God help me, I’d forgotten Callistratus in the horror of the whole.
The cavalry had been on the wings trying to throw a thin screen about the foot soldiers. Now, I think, he realised the hopelessness of it all, and thought of the safety of his own command.
I saw him cutting through the immediate enemy at the head of his squadron, saw enemy horsemen—clouds of them—going after him. In a haze of dust and heat that battle receded away to the south.
‘He’s got a head on him,’ said one of my companions. ‘He’s making for Catana.’
‘Think he’ll do it?’
‘Yes. The fellows chasing him’ll be back soon. It’s easier work here.’ Here among the kneeling wretches at the river, who either could not or would not lift their arms to defend themselves.
Then the man who had been sick started swearing steadily and savagely.
‘Look!’ he said, between curses. ‘There’s the one man they can’t kill.’
There, standing a little apart from the reeking, bloodsoaked, trampled mass, was Nicias.
I began to laugh hysterically. ‘Nothing ever touches him,’ I gasped. The plague killed thousands—didn’t touch him. It’s because the—the gods favour him—he’s so pious—wouldn’t let us go away because of the eclipse. Of course they won’t kill him—he’s killed all those men for them—’
There was another outburst of profanity beside me. ‘Look! There’s Gylippus, and—God, God, why can’t anything touch him?’
For Nicias was making his way to Gylippus, had fallen at his feet in supplication, was weeping.
Later I heard he besought the Spartan to stop the massacre; the best men of Athens were there, he sobbed, think what ransoms they would bring.
Gylippus said after a moment’s thought, ‘Maybe we’ve had enough sword-practice for today.’
He didn’t have to call his Spartans off. Brutes they might be, but even they were sickened by the butchery. It took longer to call off the Syracusans; they only gave up through sheer weariness. There were close on twenty thousand corpses choking the river-bed, and it was difficult to get beyond that barrier of mangled flesh.
33
The Last Camp
In mid-afternoon, tents were pitched below us, telling us there was no point in lingering, as we had intended, in the hope of finding someone still living among those heaped-up bodies. The Syracusans obviously did not find the vicinity of the river distasteful, even though hawks and other birds of prey were already wheeling and screeching above the dead.
The Sicilians wanted me to return with them to their village; I told them to go back with the news, and then, if they would, return for me next day. I must rest before I could make the journey. They said they saw the sense of that, assured me that I would be quite safe, for the Syracusans would not bother yet to search the surrounding heights, promised to be back for me before dawn, and left me a skin of water and a handful of olives.
Once they were safely out of sight, I began to squirm along a narrow goat-track, twisting back in the direction from which the butchered army had come. I must find out what had happened to my uncle. I might find some wounded fugitive, spared because, until they reached the river, the bloodlust had not come upon the Syracusans. I was still screened from the men below by withered bushes; a couple of goats turned curious yellow eyes on this new four-footed thing that wept as it fled, but no human saw me.
There is only a blurred remembrance of that journey—glaring sun, the hiss of pebbles skidding away under me, the thorniness of the dead scrub, the jaggedness of the rock.
As I neared the camp, I heard the sound of voices—not Athenian voices. I had forgotten that the plunderers would be there. But there was nothing else to do but go on—to watch the scum of Syracuse stripping the dead, cutting the throats of the dying. I lay there shuddering with rage and grief and nausea and then, realising there would be no news of my uncle here, I wearily began to toil back to the place where my friends had left me.
I had gone only a little way when I heard the sound of hoofbeats. This, I thought, was another victorious messenger galloping back to Syracuse; I began crawling to the nearest rock for cover, couldn’t make it, and sank down behind a poor screen of dead plants. And thus, by a matter of seconds, I was granted one more sight of Callistratus.
Months—long months—later, I learned what he had done since bursting through the enemy. He had shown his squadron the road to safety, seen them well on the road, for they themselves were nearly mindless with horror and fatigue, then wheeled his horse round, and ridden back, a solitary figure, to the north.
One of them had cried, ‘For God’s sake, come with us to Catana, Callistratus! We’ll be safe there!’
Callistratus replied unfastening his helmet and throwing it away, ‘I escaped once when the others died; I’m not going to do it again.’
But I didn’t know, of course, what he intended, didn’t know he thought me dead. I thought the rest of the cavalry in its attempt at escape had been cut to pieces, that he was trying now to make a lone bid for safety.
When my eyes had incredulously identified the dark face under the sunbleached hair, my only thought was to call to him. But then, having levered myself up on to my one sound arm in that first wild impulse of joy, I fell back wordlessly and abruptly into concealment. I thought he was trying to get away, you see, and I did not mean to lessen his chance. He would not have left me.
This action of mine has haunted me ever since. If he had seen me, known I was not dead, he might not have deliberately sought death himself. Yet he would not have wanted life. Surviving Plataea had been bad enough—he did not want to survive another disaster.
If he had tried to help me, we should both have been captured, and he might well have died as so many prisoners were to die—and he died in a better way. So while I grieve for Callistratus, have grieved for him every day and night since that late afternoon, and shall go on doing so until one day we are reunited, mine is a selfish grief, grief for myself.
For him this was the better way.
As I have said, I had gone only a little way from the camp when I heard his approach. I would not call to him, but I would watch him as long as I could, so I crawled back, and saw the end of his journey.
He saw what I saw—the plundering and the throat-cutting. He reined in, sat for a moment swaying in the saddle. Then in a loud voice he cried three times the name of his city, and his horse sprang away in their last charge. In that desperate dash he was in among the Syracusans while they were still transfixed by his war-cry; he had cut down five before they rallied enough to crowd about him.
But not for long. They could not believe this furious assault could be that of a single man; a score at least of avenging Athenian cavalry must be close behind him. Screaming at each other, they fled, leaving him toppling from the saddle just before his horse went down.
I went to him. I do not know how I covered the distance, walking or crawling.
He was alive when I reached him. His eyes were still brilliant, and I think he recognised me, but he could say nothing because of a wound in his throat.
Within five minutes he was dead. I closed his eyes, then looked around me for a place where we could be hidden before the plunderers returned. I saw on the opposite side of the valley a shelf of rock shaded by a wild olive jutting out above it, and decided to go there.
It should have been impossible; he had been noted for his height, while my wound, fatigue and horror had taken their toll of me, yet I managed to get him away.
By the time the plunderers came back, we were out of sight. Their voices carried clearly on the hot still air; they still believed he must have been followed by other Athenians, who had taken him away with them, dead or dying. They could not track us; there was so much blood in that camp that the trail we had left was not noticeable.
They left when evening fell, not caring to stay after dark close to the spirits of the vengeful dead. I could do nothing that night, for the main Syracusan
army was too close. I imagined that they would leave their camp by the Assinarus next day. I crawled down to the Erineus and drank, then revisited the deserted camp to make sure that one fire was still glowing. I should need that.
I no longer had any feeling of pain, or grief. A man who had his arm slashed off in a cavalry engagement told me years afterwards that all he felt at the time was a kind of dazed, dreamy feeling. That was more or less what I felt the first night; after all, part of me had been slashed off in the camp below. I slept only a little, waking with the dew wet on my face to find the stars still clear in the sky.
The victors passed below us next morning; they themselves wore garlands, their horses were decked gaily. They had about a thousand prisoners with them. Nicias, his hands bound, rode next to Gylippus. He was shivering all the time, although the sun was already blazing down.
Only a few plunderers returned to the camp that day. By the evening all was very quiet, and I could do what I had to do.
I had to wash the blood from him, then burn his body. To get him down from our hiding-place in the night coolness should have been a task immeasurably easier than dragging him up in haste in the glare of the day, but by this time the numbness was wearing off, now I had to fight off the chief memories of my lifetime, and these seemed to wrench the soul from my body. But at last I managed it; he lay below the camp, and I had brought water from the river and washed him.
By the time this was done, the moonlight was strong, so much that the grass and rocks and trees were as silvered as any snowdrift on Parnes. It is difficult even now to see strong moonlight without recalling the smell of fire, and after the fire had died down, the bitter little wind before the dawn, and the coldness of the dew beneath my feet, and now that there was no noise from the flames, the silence.
Callistratus had gone, and I would follow him. I had cleaned and kept his sword for this. I was very weary now.
Beyond the wisps of smoke still creeping up, I thought I saw a shadowy form moving. Was it his spirit, waiting to welcome me—or rebuke me? Would Callistratus, who had lived on after the destruction of Plataea, expect me to survive this other destruction?
I cried out to him in words from the play by Euripides we had watched together eighteen months before, the words of one friend to another, when both were in deadly danger in a foreign land:
‘How can you wrong me, thinking I could live
And leave you here to die? I came with you,
I shall continue with you to the end.’
So that I might drive the blade home with full force, I stretched out my arm full length, tightened my grip for the last effort, and—
And people from behind me seized my arm, and Syracusan voices cried, ‘No!’
I was surrounded by half a dozen of them; armed, but with boys’ faces beneath the helmet-rims.
I could only ask stupidly, ‘Why?’ and then, when they were silent, I shrugged and said, ‘Well, if you want to finish me, go ahead. You’ll probably make a better job of it than I should.’
Again there was silence. I stared at them; it seemed, unbelievably enough, that the expression on their faces was shyness, embarrassment.
‘Why do you say I can’t kill myself?’ I asked.
One of them said, stammering, ‘You were saying something. It sounded like poetry by Euripides. So of course we had to save you.’
34
The Gate of Syracuse
An hour before, I should have sworn that laughter—even hysterical laughter—was beyond me, but now I was shaking as I said, ‘So you’re not keeping me alive for a few minutes for my own beautiful sake—it’s just to hear poetry!’
The boy who seemed to be the leader of the little group, a long-faced fellow with dark hair that kept falling over melancholy brown eyes, flushed, but said solemnly, ‘That’s been the worst part of the war—never knowing what Euripides was writing. Was that part of a new play that you were saying?’
‘He presented it last year,’ I said mechanically. ‘It was called Iphigeneia in Tauris.’
‘And the year before that?’ Incredibly, they were producing writing tablets, were scribbling furiously in the dim light.
‘The Trojan Women.’ I think by this time I was a little lightheaded. ‘And this year it was Electra, and next year it’s going to be Helen.’
They gazed at me as the devout would listen to an oracle. ‘Next year? How do you know?’
‘I know Euripides,’ I said. Better to talk of him and of the play he was writing to escape from everything, than of the play he had written before the First Expedition sailed, or the play presented before our sailing—to a mission of rescue in Sicilian seas.
And yet I could not escape when I quoted the last chorus of the new play:
‘What we look for does not come to pass . . .
Such was the end of this story.’
The light of a new day had come, pale and cold as yet, but soon to the east the sun would be shooting shafts of light from out of the sea, colour and warmth would come back to the world, and Callistratus was nothing now, though I was still a lump of living clay. I said harshly, ‘I can say nothing more.’
In that remote spot, beside a funeral pyre that had just fallen to ashes, they remained well brought-up boys. They thanked me effusively, and the solemn-eyed leader said, ‘Will you come with me? My family has a farm some way out of the city—you will be quite safe there, and your wound can heal.’
‘You are willing to shelter me?’
They chorused that they were all going to try to find Athenian fugitives and shelter them—because of the plays of Euripides. But I’d be safest with Thibron—no one would think of looking for me at his home.
‘Why?’ I asked, without much interest, for I didn’t mean to take advantage of the offer.
Thibron said, blushing, and looking at me nervously out of the corner of his eye, that his uncle was Hermocrates, the chief man in Syracuse.
I don’t know if the poor little devil expected an angry reaction from me at this; I felt no rage, of course—yet the mention of this uncle did make me react. Not because of anything he had said—but because I heard, as plainly as if Callistratus stood at my shoulder instead of on the other side of the dark river, ‘You have an uncle too; what has become of him?’
I started like a roughly-awakened sleeper, remembered what I had intended until I had seen Callistratus riding back to the deserted camp. I said carefully, ‘By—something of a coincidence, I am the nephew of Demosthenes. Is he—still alive?’
They stood there, those Syracusan boys, twisting their hands in mute misery, not daring to look at me.
I said softly, ‘Fair exchange, you know! I’ve given you Euripides!’
Then Thibron said, with an effort, ‘I think he is dead—now.’
‘You’ll have to explain,’ I said. ‘For God’s sake, you’re not afraid of me, are you? You might as well be scared of dead mutton.’ And, since he still found difficulty, I said, ‘I saw what happened in the river-bed; nothing can shock after that.’
Thibron cast a desperate look at me, then seemed to reach a decision. ‘I’ll tell you,’ he said ‘but the others had better get on with the job of—of—’
‘Salvage,’ I said. ‘Isn’t it pretty hopeless, though?’
‘Two or three hundred broke away earlier, but most of them have been captured.’
‘Argives, chiefly,’ added one of Thibron’s friends, discouragedly.
I cheered him up by telling him that one Argive, Philocles, was the son of a close friend of Euripides, who staged his plays in Argos.
Then Thibron and I were alone; he helped me back to my old lair under the olive tree, and, wretchedly, began to talk, describing how my uncle had surrendered on express terms for his men, none for himself, had unsuccessfully tried to commit suicide—and so to Nicias’ surrender and the debate in Syracuse on the fate of the prisoners.
It had been proposed that the captive generals should be put to death—possibly with torture
.
Thibron’s voice shook as he told me this. His uncle, he said, had pleaded for mercy, exclaiming that while winning a victory was noble, using that victory well was nobler still.
Gylippus too, had spoken in favour of mercy—for the present. For reasons of personal prestige, he very much wanted to take to Sparta the Athenian who had done his best for Sparta—and the Athenian who had captured Spartans at Pylos. What hostages they would be!
But once again Nicias, though helpless now, decided the fate of more than himself.
Two classes of men demanded his death—for selfish reasons his much-quoted ‘connections’ now wanted him out of the way quickly, before he could talk, while the Corinthians there in Syracuse demanded his death since, they said, he would use his vast wealth to bribe his way to escape.
And since Nicias was to die, my uncle must die too, in prison at the hands of a base executioner. Their bodies were to be exposed at the gate of Syracuse, as my father’s had been exposed outside ruined Plataea—with the body of Astymachus.
I had given the body of Astymachus’ son honourable burial, and now I would do the same for my uncle.
I said as much to Thibron. He agreed, wincing, that it was a shameful thing to deny funeral rites to an enemy.
‘Even if I can’t bury him,’ I said, ‘I can sprinkle a handful of earth over his body, say the right prayers.’
‘You won’t get away with it.’
‘I don’t think I want to get away with it—but I must make the attempt.’
Thibron said in that case I ought to try that night. He would wash my wound, then I must stay in hiding until dusk, when he would bring me a horse to take me back towards Syracuse.
When he had gone, I slept dreamlessly until the late afternoon and then, just before Thibron roused me, I dreamed.
I stood in an olive grove. I was picking the olives in great haste, so much so that I was breaking all the rules of the good farmer, and was banging away at the branches to make the fruit fall.
I was hitting the branches with a spear. The fruit, over-ripe, fell heavily, bursting as they hit the ground. A sticky red fluid oozed from them.
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