War (33 page)

But I have strayed afield. Let us return to the Great Harbor, to defeat and its issue…

With Chowder’s death and Splinter’s,
Pandora
had lost all her original marines except myself and Lion. Of our fourteen after Iapygia had fallen to wounds Meton called Armbreaker, Teres called Skull, Adrastus called Towhead, Colophon Redbeard, and Memnonides; to disease Hagnon called the Small, Stratus, Maron, and Diagoras; deserted Theodectes and Milon the pentathlete. If the measure of an officer be the number of his command he restores to home alive, this roster speaks with its own eloquence. I may say in defense only this: none did better. Of sixty thousand free citizens, subject-state volunteers, and conscripts inclusive of both fleets, fewer than a thousand made it home, and these on their own and only after appalling trials.

The fault I own as mine, for my men. The tuition in obedience I had received as a boy, reinforced by the code acquired in the mercenary service, was too severe, too Spartan if you will, to be imposed upon Athenians, particularly the unpropertied roughnecks who constituted the bulk of the latter-day fleet marine force. Courage and initiative they owned in abundance. They were born to debate and disputation, abashed by no authority established over them, brash and spirited and untamable as cats. Invincible when events ran their way, they could not summon the self-command to rally when the sky began to rain shit, nor was I, or Lion, capable of inspiriting it in them. They personified that type of warrior who beneath a commander of vision and audacity may roll resistlessly from success to success. Compelled, however, to endure adversity over a sustained interval—not alone defeat but simply delay and inaction—the restless enterprise that made them great would turn upon itself and, like a caged rat, commence to gnaw its vitals. From Lion’s observations:

The soldiers and sailors of Athens had won so often that they did not know how to lose. Overthrow unmanned them, as a sudden blow will a boxer who has seldom been hit. I never saw men lose weapons and armor as these. Restless, easily bored, our citizen campaigners possessed not the patience of the warrior and did not care to acquire it. The virtue of obedience, in Sparta so highly prized as to be worshiped as a god, was to Athenians the same as want of vision or deficiency of daring. In victory they disdained their officers; in defeat they mutinied openly. One could not pound it into their skulls that obedience and command are reverse and obverse. Those generals of quality who by luck arose to command held up to their men the very virtues—forbearance, steadfastness, endurance—which to these youths were worthless as piss and imposed punishments which could not be enforced in a democratic camp. The best one may say to honor these dead is that they perished when the fight might yet bear the name of honor.

Two nights after the defeat in the Great Harbor, the army packed up and pulled out, all forty thousand who could trek, seeking any part of the island where survival could be fought for. The sick and wounded would be left to die.

My cousin would not desert them. I confronted him as the army massed to move out. The night was pitch, yet one could see the shades of the maimed and mutilated, hobbling and even crawling to the formation of their fellows, pleading to be taken with them. Please, one without legs would implore, I can be drawn! Pull me like a sack! Men would promise gold when they got home, all their fathers owned. Others appealed in the name of the gods or of filial piety, of boyhood bonds, oaths sworn, trials endured in common.

The order came to move out. The sick pressed their treasure upon the able—bear me only a mile, friend!—while the well forced all they had into the fists of the disowned. Here, mate, buy your life if you can. The distress of those pleading for deliverance was exceeded only by the agony of their comrades, possessed of no option but to deny them. I begged Simon to depart with us. What good could he accomplish, holding here to die? The failing ringed him about, imploring him to heed. Go—and take me with you! Others importuned Lion and Telamon, who, with kind hearts steeled, sought to deflect them. Suddenly a youth lurched from the press. This was the petty officer of the
Pandora
called
Rosy Cheeks, who had taken a spike through the foot. He clutched at my cloak. “Friend, I can hobble. I beg you, lend me your arm!” In two years of campaign I had not yielded to terror or rage. Now my belly failed. I flung the beggar off me, cursing him and all the sick. Why don’t you croak, the mob of you, and get it over with! I pleaded with Simon not to cast his life away on these who were already dead. He responded by requiring my blessing. I called him a fool who deserved to die. He struck me in the face. “Give me your blessing.”

“Take it to hell.”

My brother caught me from behind. We embraced our cousin, weeping.

“See my boy gets his schooling and my lass her dowry.” Simon pressed into my palm his rings and an ivory charm he had won for a solo at the Apaturia. “For Road’s Turn,” he said, meaning Acharnae, his tomb.

The track beyond the palisade ran across the marsh held by the enemy throughout the sea fight. It had been vacated. The men took cheer and accelerated the pace. “He’s afraid of us,” someone proposed, meaning Gylippus. The Syracusans were behind their city walls, celebrating. You could hear their cymbals and drums. We were missing a hell of a party.

We must link with the Sicels inland, then drive to Catana, twenty miles north. The way round, for we dared not skirt Epipolae, climbed stony slopes from the harbor. The army was to advance in a hollow square with the noncombatants in the center, but great flocks of camp wives pressed out, seeking their men. Lion’s Berenice and her sister Herse trekked beside us; it went with excruciating slowness. The formation extended on both sides of the road; every time it came to a wall the mob bunched to a standstill.

Near dawn enemy scouts overhauled us. We could hear them, horseback, calling to each other in the fog. By night their whole army would be on us. The women must get out now. Lion parted from Berenice on the move, pressing into her kit the packet of his notes and all the cash he had. Others groped godspeed. A few got in a farewell fuck. You saw them, grappling in the dirt or humping each other against trees.

There was a holm oak beside the track. Someone had hung a
kypridion,
fillets of wool bound with the passion knot, the sign of Bridal Aphrodite, which the women tack for luck above the lintels of newlyweds. Who could have set such invocation upon this tree of blood, whose bloom produces the scarlet pigment that colors the war cloak of Sparta and Syracuse? She was our bride now, this dame called Death. I fell in step beside Lion.

At noon the column reached the first river. The Syracusans had either dammed it or diverted its course; it was dry. We learned this, miles back in the column, from enemy cavalry, who called across as they fired the underbrush on our flanks. They shouted, too, that our camp had been taken. The wounded and those attending had been slaughtered to the last man. I sank in grief on the roadside and must have remained unmoving for a term because we again, Lion and I, became separated from our company, the third or fourth so far in the retreat. “Get up!” My brother tugged me. “Pommo! We must keep with the column!”

The track ran through underbrush. Enemy cavalry had fired this to windward and now the passage clotted with smoke. “This is why Gylippus opened the gate!” a trooper at our shoulders snorted. “Why attack us behind our walls when he can let our brilliant officers lead us into this waste where thirst will drive us mad!”

At last a rider came down the line. Our men were digging wells in the dry riverbed, seeking the underground flow. “What’s the holdup?” an infantryman shouted. “Attack upstream! That’s where the enemy is—and the water!”

The rider relayed the generals’ decision: that the brush was too dense, we may march into even worse.

“I haven’t drained a drop of piss in two days, mate. How much worse does it get?”

Cavalry hit when we reached the plain. There were not many yet, as their main raced ahead to fortify the way against us. The column pressed on, in that infuriating spread-and-compress repetition of large bodies on the move. We came to a farm with a springhouse. The site had been assaulted by the thousands before us. Nonetheless men fought over the oozing clay, which they held in wads above their lips and squeezed like pomegranates for the juice.

The column reached the second river at nightfall. The wells produced muddy soup. Each got a cup. We moved on.

Men were melting by twos and threes into the brush, taking their chances on their own. Telamon fell in beside us. Time to fold the flag. Would we join him? Athens, Lion replied, is our country.

“With respect, friends. Screw your country.”

We laughed. He took our hands. He was no man for long farewells.

Two dawns later the column came to a great plateau. A pair of ravines cut through at the southwest; there was no way round; the enemy held the heights. We must force it or never see Catana. Lion and I were incorporated into a company under a captain whose name we never learned, a garrulous fellow whose men clearly loved him. We got to the base of the track just past noon. Men were going up and dying. That was all there was to it. Our company was shunted beneath a hastily cobbled palisade. We would go up next.

Behind us stretched the column. Syracusan cavalry made rushes at a hundred points; you saw nothing for miles but their dust ascending from the scrub. The earth at our feet was cracked clay; I observed that we must get water or die. Lion indicated the “beaten zone” beyond our palisade, where the foe’s missiles and stones rained.

“Step out there and solve your problems.”

Three times our company went up the hill. The pass narrowed to a single wagon-width; the enemy had sealed it with a wall. Behind it he was massed twenty across and a hundred deep; thousands more blanketed the cliffsides. They sent stones and javelins, even landslides upon us. By postnoon they had the knack; they let the attackers advance to the wall, where the facing rocks compacted them into a body; then they opened fire. Each assault company bore it in turn; when enough had gone down, or simply cracked, the unit fell back and another went up in rotation. The track had acquired a name, Blood River, though this was a misnomer, as all fluid soaked at once into the desiccated dirt. Exposed on the uptrack, we pressed ourselves like lizards against sheltering rocks or hunkered beneath makeshift palisades, burrowing into these clefts, while the foe’s stones and darts crashed upon us. You could see the shields of the fallen, great piles dragged back by their comrades repulsed in subsequent assaults or toppled or slid downslope on their own. Their oaken chassis had been bashed to splinters by the stones and boulders of the foe, signia and blazons effaced beneath a paste of dust and blood.

The track up had become a calf-deep furrow, riven to powder by the soles and knees of the assault troops as they mounted, marinated by their piss and sweat, then reground by their backs and heels as their corpses were passed down by others who mounted to take their place. The companies assaulted the hill all day. Next day the same. We had learned to shiver the enemy’s javelins where they struck, for each time we fell back the foe retrieved them to fling upon us afresh. The lances slung downhill terrified the men, not just the impact but the sound, and the stones and boulders were worse.

A cavalry captain galloped up, calling for volunteers. Gylippus had got in the rear of the column with five thousand; he was throwing up another wall to pen us for the slaughter. Lion and I leapt to it. Anything to quit this hellish ravine.

In the rear, our ten thousand assaulted Gylippus’ five. By nightfall the foe fell back, depleted of missiles and stones. The company ahead of ours took the wall. They tore through the abandoned kits of the foe but could find no water. These companies must rejoin the main body. Ours and two others were ordered to remain, to bury the dead and set up a night perimeter. We flopped atop the wall, dirty as death, and watched the units trudge back. From our vantage we could see the enemy cavalry, the dust of more squadrons than could be counted, and across the plain additional plumes, columns of infantry converging from the north and east—a hundred thousand, two hundred thousand, massing for the kill.

Thirst tormented the army. Men cursed Nicias and Demosthenes, and Alcibiades too; him more than them, for he had abandoned us. I hated him too, for my cousin and all the dead, but most for not being here to preserve us.

Twice Nicias passed on horseback. One must give the man credit. Though racked with disease, he displayed tireless resolution, passing up and down the line absent all care for his own affliction. I heard him, an hour past dark of the fifth day, surrounded by two thousand:

“Brothers and comrades, I must speak with haste. I know we have no water and this goes hard with us and the beasts which bear our armor. But we will turn about tonight and march back to the sea. There are rivers along the track to Helorus of greater volume than the enemy may dam.

“Be of steadfast hearts, my friends, fortifying your resolve with this knowledge: that the forty thousand of our army is not only a formidable force but a city in itself, greater than any in Sicily save Syracuse. We may go anywhere, drive out the inhabitants and establish ourselves in their places. We may find food and water. We may build ships and get home. Remember this and be not downcast. As for the reversals you have suffered, do not let them make you lose heart. Fortune cannot hold herself indifferent forever; even the sternest of immortals must be moved by our plight. For those decisions which have brought us to this pass, I take responsibility. You are not to blame. Never has your fighting spirit shown itself wanting, but your exertions have been set at naught by the gods’ perversity and our own ill generalship.”

Lion studied the men as they listened. He was struck, he said later, by the intelligence of their faces; they recalled to him the countenances one beheld in the theater on the morn of a competition. Now they seemed, my brother observed, to assess Nicias as they would an actor and to class him of the leaden and the second-rate. Nicias, his hearers’ expressions betrayed, is pious; he is valiant, even noble. But one thing he is not: he is not Alcibiades. Neither, for all his craft and courage, is Demosthenes. Desperate as the army’s pass now was, could any doubt that, Alcibiades in command, he could not overturn it? Nicias was right about one thing: we were an army, redoubtable even now as any on earth. Yet we were broken and we knew it. I hated Alcibiades the more. There was none to replace him. As Nicias spoke, men’s hearts cracked, apprehending this.