It was possible to deploy in the plain beyond, and the slaughter was even greater there. Armenian John pushed the Vandals back to the very walls of Carthage, and by a view of the corpses dotted here and there over the plain in those ten miles one could have imagined that an army of 20,000 men, not a mere half-squadron, had been at work.
Meanwhile King Geilimer’s forces and those of his nephew converged on the Tenth Milestone. In a plain which had once been a salt marsh the nephew had the ill-luck to come suddenly upon the Massagetic Huns. He outnumbered them by 3,000 to 600, but the outlandish look of these hollow-eyed, long-haired fellows (who lived, remember, a year’s journey away from Carthage and had never before been seen on African soil) scared the superstitious Vandals, and the unexpected, stinging showers of arrows were terrible. They fled unanimously without coming to blows at all, and were massacred almost to a man. As for Geilimer, he was unaware of his nephew’s fate and had lost touch with Belisarius’s rearguard, because of the hilly nature of the ground. Belisarius knew by now that Armenian John had cleared the defile of the enemy; but had received no further reports from him, and feared that he might have been ambushed and stand in need of assistance. Leaving the infantry behind in the stockade, he ordered the Herulians under his blood-brother Pharas, and a squadron of Thracian Goths, to gallop ahead and investigate; he followed at a more leisurely pace with the main body of cavalry.
King Geilimer was close to the Tenth Milestone now, with 30,000 cavalry. At the stockade my mistress had taken command and organized the defence in a very capable way; for she had studied these matters with Belisarius, and her courage and humorous manner of address inspired great confidence in all. However, her military capacities were not put to any severe test: Geilimer passed by our stockade without seeing it, for a hill lay between. He missed Belisarius too, who was advancing by a different road.
When Pharas and the Thracian Goths reached the posting-house where the skirmish had taken place, they found the people there in a state of the greatest excitement; because the dead Vandal in the gilded armour was none other than Ammatas himself, Geilimer’s brother.
Pharas and his Herulians pushed on in search of Armenian John. Hardly had they gone when a cloud of dust was seen to the southward, and a look-out signalled enormous forces of Vandal cavalry-King Geilimer’s men. The Thracian Goths immediately rushed to seize the hill commanding the entrance to the defile, but the Vandals soon thrust them off it by sheer weight of numbers, and they retreated at a gallop on the main body. Thus King Geilimer, with an army five times the size of ours, was left in possession of the highly defensible defile. Armenian John and Pharas were on one side, and Belisarius on the other, our fleet was far away – the battle was as good as lost to us.
Now, in Constantinople there is a square called ‘The Square of Brotherly Love’ with a fine group of statuary in it, on a tall pedestal, commemorating the fraternal devotion of the sons of the Emperor Constantine – who subsequently destroyed one another without mercy. And among the Greeks and other inhabitants of the Mediterranean lands true fraternal devotion, because of the laws of inheritance, is so rare that its genuine occurrence, even in less exalted persons than young men born in the purple, would indeed be worthy of sculptural commemoration. Why, the oldest poem in the Greek language, the Works and Days of Hesiod, grew out of an instance of fraternal squabbling. But with the Germanic tribes brotherly devotion is the rule rather than a rarity, and the luxurious life that they lived in Africa had by no means weakened this trait in the Vandals. When, therefore, King Geilimer reached the posting-house by the Milestone in the middle of the afternoon, and the news was broken to him that his brother Ammatas had been killed, this was a terrible thing for him. He gave himself up to barbarian grief and was incapable of taking stock of the tactical position: he could think only in terms of sepulchres and funeral elegies.
Belisarius had rallied the Thracian-Gothic fugitives and pressed on with them to the Milestone, where the Vandal forces were now crowded together in complete disorder. The cavalry had descended from the commanding hill in order to observe what was happening, and remained to join in the general lamentations over Ammatas’s death. Geilimer, who now heard also of the defeat and death of his nephew at the hands of the Massagetic Huns, was blubbering disconsolately, and no military thought or action could be expected of him.
Belisarius, surprised but gratified by what he saw, at once divided his squadrons into two compact masses and sent them up the hills on either side of the defile; and, when they were in position, signalled a simultaneous attack on the mass below and between. Volleys of arrows lent sting to that impetuous charge, the slope of the hill lent it irresistible momentum. Hundreds of the enemy went down at the first onset. Then our squadrons disengaged and, after withdrawing a little way up the slope and letting loose another volley of arrows, charged once more. They repeated this manoeuvre again and again. Within half an hour all the surviving Vandals but two or three squadrons, who were cut off in the defile, were away in full flight towards the salt-marsh, where a great number of them were headed off and killed by the Massagetic Huns. As for Armenian John in the plain outside Carthage, his men had become so scattered from plundering the dead that he could not easily rally them. Pharas’s arrival did not help matters, for there was loot for his Herulians too, and it was some time before the combined force of 700 returned to Belisarius’s assistance, arriving just before the close and completing the victory with a charge up the defile.
It was a battle of which Belisarius said: ‘I am grateful but ashamed: as a hard-pressed chess-player might be when a temperamental opponent has thrown away the game by sacrificing his best pieces. Perhaps, after all, I should have taken the Admiral’s advice, and made straight for Carthage by sea; for the Milestone defile was an impassable barrier, had it been resolutely held.’
On the following morning my mistress came up with the infantry’ and we all went forward together to Carthage. We arrived late in the afternoon, and found the gates thrown open to us. But Belisarius forbade any of us to enter the city, not so much because he feared a possible ambush as because he could not trust the troops to refrain from plundering. Carthage was a Roman city redeemed, not a Vandal city captured, and must be offered no violence. The jubilant citizens had lighted candles and lamps in almost every window, so that the city was illuminated as if for a festival; and very beautiful it looked from where we were, being built on gradually rising ground. Excited citizens came running out to visit our camp, with wreaths and presents for the soldiers. What a pity, they cried, that we were not allowed to participate in such marvellous scenes of unrestrained jubilation. All the vile Vandals who had not been able to escape had sought sanctuary in the churches; and there were tremendous processions in the streets, led by the bishops, of singing and cheering Orthodox Christians!
That evening the fleet arrived, for the wind had turned just as they were rounding Cape Bon; and anchored in the Lake of Tunis – all but a small division of warships that went off on an unauthorized expedition to the outer port of Carthage, the crews plundering the warehouses. When Belisarius knew that the fleet had arrived he said: ‘Yet if, risking unfavourable winds and a sea-battle, I had taken the Admiral’s advice, I see now that I should have chosen wrong. For a sea-attack upon Carthage would have been madness. The defences of the harbour could not have been pierced, the sea-walls being lofty and well-manned. And if it had not been for the panic raised by the news of King Geilimer’s defeat, which caused the Vandal garrison to remove the huge booms from the entrances to the Lake of Tunis and the outer harbour, so as to escape themselves in all the available ships, our fleet would not have been able to enter. It was a problem that had no solution. We should never have attempted the expedition with such small forces. Yet with greater forces would we have been so successful?’
The next morning, when it was fully day, he disembarked the marines. After giving strict orders as to the importance of keeping on good terms with the natives, he marched the wh
ole army into Carthage. Then, billeting arrangements having been made on the previous night, each detachment moved off to the street assigned to it in as orderly a manner as if this had been Adrianople or Antioch or Constantinople itself. My mistress Antonina went with Belisarius to the Royal Palace, which they made their home; we all sat down in the banquet hall at dinner-time to eat the very banquet that Ammatas had ordered for King Geilimer, the royal servants waiting upon us. Afterwards Belisarius sat on Geilimer’s throne and dispensed justice in the name of the Emperor. The occupation of the city had been so quietly undertaken that business was not in the least disturbed. Apart from the matter of the warehouse robberies, into which he made a stern inquiry, there was no crime that called for punishment and very few complaints.
This day was celebrated the feast of St Cyprian, the patron of Carthage, though it wanted two months of the correct date; because St Cyprian’s storm, a violent north-east wind which is expected in mid-September, had also anticipated its date and blown the fleet safely into harbour. The Cathedral of St Cyprian, which had been seized as an Arian place of worship some years before, was in the hands of the Orthodox again, so that the feast was celebrated with ecclesiastical triumph and hosannas.
The city is a grand one, full of shops and statues, and colonnades of the local yellow marble, and baths and street-markets and a huge Hippodrome on a hill — of everything in fact that a city should be, though the squares are not so large as those of Constantinople and the streets much narrower. A radiance of liberty continued to shine for weeks in the faces of the inhabitants, and every day seemed a festival. The extraordinary ease with which the Vandals had been defeated was almost the only topic of conversation, and, to account for it, everyone began recalling his or her prophetic dreams or domestic omens.
A prophetic quality was even found in a schoolchildren’s rhyme, long current in the streets:
Gamma shall chase Beta out;
Again, contrariwise,
Beta shall Gamma put to rout
And sling out both his eyes.
This rhyme was based on a horn-book used in the local monastic schools for the learning of the Greek alphabet: the first letter ‘alpha’ was to be memorized as being the initial letter of ‘anthos’, a flower; and ‘beta’ as standing for ‘Balearicos’, a Balearic slinger; and ‘gamma’ for ‘Gallos’, a Gallic spearman. These figures were drawn by the monks in the horn-book to fix the letters in the minds of the children. But the children had a notion that the Balearic and the Gaul, on opposite pages of the parchment pamphlet, were enemies. So, in their game of ‘Gaul and Balearic’, one child was the Gaul and pursued another, the Balearic, with a stick; but as soon as he caught him the Gaul ran away again, and the Balearic, in pursuit, attacked him with pebbles. The rhyme referred to this game. But the popular interpretation of it as a prophecy was that King Geiserich had chased out Count Boniface, the Roman General who had invited him there from Andalusia, and now Belisarius had put King Geilimer to rout and killed his brother and nephew. For the initial letters corresponded exactly.
Belisarius himself had no time to spend on self-congratulation or the analysis of prophecies. He at once set to work a number of Vandal prisoners, and all the available masons and unskilled labourers of the city, and a great number of sailors, and whatever infantry he could spare from garrison-duty, at repairing the city-walls to landward which had fallen into a ruinous condition, and at digging a deep, stockaded trench about them. This was a great undertaking. Though the city on its swelling promontory is protected by water on three sides, its fortifications are of enormous extent: a triple line seven miles long, across the neck of the promontory, of walls forty feet high with strong towers at intervals; and a fifteen-mile inner wall, also very strong, where the land begins to rise; and coastal defences. There are two fortified harbours – the outer for merchant vessels, and the inner for warships, of which more than two hundred can be accommodated at a time. The inner harbour was empty when we arrived, the greater part of the Vandal Navy being away with Zazo at Sardinia, and other ships having been sent to Tripoli, and the garrison having escaped in the remainder.
A day or two later a Vandal warship was signalled and allowed to enter the harbour unmolested, because it was clear that the crew had no notion that their city was in our hands. The captain was arrested as soon as he disembarked, and was thunderstruck at the sudden change of sovereignty. He bore a letter for King Geilimer from his brother Zazo announcing a complete victory in Sardinia, and trusting that the Imperial fleet that had been reported on its way to Carthage had met with deserved destruction. King Geilimer was now reorganizing his forces at Bulla – an inland town four days’ march away to the eastward, and the ancient capital of the Numidian kings. He had already sent a letter to Zazo, by one of his galleys stationed farther down the coast, imploring him to return.
A fortnight later Zazo was back in Africa with his entire force – Sardinia lies only 150 miles to the northward – and was embracing his brother Geilimer on the plain at Bulla. As they stood there, weeping silently together, locked in each other’s arms, they formed a statue of brotherly love that would have made the fortune of any sculptor who could have reproduced it. And wordlessly, following the royal example, each one of Zazo’s men singled out a man of Geilimer’s for a similar embrace, and then all began weeping and wringing their hands. A most fantastic sight it must have been!
Then the combined Vandal armies moved against Carthage. Geilimer was astonished to find the outer defences protected by a newly dug, stockaded trench, and most of the weak places in the outermost of the three walls repaired. They did not dare to attack the wall, which was held by sharp-shooting infantry, and contented themselves with making a breach in the fifty-mile long aqueduct which supplies the city with water. But Belisarius had already taken the precaution of temporarily diverting the water from the baths and ornamental pools into the deep, underground, drinking-water reservoirs. The Vandals also cut off the supply of fruit and vegetables from the interior; but this made no impression on the city, which could supply itself from the sea and from its own gardens. To be a Vandal in Africa had meant to live tax-free and enjoy feudal privileges, so that the Vandal suburb of Carthage, to the right of the old city as one sails in from the sea, was composed of magnificent residences, each standing in a park with extensive orchards and kitchen-gardens. These estates Belisarius appropriated for the billeting of the troops; and as it was the fruitful autumn season we were all extremely well off for supplies. The city granaries were well stocked, too.
Then King Geilimer tried secretly to persuade some of our troops to mutiny: the Thracian Goths, who were their Arian co-religionists, and the Massagetic Huns, who had a grievance – when peace had been signed with Persia they had not been sent home to their native steppes at the other side of the Persian Empire, as had been promised, but shipped to Africa. The Goths merely laughed at the disloyal suggestion and reported it at once; but it was some time before Belisarius, by treating the Huns with particular honour and inviting them to a number of banquets, won their full confidence and made them confess that they had seriously considered the Vandal proposal – as he already knew from his lieutenant Aigan. They explained that they did not wish to be detained in Africa as garrison troops, to live and die so far from their homes. Such attractions as silk garments, and crystal drinking-vessels for their kavasse, and full bellies, and plump, loving women, could not outweigh their homesickness for the wide, windswept steppe and the wagons of their own folk. Then Belisarius swore an oath, by his own honour, that they would be allowed to go home as soon as the Vandals were conclusively defeated; and in return they swore renewed loyalty to him.
When, in early December, the wall was repaired and once more defensible throughout its seven-mile length even without the trench, Belisarius decided to lead his army out against the Vandals. If he were defeated now, he at least had a secure place for retreat. He commanded the infantry, which formed the main body, in person. The advance guard, consis
ting of all his cavalry except for 500 of his Household cuirassiers, whom he had kept behind with him, found the enemy at Tricamaron, twenty miles away, and attacked at once, as they had been ordered to do. The character of this battle was unusual. The Vandals, although again enormously superior in numbers, stood dully on the defensive, as if they were a poor sort of infantry recruits. Armenian John, at the head of the remaining 1,000 Household cuirassiers, tried to tempt them out against him by skirmishing attacks. At last, finding them immovable and realizing that they had lost all courage, he charged in earnest, unfurling the Imperial standard. Geilimer had, for some superstitious reason, ordered his men to discard lance and spear and fight only with their swords: which put them at a great disadvantage.