Tides of War

  This second bastion was not yet Chalk Hill, not the linked series of redoubts the foe had built last autumn when he drove us off the Heights, but a new one, higher-walled and at the peak of a steeper slope. The enemy had thousands here; it must be stormed. He had cleared fields of fire to two hundred yards and spiked this expanse with bales of faggots, doused with pitch. Mounds of thorn had been piled on both flanks to channel attackers into the missile troops’ killing zone. These our incendiaries set ablaze. A yellow moon burned through the haze. The order came to hold till the obstacles burned down. But the troops could not contain themselves, from fever for the fight, fear of Gylippus’ reinforcements, or apprehension spawned by their own blood-sapping fatigue. The ranks piled unordered into the inferno, using shields to plough apart the blazing packets, while the enemy concentrated fire on the avenues down which the Athenians, Argives, and allies now advanced.

  Our brigade was second from the front. The first hundred hit the wall. Its face was stone, bristling with stakes. From the crown the enemy rolled boulders. We turtled up, shields across backs, tearing at the stones with our bare hands. The light troops raced up behind. You could hear their shafts and sling bullets shrieking overhead. A boulder from above hit me square in the spine, pounding me into the spiked wall. The stones were knitted too tight to tear. “Climb!” all were shouting. A body fell on me. Some whore’s son drilled by our archers. I tried to mount, keeping him on my shielded back. The bugger came to life! I felt fingers claw my sockets and heard the scrape of a blade seeking my throat. I jammed the flange of my helmet down, sealing the seam against the cuirass, and rose with the strength of terror. He went limp, shot by his own from above.

  “Climb!” Lion was screaming beside me. I saw, or felt, his stumpy form clamber up the face. Shame seized me. I mounted beside him. The defenders were dumping flaming pitch on us. Up we went. They backed before their own blaze. Our javelineers poured volleys into the enemy atop the wall. As I hit the crest, a man rose before me swinging a gutcutter; I lowered and butted him. We plunged entwined. He had no helmet; I bashed in his skull with my bronze. I heard cheering. The second companies surged past, spewing sweat and spit as they fell on the backs of the fleeing foe. I sank to all fours on the smoking stone.

  “Lion!”

  “Here, brother!”

  We jacked helmets back, enough to confirm each other’s survival, and collapsed from relief and exhaustion.

  The moon stood full up now. The men rallied, surging over this second fort. “Get up, get up!” We must not yield to fatigue, not while the counterwall stood and Gylippus had time to fortify it with more troops. The men had been climbing and fighting four hours. The night had not cooled one iota. The troops’ tongues hung like dogs.

  We heard Argive accents. A colonel of the elite Thousand burst from the darkness. He was closing up the line. “One more rock to take!”

  The call came for officers. Lion was puking and cramping, so I went. Demosthenes was there. His brigade had started up before ours, against the fort at Labdalum; either he or we were completely out of order. His lieutenants directed the men to eat, but who could choke down bread absent wine or water?

  The troops are spent, sir, one captain reported. The third wave is still behind us, mounting from Euryalus; should he hold here and let them take the advance?

  Demosthenes stared as if the man had gone mad.

  “The moon is up. We take this shithole now.”

  A colonel said he didn’t know if his men could do it.

  “The men don’t tell you what can be done,” Demosthenes roared. “You tell them!”

  The commander could see his officers were reeling. They had all drunk too much wine, and though fear and exertion had sweated most out, yet the grape’s fire had taken a toll on the blood, like a two-day drunk, bringing on that state of bone-weariness that no measure of will may overcome.

  “Gather, cousins.” Demosthenes mustered the officers like a father his sons. “I know the men are exhausted. Can you think I don’t feel it too? But we must seize the Chalk Fort. No other outcome is acceptable.

  “If we fail tonight, Gylippus will drive us off the Heights tomorrow. Then we’re back where we started, and worse because the enemy will believe nothing beyond his power. But the Chalk Fort taken this night turns all in our favor. The counterwall will fall; the city will be invested. Brace up, men. We can’t give the foe time. Finish him now and get this trick over!”

  But Gylippus did not wait for our attack. Putting the counterwall at his back, he led his troops straight for the marshaling Athenians. We heard their paean and raced back to our places. Lion already had our marines moving. I fell in and swam forward.

  The enemy was massed in uncountable numbers. Our ranks closed; the armies crashed together. A melee ensued that could be given the name of battle by its scale only. No one could swing a sword, such was the press of bodies. The nine-foot spear was useless. One dropped it where he stood, fighting instead with the shield as a weapon, struggling simply to take your man’s feet out or stick him Spartan-style with the short thrust and draw. Any part of the body that bore armor became a weapon. One fought with his knees, driving them into his man’s testicles, with elbows fired at the throat and temple, and heels against those fallen on the earth. In the melee a man seized the rim of the enemy’s shield and pulled it down with all his weight. You clawed at a man’s eyes, spit in his face if you could summon spit, and bit at him with your teeth. We could feel the foe falling back. Our reinforcements poured from behind, driving by their weight the mass of contention forward. The moon rose behind. The enemy broke and ran.

  For what happened then, blame must be laid upon our officers, myself included. We could not restrain the men; they bolted in a mass, ravening upon the foe like beasts. The spring of their fury lay no doubt in two years’ woe and frustration under Nicias. I believe the men feared as well that their endurance was at its end; they had been fighting five hours without food or water; they must finish the enemy now, before strength failed.

  You have witnessed the rout, Jason. Performed properly, the cavalry run down the fleeing foe, disabling him with the saber or slaying him outright with the lance. Allied with the horse troopers, the swiftest of the infantry overhaul the enemy in his flight, bringing him down from behind with the thrust of the nine-foot spear. The wounded he spikes where they lie. Here on the Heights, however, we had no cavalry and by this stage no nine-footers; all had long since been slung or shivered. Instead our troops fell in disorder upon the stampeding foe, hacking at him with the sword. This is no way to kill a man. The edge-on wound is not reliably fatal or even disabling, and, more ruinous, it rouses its object to such desperation as to goad even the coward to turn and fight, when, taken down as he ought, with a penetration wound or missile weapon, this same fellow would continue to present his back and be slain with ease. The second axiom of the broken field, drummed into the rookie’s skull, is never to take the foe one-on-one, but always by pairs, and from opposing quarters.

  Both precepts went by the board in the fatigue-spawned extremity. Out front our infantry could be seen slashing at the foes’ hamstrings and necks, then, as these rearmost fell, rampaging onto the next lot, leaving the outstripped foe wounded but still able to fight or, if he was clever, faking it entire, and now, as the next rank overran him, alive and unharmed among our own troops. The line broke down across the entire field. Topography enlarged the dislocation. Chalk Hill, to which the enemy now fled, was a good half mile away, over ragged and broken ground. Our men, spent, broke apart while the foe in flight was able to use the fells and declines to make his escape.

  Nonetheless the Athenian advance encountered scant opposition; cries of triumph rose as our troops, disordered as they were, rolled on toward the redoubts that ringed the chalky rise commanding the counterwall. The moon was over our shoulders as we advanced; ahead you could see the enemy debouching in masses from half a dozen portals, shields, and helmets gleaming in the light. They were
smart. Gylippus was smart. He had chosen not to hold his men behind the battlements, upon which our disarrayed troops would press, regaining order simply by their own compaction. Instead the Spartan elected to meet us in the open, throwing his massed, rested troops against our disordered, exhausted ones.

  The world knows how spectacularly this succeeded. Lion and I had caught up with Chowder and Splinter and the orphans of other units who had attached themselves to us. Our side continued to overrun the foe; the Argive Thousand on our left was mowing down the Syracusan division arrayed against them. We could see the Chalk Fort, a hundred yards ahead. “It is fallen!” I heard an Argive officer cry.

  At that instant the man on my right toppled into me. I caught him and held him up, for a man in armor on the ground is as good as dead. I turned right and there was the enemy, rolling us up from the flank.

  We learned later that this was the Cadmus division, Boeotian volunteers, and the Thermopylae regiment of Thespiae, two thousand in all, whom Hegesander had stationed before that redoubt called the Ravelin. Where all others broke, these held. Like a great rock upon which the ocean wave crashes and bursts, these stood and turned all.

  I was on the earth, toppled before their rush. It was impossible to rise in fifty pounds of armor. A man, one of ours, was trying to burrow under me, so my flesh and not his would take an enemy spear. The Boeotians passed over, plunging the butt spikes of their nine-footers. I heard the burrower take it; the sound of his skull pierced, cranial foreships staving and the soup gushing from within. I took one blade outside my hip and another two whiskers from my globes. The foe passed over. I rolled free. Lion hauled me clear.

  In routs escape is rarely demanding if one keeps his head. You simply dump what weight you must, bucking your nerve with the certainty that you’re willing to run harder and longer to preserve your life than the foe is to take it. Here on the Heights all such usage was overturned. It was dark. There were no roads. Moonshadow cast all into chaos. You couldn’t hold where you were; you had been overrun. To advance was suicide, while to flee only hurled you among the very troops by whom you had just been routed.

  We had to get round. But now a fresh hazard confounded us: the enemy our troops had outstripped in the advance. These were on their feet now, rallying into bands of butchers. They ranged the killing ground, slitting the throat of every downed Athenian. I was with Lion, Chowder, Splinter, and about a dozen others. We had migrated somehow to the extreme right of the field. The bluffs dropped sheer, two hundred feet. Chowder peered down with Lion.

  “Shall we try it?”

  “After you.”

  We tracked the brink, seeking a descent. From a rise Lion and I squinted. In the distance: a battle.

  Stripping helmets, we could hear the paean—their Dorians or ours, who could tell?—and that anthem all soldiers know, the toll and rumble of the othismos as the massed formations compact and clash. “I’d as soon give this the skip,” observed Splinter.

  Lion asked what had become of his taste for glory.

  “I lost it hours ago, with the contents of my bowels.”

  We skidded down the slope toward the battle. At the bottom men transited like phantoms. We heard Attic accents.

  “Athenians?”

  “Move up!” an officer shouted. “We’re forming beyond that rise!”

  We tagged the troops, but lost them in a defile. There was fog in the low places, the light had gone strange. The moon in your eyes, you were blind; behind you, you trod in ink. Emerging from a fell, we saw a mass of several hundred infantry, their officers dressing their line. We dashed in, seeking one to report to. A trooper waved us down the line. A man spoke, addressing a comrade. Syracusan dialect.

  These weren’t our troops.

  We were among the enemy.

  A Syracusan tugged at my shoulder; handsome chap, a six-footer. He was asking me something. Lion’s blade sliced his throat. He dropped like a pig, gushing fluid.

  We ran for our lives. I called to Lion to take over. I was unstrung; my thoughts would not obey me. “How did those sheepfuckers get there?!”

  We drew up in a ravine, out of our wits with terror and clutching each other like children. “Are we turned round? How did they get on that side of us?” We tried to orient ourselves by the moon, but in the defile you couldn’t tell which direction its light came from. Sounds! Men advancing in a body, from where we had just come. “It’s them!”

  Three rangers scrambled over the crest. We unloaded everything at them.

  “Athenians!” they shouted in fright.

  We demanded the watchword.

  They had forgot. So had we.

  “By Zeus, are you Athenians?!”

  “Yes, yes! Stop shooting!”

  They were our countrymen. In a minute their main body scrambled over the rise, about a platoon; we located their lieutenant. Lion told of the enemy we had blundered into, immediately north.

  “That’s west.”

  “It can’t be. Look at the moon.”

  “It’s west, I tell you!”

  “Then where’s the fight?”

  “It’s over. We’ve lost.”

  “Never!”

  We bolted, seeking the battle. More men ahead. We formed fast, fearing the enemy. “Athena Protectress,” their point pair called. The password! We countersigned. They hurried toward us. “By the gods,” our youngest advanced with relief, “what the hell’s going on?” Their point plunged a nine-footer into his guts. More fell on us from the flank. We bowled through in terror.

  We could not tell if they were the enemy, discovering our watchword, or our own mistaking us for the foe. One imperative drove us: to reach our own lines. It didn’t matter if we were eviscerated one moment later, we must reunite with our countrymen. We were out of our minds with this necessity.

  Forms ghosted past in the darkness, fleeing and advancing in all directions. They kept silent as we, each in dread of the other. A new fear had seized me. I was terrified that I would encounter my cousin and each, taking the other for the enemy, would slay the other.

  When men passed I called out, “Simon!”

  “Shut up!” Lion barked.

  I couldn’t.

  “Simon! Is that you?”

  “Have you lost your mind?”

  At last we got out onto the flat. A breast-bursting hump of a mile carried us to the Labdalum fort, the first one that the rangers and shock troops had taken, what seemed like a lifetime past, this night. There were mobs everywhere: dead and wounded being borne rearward; masons and carpenters just now mounting the switchbacks of Euryalus; and scores of remnants like us, bunching up in terror and disorder. Troops streamed by, fleeing. Battling each other to get down the cliff face.

  “What has happened?”

  “Lost! All lost!”

  “Hold up!” Lion advanced into the stream. “Rally, brothers! Summon your courage!”

  The sight of our countrymen in flight filled me with such shame that fortitude, or some simulacrum, reanimated. I took my place beside Lion.

  “Have you found your head, Pommo?”

  “Yes.”

  “You scared the wits out of me.”

  Men fled past us. We caught a few, shamed as we, and formed them into a front. I recognized one, Rabbit, who had fought as a shield with Telamon. When I clutched his arm, I saw he was in tears.

  “I killed a man,” he cried.

  “What?”

  “Our own. One of ours.”

  He was unhinged and begged me to cut his throat. “God help me, I couldn’t see….I thought he was theirs.”

  “Forget it, it’s the dark. Make your stand.”

  He bared his steel and set its point beneath his jaw.

  “Form up!” I shouted at him. “Rabbit! Take your place!”

  He grasped the hilt with both fists and jammed the blade up into his brain.

  “Rabbit!”

  He dropped like a cut puppet. Men gaped in horror. We could hear the enemy’s pae
an.

  “Hold!” Lion bawled to our comrades. “Hold where you stand.”

  “Why?” cried one.

  They ran.

  We ran too.

  XXII

  THE AVERTED FACE OF HEAVEN

  You have heard recounted numberless times, Jason, the chronicle of the lunar eclipse which occurred a month succeeding the calamity on Epipolae, and the terror into which it plunged the fleet and army, coming as it did in the instant their vessels made ready to embark for safety. Men have censured Nicias as commander and indicted the troops themselves for yielding to such dread, superstition-spawned, at the hour of their deliverance, when they had at last set their purpose to abandon Syracuse and sail for home.

  Of those who condemn us I say only: they weren’t there. They weren’t there to feel the dread that breathed in that hour, when the moon hid her face and its benediction from men’s sight. I consider myself a man of practical usage, yet I, too, stood stricken at my post, staring skyward in consternation. I, too, turned about, unnerved and unmanned by this prodigy of heaven.

  Nine thousand had been lost since Epipolae. In the panic at the cliffs, men had leapt and fallen by hundreds. I went out that first dawn with Lion, seeking our cousin. Thousands were still missing. Many who had made it down off the Heights had lost their way seeking camp. Now with first light the Syracusan horse were making mince of them. At the base of the cliffs, dead and dying lay strewn for acres. They were all ours. Some had tumbled in the panic as thousands bunched up at the brink and each, in terror to reach safety, had dislodged another, spilling him in turn onto those picking their way down the switchbacks below. Many in despair had leapt of their own will, stripping armor and casting themselves to fate.

  At the top of the cliffs prize parties of the foe now collected. They called down, taunting. “You are so clever, Athenians, did you think you could fly?” Take a good look, the enemy vaunted, slinging severed limbs and even heads down onto the mounds of our slain. “This is the only way you will leave Sicily!”