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Against Rome |
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Back to section viii of this chapter I. Hannibal, Spain, 221 - 218 B.C. ix Autumn
died and all winter the siege stretched on. December passed. January passed.
Hannibal walked up and down before the walls, hugging his greasy robe around him
against the bone-freezing cold and the sharp wind off the sea, glaring up at the
impervious walls. Would she never fall? Finally,
in February, after eight long months, Saguntum did fall open, raw and exposed
like the flesh of a melon smashed with a club. Hannibal
saw to it that the carnage was extreme, and the Saguntines actually aided him by
carrying their hot resistance to the very last. When
the city gates were finally breached, Hannibal entered her with a group of his
officers. Fighting continued all around them, the noise rising in a clash and
clatter, a shouting and cursing. Screams wailed through the streets. Now the
city rose in flames. Houses near Hannibal had begun to burn. “Look,”
Maharbal said. He pointed to one of the burning houses nearby. The flames roared
up inside, licking out through the windows, smoke billowing up in dark plumes
shot with black and orange. Inside,
visible through a window, he saw a woman holding a small child as the flames
went at her. Fascinating. She was perhaps twenty, startling in her beauty but
formidable, looking much like his Imilce, though very thin after months of
siege, the child an infant with its face a red mask of squalling fear, so like
his little daughter. He stood transfixed, attracted to their plight but avid
still in his desire to see them burn. Her
white gown caught fire, and the woman stood there, not thirty feet away, looking
straight back at him, face hard with defiance. The flames raced upward. Her dark
hair caught, and the pain and terror finally got to her so that she dropped the
wailing child and began screaming herself. Smoke obscured her then, and after a
long moment the screams stopped. “How
did the fires start?” Hannibal asked. “The
women set them themselves after locking themselves inside.” Maharbal pointed
to other houses, also alight, some of their occupants still visible in the act
of dying. Hannibal
stood there watching as the screams rose. Brave people. Not a lovely thing to
watch, even in victory—nor unlovely either, for the agony of bodies held a
curious purity to a Carthaginian. He could rue the necessity, but that same
necessity was an undeniable master, not to be gainsaid anymore than one could
gainsay Baal. He
watched avidly, absorbed the music of their wails. Flames rose like orange Alps,
and his blood sang. He loved the fight itself far more, the give and take,
stratagem and counterstrike, mounting like the rhythms of sexual battle, but the
culmination, the moment of fiery conquest, that was the orgasm. He danced
slowly, swaying before the fires of the Moloch recreated in his victory. As he
came, so must Rome come now. Then,
after a little while, there was nothing but the sounds of triumphant soldiers
and the cracking wingbeats of flames. They
brought the captured men before Hannibal and beheaded them with swords as he had
ordered, all but thirty of them. These he sent stumbling forth to tell
Spain—and presumably Rome—how it was going to be. When
the flames died and the smoke had dwindled to a few little columns, Hannibal
sent his Iberian troops home to their towns for the remainder of the winter and
took his Africans back to New Carthage. To the troops he gave a goodly share of
the spoils, but the majority of the booty went by ship to Carthage—it would be
good to confront his critics at home with the fruits of war. *
* * Then,
as spring bloomed, it was time. Hannibal
attempted once more to make love to Imilce, but she refused him. “I’m
off to war, Imilce—I’ll be gone for years.” He could force her, of course
(at some risk to his own skin), but it was of little enough consequence whether
he bedded her before leaving or not. So be it. He fastened up his tunic again. “What
about me?” Imilce asked, eyes brimming with tears, mouth set hard. “What
about your daughter?” Hannibal
finished strapping on his sword before he responded. Then he took his wife by
the shoulders and stared fiercely into her eyes. “You’ll
stay here—a fighting camp’s no place for women. And certainly not for
children, especially girl children.” “You’re
deserting us.” “I’ll
be gone a long time, it’s true, but I will be back eventually. You will stay,
under Hasdrubal’s protection. And I’ll hear no more of it.” Hannibal
had a war to make. So
his firm refusal to take Imilce and the child with him was his goodbye. He
barely heard her wails and curses as he strode out of the house,
out of their lives. *
* * On
the second to last day in May, Hasdrubal Barca joined Hannibal, who sat astride
Surrus, “the Syrian,” his favorite elephant atop a windy hill above the
dusty plain. Hasdrubal sat his horse at Hannibal’s side as before them over a
hundred thousand men now formed into marching order. A
great tent of dust hung over the huge assembly: ninety thousand foot soldiers,
twelve thousand cavalry, some forty thousand horses and mules, scores of
elephants, hundreds of wagons full of food stores, weapons, tents, and other
supplies, catapults and other siege engines, and more than twenty thousand
non-combatants—cooks, farriers, quartermasters, sutlers, priests, carpenters,
armorers, cobblers, prostitutes, slavers, many hangers-on, the usual school of
feeders off the army. The
troops were Libyan-Phoenicians from the other Phoenician colonies in Africa
besides Carthage, native Libyans and Numidians, Iberians, Celtiberians, Gauls,
Greeks, Macedonians, Italians, a good many Sicilians, and even some
Carthaginians. Her population small, Carthage maintained no standing army.
Instead, her mercantile wealth hired the best mercenaries from a dozen nations,
placing them under the command of Carthaginian officers. His
cavalry consisted of light and heavy troops, the light composed of lightly armed
Numidian tribesmen mounted on small, wiry horses, the heavy troops of
Celtiberians up on powerful Spanish mounts, carrying small lances and two-edged
swords, slightly curved for cutting as well as thrusting. As well, he had
slingers from the Balearic Islands, who could control the early stages of a
battle with their round stones or lead bullets. And his infantry, Carthaginians,
Libyans, and Iberians, were armed like Greeks, with large shields, breastplates,
helmets, and greaves. They carried short, thrusting swords and long spears, and
they fought in the Greek phalanx taught them by Xanthippus, the Spartan general
who had defeated the invader Regulus. In battle, these would present a solid
wall of shields bristling with long spears. Noise
rose like a column of smoke over a sacked town, a storm at sea, a Babel of
shouting tongues and a din of rattling arms, the crack of whips, occasional
cries from the horses or trumpeting from the elephants, the creak and rattle of
wagons, all of it amplified a hundred thousand times. So
that it would not be three days hence before the last set themselves in motion,
Hannibal had organized them for the first part of the march into three great
parallel columns a mile apart. They
had been weeks organizing, most of the men camping
in their columns. Thousands of fires blazed at night, requiring many
wagonloads of wood and dried dung to supply them. What had started as a
sprawling camp gradually coalesced into the three columns, the Herculean labors
of thousands of by now hoarse noncommissioned officers. At
this point, only the most trusted officers knew their destination. No doubt
learning it would dismay the men, for the truth of it would condemn them to at
least several years of hard living far from their homes and families, in an
actively hostile land whose language most did not speak—and that was only
after they surmounted first the Pyrenees and then the Alps. Best they continue
to think their mission was to pacify northern Spain. Hasdrubal
Barca felt the excitement of the moment, of course, but for him it was also a
time of frustration and disappointment. For he would not be going with Hannibal
on the long march. “You
will command Spain,” Hannibal had told his brother over a year before. “Spain?
I’m not to come with you?” “Who
could I trust more to hold Spain than you, Hasdrubal?” Hasdrubal
looked stricken, for he had genuinely never thought of this. “The
Romans will probably come,” Hannibal went on. “So you should see plenty of
fighting. And you know as well as I how important Spain is as our base.” Hasdrubal
knew this would spare him many hardships, possibly even death, but the pill was
still a sour one. Mago was going, Maharbal was going, all of them were going.
But not Hasdrubal. Still,
he had kept his head about him and acquiesced as gracefully as he knew how. And
now he sat his horse beside Hannibal with a smile on his face, expecting to
embrace his desolation later, in private. Hannibal was right. Someone must hold
Spain. If Carthage lost her one great province in the Mediterranean during the
fight to come, she would undoubtedly lose the war as well. Therefore,
he, Hasdrubal Barca, would remain behind and hold Spain. “What
about your giant map?” Hasdrubal asked. “You
keep it. I’ve had a much smaller version made.” Hannibal grinned. *
* * At
the designated hour, Hannibal raised his arm and looked along the lines to see
that his officers were watching. A line of them dwindled away into the distance,
ready to repeat his commands until they had permeated the whole army. This
was the moment, then, the true commencement of all his labors, the fruit of a
million preparations, the work of thousands of men—but the child of one mind.
Let the child born of this moment rise to stride forth: up the Spanish coast,
across the Pyrenees, through southern Gaul, across the mighty Rhodanus River,
into and over the towering Alps. To Italy. Perhaps even to Rome. Butterflies
filled his stomach. But this sensation, he knew, was the source of his luck any
time he went into battle. He
smiled in triumph and let his arm fall. A
hundred other arms repeated the gesture. Three
hundred trumpets blared the command to march, and the great mass surged into
motion. It had begun. *
* * Hasdrubal
Barca rode up onto a little hill where he could watch the great procession over
the top of its tent of dust. He came back to the same spot for three more days
before the last of them were out of sight. Hannibal’s
army headed north, crossing the Ebro at three places in three
segments—commanded by Hannibal, Mago, and Maharbal—some four weeks after
they started out. Where were the Romans? End of Chapter 1 Back to Top
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