“They’re attacking!” Grant sits up in his bunk and looks at his watch. It is six A.M. He hears the first shots. How can they already be so close? He gets up, grimaces when his foot touches the floor—he’d forgotten about his fall—and hurries to put on his tunic. “They’re attacking!” Sherman leaps up, too, and Prentiss and Wallace, all the Union officers who are camping with their men around the little church at Shiloh. How many are they? Where are they? They are all getting up. The enlisted men reach for their rifles. The officers saddle their horses. The artillerymen get busy and already the enemy is upon them. The Confederates arrive in a thick wave. They are running, shouting to give themselves courage, glad of the element of surprise they have created, the panic they can see in the Yankee ranks. They have to form a line of defense as quickly as possible. Not scatter. Not give way to fear. Regroup. And hold fast. At any cost. Hold fast. Grant says it, then repeats it. Otherwise, they will be blown to pieces . . .
“Sack the villages!” From the top of the hill where he has pitched his camp Hannibal looks down at the graceful slopes of Tuscany in the gentle late-afternoon light. Everything here is beautiful: the vineyards on the hillsides, the cypress trees dotting the fields. Everything is opulent and peaceful. His men hesitate, look at him. Are those really his orders? He can see they do not believe him so he repeats it, “Tell your men to destroy everything.” He knows what this means. He knows how rough the Balearic rebels will be when they break down doors and throw themselves upon everything—women, animals, wine—to satisfy a monstrous appetite, to forget the hardship of the Alps and the scorching sun upon the glaciers. He knows it will get ugly, that their robes will be torn in the mud, that houses will be set ablaze and villages razed to the ground. But this is the region of Flaminius, the commander of the Roman legions, and he must be defied, needled, made to lose his composure. Some men go to war on the condition that it will not touch them. They agree to put their own lives in the balance, yes, but not their wives’ or their children’s, or their cellars full of amphorae of oil and local wine, or the beautiful houses they have inherited. Flaminius is one of those men. Hannibal can tell. He will lay waste to the entire region, and the Roman will lose his clear-sightedness and his composure.
Everything is a question of composure, and Sherman has no lack of it. He gathers his men and reforms his line of defense. Prentiss, in the center, does likewise. They must stand firm. The Confederates are upon them. The first wave knocks them over like a sword thrust in the belly. The dead men fall, only just roused from sleep, their faces now forever frozen in the morning chill. “Take me to the battlefield!” orders Grant. He wants to get as close as possible. He knows that it is composure that will make the difference, and he has plenty. In this respect he and Sherman are twins. They remain equally calm in the fray, they have the same ability to read troop movements in the crush. He speaks to his men, berates them, encourages them. He wants to know who is overwhelmed and who is resisting, where reinforcements are needed . . . That is how battles are won, by controlling the fear that is constantly trying to make you turn tail and thrusts you toward death just when you thought you were saved.
Her plane has just left Vienna. She is headed east. Soon she will fly over Turkey and then northern Iraq. Soon she will pass above Mosul, the gutted museum, the barbarians gleeful of their misdeeds, these layers of History that are her life, there below, in this region that is constantly set ablaze.
The waves follow, one after the other. Who can withstand such an onslaught of power? Eight, ten, twelve, more than fifteen attacks are launched against the Yankee line of defense. The Confederates are indefatigable. They charge again and again . . . Bodies mingle, in an embrace of death. The enemy is no longer visible, so dense is the cloud of gunpowder and smoke. Hold fast. Grant keeps saying the words, like a prayer. And that is what Prentiss and his men do, at the forward post, for over seven consecutive hours. They hold fast, to give Grant and the others time to get organized, to give Buell time to arrive and take up his position. Then at last they surrender. Aching, stunned, their faces splattered with the blood of those who fell by their side, enemies or brothers, they surrender, and General Johnston smiles. He has not yet understood that this surrender is not a victory for him; Prentiss may be capitulating but Sherman has had time to take up a new position, as has Wallace. Grant is more determined than ever. The wind has changed. And only Johnston fails to understand that as Prentiss advances, battered by all the blows given and received, looking gaunt and exhausted, his uniform in tatters, it is as a victor. Because from now on the battle will start to go the other way.
She flies over the war-torn land between Mosul and Erbil. That is where Alexander beat Darius. That is where Paul-Émile Botta found and excavated Dur-Sharrukin. These lands have never stopped bleeding, for centuries empires have clashed and their people have fled from war. Her own life consists of digging, unearthing, preserving. What is the point, if the world is on fire? Should she not, rather, take up a gun to try and check the killers’ advance? So many questions reeling through her. Of course she shouldn’t. It’s absurd. She knows very well that she is fighting, in her way, but she cannot help but think again of the man with the angle grinder. And what if he were standing there before her, would she be prepared to kill him to protect the great colossus?
Not a sound. The thick fog seems to be stifling everything. The birds have fallen silent. The Romans cannot even hear the sound of their own footsteps on the ground. Everything is silence. They advance. Flaminius wants to have done with Hannibal. So that never again will any barbarian be in a position to burn the villages of Tuscany. So that never again will Rome experience the humiliation of trembling before the enemy.
The Carthaginians try not to breathe, not to let their weapons rattle. They wait. It is now that the outcome will be decided. And they know it. Lake Trasimene is not far from here; they have taken up their positions high on the hills above the valley. If the Romans pass below them, in the narrow defile along the river, they will have won. If the sky clears and they become visible, all will be lost. Hannibal waits. He knows that the day’s outcome no longer depends on him. A sound, a horse whinnying, a cloud shifting—anything can change the course of History. And then suddenly one of his men goes up to him and murmurs in a thick voice, “They have entered the defile.” So he stands and orders his men to hurl themselves upon the enemy.
“Charge!”
General Johnston himself is participating in the attack, and he plants his spurs in his horse’s sides. He thinks that all they have to do is finish the attack and it will all be over soon. The Yankees have withdrawn to Pittsburg Landing. He sees nothing to prevent him from making the most of his advantage. He thinks it is time to harry the defeated. “Charge!”
The Carthaginians scurry down the slope. And initially the Romans do not understand where the shouts are coming from, because the fog distorts sounds, displaces them. Until suddenly they see the men there, already upon them, careening down the hill to their left. The horses are frightened and rear up. The foot soldiers withdraw spontaneously toward the lake to avoid the attack. There is confusion everywhere, and no one can see a thing.
A bullet pierces Johnston’s leg, near the top of his boot. The blood flows, sticky, thick. He thinks it is nothing serious, and stays on his horse. He does not know that the blood will continue to fill his boot and that in less than an hour he will be dead, there, at Shiloh, in this land that should have been a site of victory but which will, instead, be his grave.
The panic spreads everywhere. No one can control the men. Flaminius knows that if they lose their calm they will be lost. He shouts orders but no one can hear them in the fog. Everything goes to pieces. The Gauls are terrifying, with their braids and long beards. Then a horseman rushes at the consul and kills him with one blow. A little voice falls silent in the mêlée and the vast Roman army, without its leader, scatters in all directions.
“Charge!” Now it is
Grant who is shouting. And Buell with him. Sherman, Wallace, and all the Yankee officers. It is their turn to advance. War is nothing else: this backwards and forwards, gaining territory or losing it. Standing one’s ground or retreating. And having the strength to get back up, even after seven hours of combat, even after a night on the lookout, to attack the same enemy who tore you to pieces the day before. Beauregard, who has replaced Johnston, sees the Union troops counterattacking. He realizes it is all over. More men will die, but the battle of Shiloh has been lost and there is nothing for it but to retreat.
She glides over her gilded lands. Seen from here, everything looks calm. And yet she knows that on the ground there is war. People shooting, running, shouting. Villages will be shelled, positions taken and retaken. But from up here everything looks beautiful, vast and calm. She thinks of the Jesuit priest Antoine Poidebard, the inventor of aerial archeology. In the 1930s he crisscrossed the skies over Mesopotamia, flying over Beirut, Damascus, the Syrian desert, Palmyra . . . Hundreds of hours of flying time, his eyes riveted to the ground to locate buried Roman structures, the lines of walls that time had leveled, the traces of ancient fortifications. And the Bedouin tribes watched, stunned, as the plane flew overhead; sometimes they fired at it, for fear it might bring some misfortune. She thinks about Poidebard and how he too glided over the crush of countless lives beneath him. He saw the Roman limes in the Syrian desert. He could see Antiquity surfacing, because from his airplane it was so clear, you could not miss it, whereas down below the humans who walked along those roads or lived in those villages could not see it. She thinks of Antoine Poidebard and the amassing of time. It is all there beneath her: Alexander’s campaigns, the wall that kept the Pax Romana, the lines that Churchill and the French drew during the Cairo Conference, the advance of Islamic State. She is gliding over time, over humans, their tiny destiny, and she doesn’t even see them. From where she is, the only thing that is visible is the gilded land of the East.
For the victory to be real, it’s not enough for the enemy be caught in a trap, with no way out and their leader dead; it’s not enough for there to be no more orders to muster the troops, with each soldier thinking only of his own life, trying to flee, and trembling with fear. For the victory to be real, you have to go all the way, and once the enemy is driven back, with the lake behind them, at a loss what to do, then you must advance and kill them. That is what they are doing now. The Iberians, the Balearics, the Punic soldiers. They surround the Romans and slay them. They slice, stab, hack. They slaughter the men as if they were a herd of sheep. One by one, patiently. Fifteen thousand men. With the weariness of repeated gestures. They do it because only afterward will they truly be able to speak of victory, only later will the news reach Rome and, for the first time, panic will spread through the streets. They mutilate bodies and slit throats, one by one, until those fifteen thousand bodies stain the waters of the lake with their blood, fifteen thousand bodies of men who this morning thought they would live and now, three hours later, are floating while the fog lifts at last to offer Hannibal the gruesome spectacle of his victory. Perhaps he is gripped by that moment? Perhaps for those three hours of hand-to-hand combat they were brothers, united in having, all of them, placed their lives in the hands of fate? Perhaps that is why he searches for Flaminius’s body on the battlefield for a long time, but he does not find it, because the consul was decapitated and his head rolled into the water; and so, Hannibal asks that they pay tribute to all the dead, including those whose throats his soldiers were still slitting only a few minutes earlier. And at last everyone falls silent as they stare at the red waters of the lake.
Grant knows that today he has won. He strides through the orchard at Shiloh, littered with bodies; he steps over the stiffened arms of the dead men. Around him, all the officers are dismayed by the extent of the loss. What did they think? Warfare is slaughter, that’s all it is. Nothing else. Everyone is looking at him with disgust but he knows that he has won. Even if there is a surge of anger going all the way to Lincoln, even if from now on they will call him “the Butcher.” Even if for a time they will remove him from positions of command because the other generals still dream of clean victories. He, Grant, knows the odor of battlefields. Once the smell of gunpowder has dissipated, the smell that is left is that of guts and blood. So why not, let them call him “the Butcher,” basically they’re right. So many men fell today. But he refuses to let anyone say that he lost, at Shiloh. It’s a victory. This is what victories look like: the wounded men limp, and the dying ones moan, just as they do in defeat. The only thing that matters is that Beauregard is retreating and he, Ulysses S. Grant, is advancing. And so what if it’s hell. Since it is a war, it has to be won.
The plane speeds across the skies of Turkey and Iraq and she seems to sense all those hundreds of millions of lives that ended in mutual massacre in these lands over the centuries. How much of all that is left? Statues, vases, temples, fortresses, staring at us in silence. Every era has known upheaval. What is left is what she, personally, is looking for. Not lives, anymore, individual destinies, but what humans have given to time, that part they want to rescue from the catastrophe, that part on which defeat has no hold, the gesture toward eternity. And today it is that part which the men in black are threatening. They wave their weapons and scream that they are not afraid of death. “Viva la muerte!” said the Spanish fascists. It is the same sort of arrogant pride, the same hatred of humankind. But what they are attacking, those men in black, is that which, normally, is exempt from battle and fire. They shoot and shell and burn the way men have always done. Antiquity is full of cities that have been ransacked—Persepolis burned, Tyre destroyed—but as a rule traces have always remained, as a rule man did not completely obliterate his enemy. What is happening now, with these men vomiting their hatred, is the ecstasy that comes with the power to erase History.
IV
BEIRUT
The Beirut heat gripped him the moment he left the airport, thick, briny air, carrying the commotion of traffic jams and the cries of children from the neighborhoods to the south. During the taxi ride to the hotel he gazed out at the streets, avidly, observing the changes in a city he has known for fifteen years: the buildings that have eventually collapsed from exhaustion, the new ones that have grown like huge glass flowers, with fountains and marble. Everything is adjacent here, ruins and real estate speculation, traces of the past (a bullet-riddled building, an old house in Achrafieh from the days of the French protectorate) and a desire to forget. They are all here, Christians and Muslims, faces of poverty and cosmopolitan smiles. He loves this city more than any other, with its dense violence, as old as a mountain vendetta; the nervous tension of the streets in Hamra and the majestic morning calm of the restaurants along the Corniche, where you can eat breakfast overlooking the sea. He loves this city that constantly hesitates between razing everything to the ground and rebuilding, or keeping it all so that the wounds of the past will be visible and serve as a lesson to the generations to come, hesitating and never deciding, because before it even has time to decide it is overcome yet again by its demons, voraciously self-harming, bleeding, tearing itself to shreds. He loves this city because the entire world is here—Druze, Kurds, Palestinians, Armenians, those who come back once a year to see their old mother, arriving from Cairo or Bamako, Beijing or Port-au-Prince, and who speak multiple languages because for years now the world has belonged to the Lebanese; they may tear their own country apart but they sail all the seas, these sons of Phoenicians. These days the city is splitting at the seams with the influx of refugees, a constant flow of Syrians. They look at the Palestinian camps that have turned into concrete cities, horrible places crammed together in an inextricable tangle of electric wires, and the Syrians know that is the best they can hope for: to stay here and get old as exiles in a city that has no tears left for those who flee their country, because the city itself still needs to fight to survive, still yearns for a dazed oblivion.
The plane landed and initially, at the airport, everything seemed normal. Then a car came to take her to the French Institute and they drove through town. Erbil is in a state of utter confusion. There are refugees converging from all sides, fleeing the advance of Islamic State. A few months ago the Iraqi Kurds took in their Syrian brothers. Refugee camps were built all along the northern border. In Domiz. In Kawergosk. Now the Iraqis themselves are fleeing. Erbil is trying to absorb these terrified men and women who have abandoned their towns and villages, taking with them only what could fit in a bag, carrying their children, trying to find a place to stop and regain a semblance of calm, to breathe and drink some water and try to believe they will find a solution for the days ahead . . . Erbil is expanding, cracking on all sides. And in the street, on the women’s faces, what she sees is the grip of fear.
Hear Our Defeats Page 6
