Siege of Rome

by David Pilling

  We were walking near the Forum, the large rectangular plaza in the centre of Rome, surrounded by various splendid temples and government buildings. There were a number of soothsayers at large, emaciated men and women in patched robes, loudly proclaiming their nonsense while groups of wide-eyed, half-starved citizens looked on in fear and wonder, devouring every word.

  I stopped to observe a particularly large crowd gathered in front of one of the temples. It was a small, square monument to Janus, the two-faced god who looks to the future and the past, with ornate decorations on the roof, a latticed window and double doors made of rusted iron to front and rear. A garland of twisted rope hung over the doors at the front.

  “The doors to the Temple of Janus have been closed for centuries,” said Procopius, “it used to be the custom that they would stand open in times of war, and were closed in times of peace. Rome was usually at war with someone, so they more or less always stood open.”

  Some demagogue was standing on an upturned barrel beside the doorway, screaming at the crowd to break the garland and smash the doors open.

  “The fortunes of war have turned against us!” he bawled, spraying the mob with spittle, “and why, has this happened? Because we turned away from the old gods, who once watched over Rome during the high days of the Caesars, when our great city was the centre and heartbeat of the world!”

  Some of the like-minded souls in the crowd cheered, and he raised his fist in salute. “For too long has the statue of Janus sat in darkness! He presides over the beginning and ending of wars, and there shall be no end to this war unless we open these doors and allow light into his temple!”

  The mob surged forward and ripped away the garland, tearing it to pieces and stamping on it. Some of them wielded hammers and picks – I suspected that this little demonstration had been arranged beforehand – and started beating at the rusted iron doors.

  “This is against the law, you know,” said Procopius, “the worship of pagan idols was abolished when the Empire formally adopted Christianity. If an officer of the law was present, he would have no choice but to arrest the culprits.”

  He gave me a sly look. As a soldier, it was technically my duty to enforce the laws. I was also the only soldier in sight, and had no intention of risking my neck by standing between the Romans and their absurd deities.

  In any case, the doors were rusted firmly shut, and stood up against their blows. Janus remained in darkness, and for all I know still sits inside his little temple, neglected and forgotten, biding his time until the light of Christ fades from the world and men turn back to the old ways.

  There was no end to the trouble caused by these Romans, who we had been sent to rescue from barbarian slavery. Their senators, urged on by the mass of the people, continued to harass Belisarius, pleading with him to let them march out and confront the Goths. Some of his officers added their voices to the chorus, arguing that the Goths would not expect us to sally out in force.

  If our men, who should have known better, had kept quiet, then Belisarius might have safely ignored the yelping of the Romans. As it was, he started to buckle. This alarmed me, for the last time he yielded to the protests of others, and gave battle against his better judgment, was at Callinicum against the Sassanids. That battle had ended in defeat, though Belisarius managed to stage a fighting retreat and save the greater part of the Roman army.

  At last my fears were realised. Belisarius gave way to these combined demands, and declared his intention to march out in force and attack the Goths.

  19.

  Belisarius was cautious, else I would not be here now, blinking wearily at this parchment and praying for strength to ignore the rheumatic pains in my wrist. My candle burns low, and the shadows lengthen.

  The general split his army in two. Led by himself, the main part sallied out of the Pincian and Salarian gates to engage the Gothic troops north of the city, while a band of cavalry under two officers named Valerian and Martinus attacked the Goths encamped west of the Tiber, on the Plains of Nero, to prevent them helping their comrades to the north.

  These men were reinforced by the Roman citizens, a disorderly rabble of poorly-armed militia, and a detachment of Moorish cavalry. Belisarius did what he could to ensure that the Romans came to no harm, and gave them strict orders to act as a last-ditch reserve. They were to take up position to the rear, at the foot of the city walls, and not move unless the officers summoned them.

  Belisarius spent the morning arranging his men near the gates, but waited until after midday before ordering the attack. The century of Isaurians in my charge were part of his main army, again under the overall command of Bessas, who seemed to have taken a liking to me.

  Unlike the Heruls, I had little in common with the Isaurians, who I found to be sullen and intractable, and fond of playing at dumb insolence when I gave them orders. They made great play of struggling to understand my accent, cupping their ears and exchanging baffled glances when I addressed them.

  At last, on the evening before the battle, I lost patience and had the chief offender tied to a barrel and flogged by two of his comrades until the blood flowed down his hairy back. After that, they seemed to regard me with a degree of grudging respect, and I felt a little more confident leading them into battle.

  Cleverly, Belisarius commanded his men to stand down and take some food, hoping to deceive the Goths into thinking he had put off the attack. The ploy worked, and the Gothic squadrons arrayed for battle on the plains north of the walls started to break up.

  “Open the gates!” Belisarius shouted. He and Bessas were in command of the infantry, while he had entrusted his six hundred Hunnish cavalry to a trio of officers from Persia and Thrace.

  The smaller Pincian Gate was flung open, and our cavalry streamed out of the city. Bessas led the infantry through the Salarian Gate at a more orderly pace, column by column, to deploy in squadrons just beyond the outer ditch. We were not to advance, but act as a reserve to cover the retreat of our cavalry in case they were defeated and thrown back.

  In truth, I doubt Belisarius had set his heart on winning that battle. The Goths were too many, and he had only consented to fight in order to prevent a mutiny among the officers and senators. He was handed a stark choice of sacrificing the lives of his men in order to please their vanity, or refusing their demands and risking a full-scale revolt.

  His leadership and authority were on a knife-edge at all times, just one wrong decision removed from catastrophe. Such had the ancient Roman virtues of discipline and respect for higher authority fallen away in these degenerate latter days.

  I was privileged, if that is the word, to observe a battle from afar rather than risking my neck in the midst of one.

  All went well for a time. Our Hunnish and Sclavonian horse-archers skillfully charged and retreated, avoiding contact with the superior numbers of Gothic lancers and spearmen and showering them with arrows. Despite their appalling losses, the Goths held their line and refused to advance. They had learned to be wary of Belisarius, and feared moving forward in case they fell into some clever ambush.

  There was no ambush. Belisarius’ one aim was to kill as many Goths as possible before ordering a general advance. Sweat clouded my eyes and rolled down my back, already boiling inside layers of leather and mail, as I imagined our meagre squadrons being ordered forward to engage that great mass of barbarians.

  If we marched onto the open plain, away from the protection of the ditch and our archers on the walls, the Gothic cavalry could easily encircle our flanks and rear, while their infantry engaged us head-on. We risked being swamped, trapped and crushed inside the closing steel jaws of the enemy.

  For hours the fight raged back and forth, while the sun slowly dipped in the sky and I silently pleaded for Belisarius to change his mind and order a withdrawal.

  I witnessed some extraordinary sights during the course of the fighting. Cutilas, the Thracian officer whom Belisarius had entrusted with part of the cavalry, plunged alone into
the midst of a howling band of Gothic lancers, and was struck in the head by a javelin. He cut his way out, felling Goths like ripe wheat, and rode back to our lines with the javelin still embedded in his skull, waving back and forth like some bizarre appendage. Our physicians later managed to extract it, but the wound turned bad and he died a few days later.

  Another man named Arzes, one of Belisarius’ Guards and a slight acquaintance of mine, also suffered a terrible wound. His men rescued him from the press, threw him over the back of a horse and escorted him back to the city for medical attention.

  Our ranks parted to let them through, and I whistled between my teeth when I saw the Gothic arrow imbedded between his nose and right eye. An unusually skilled physician later managed to draw the arrow out and save Arzes’s eye, by making an incision at the back of his neck and ripping the triple-pronged barb out through the hole. A grisly procedure, and one I was glad not to witness.

  On the western side of the city, beyond my sight and hearing, our troops under Valerian and Martinus initially performed wonders. Their cavalry fell on the Gothic camps and threw them into confusion, slaughtering hundreds of their warriors and retreating in good order when reinforcements came storming up. Meantime the Roman citizen levies and their Moorish auxiliaries stayed quiet and motionless in the rear, where they could be most effective simply by looking formidable.

  Procopius witnessed the battle on the Plains of Nero from the safety of the walls, and later that evening gave me a full account of the disaster that ensued.

  “You may blame the Romans,” he said, “for acting like fools instead of cowards. I think I preferred the latter. Seeing the Goths west of the river being thrown into disorder and routed by our cavalry, they abandoned all notions of discipline and poured forward, ignoring the shouts of their captains.”

  He paused to take a sip of wine and stare bleakly into our camp-fire. “Like all soldiers with the minimum of training, they forgot about the enemy and started to plunder the camps. The Goths, under Vitiges, rallied and counter-attacked. Our cavalry tried to stop them, but were engulfed and smashed to pieces. You should have seen Vitiges, Coel. He was like some pagan god of war, huge and terrible in his winged helm, his eyes flashing fire and brimstone. His sword was lightning in his hand, striking one man down after the other – stab-stab-stab! Alaric himself could have scarcely looked more terrible.”

  “If you have finished glorifying the enemy, what happened then?” I asked impatiently. Some of my Isaurians were seated in a circle around the fire and leaning forward intently, open-mouthed and wide-eyed, to catch his words. They loved stories, and Procopius loved an audience, so the two were well suited.

  “The Romans broke and fled,” he said with a shrug, slightly nettled by my directness, “and were pursued all the way back to Rome. Hundreds died before they reached the safety of the gates. There will be a great many widows and orphans weeping over their lost menfolk tonight. Our surviving cavalry would have been destroyed to a man, if not for the arrival of Bochas.”

  Bochas was one of the officers Belisarius had placed in command of his cavalry. When news of the unfolding disaster in the Plains of Nero reached the general, he had recalled as many men as he could from the fighting beside the Tiber and sent them to relieve Valerius and Martinus.

  The collapse of our army on the Plains of Nero, precipitated by the ill-timed charge of the Romans, occurred at the same time as Belisarius’ attack to the north started to falter. The Goths had poured more men into the battle, replacing their earlier losses, and after hours of fighting our cavalry were tiring and running short of arrows.

  Belisarius was not fool enough, thank God, to commit his infantry to try and rescue the situation. We remained at our posts, watching our horse-archers fight with the utmost skill and bravery. Time and again, they charged into endless clouds of arrows, before wheeling, retreating, splitting up and reforming for another assault.

  The Goths bided their time. When the sun hovered low on the horizon, and the reeking plain was bathed in red-gold light, the droning of their horns swept the field. This was the signal for fresh squadrons of Gothic and Frankish cavalry, held in reserve until now, to burst from the depleted lines of their infantry and charge our exhausted horsemen.

  “Form line!” The order passed through our ranks and was taken up by each officer in turn, myself included.

  The ground shook underfoot as my Isaurians formed into two lines of fifty, the last man on each flank almost rubbing shoulders with the men of the next squadron. They may have been a sullen and recalcitrant lot, but they knew their trade, and shuffled calmly into position.

  As they were drilled, the front rank stood with their large round shields forming an interlocking wall, spears presented horizontally at chest height. Behind them the men of the rear rank stood with spears held upright, ready to step forward and fill any gaps in the line if we suffered casualties.

  I stood behind them, just to the left of the rearmost man on the end of the line, watching in horror as the broken remains of our cavalry fled back towards the city. The Goths pursued relentlessly, spearing and chopping down the fugitives. In a moment, a few short seconds, the barbarian tide would roll over us.

  “Ready!”

  The order came from our captains of foot-archers. Again these were mostly Isaurians, formed up behind the lines of spearmen. A tremor passed through our army, accompanied by audible moans of fear, but the presence of the general steadied us.

  “Stretch!”

  Christ save us! They were less than twenty feet away now, a surging tide of galloping horses and gleaming lances and fierce, pale faces, hundreds of pairs of eyes blazing with hatred under bright steel helms.

  It was death to stand firm against that charging horror. It was death to turn and run. I stood, fixed to the spot like a worm on a nail, my right hand curled tightly about Caledfwlch’s hilt, as if my little sword would be of any use now.

  “Loose!”

  A rushing sound, like thousands of birds taking to the air at once, briefly drowned out the thunder of hoofs and the frantic hammering of my pulse.

  The front rank of Gothic horsemen seemed to falter, their beasts twisting and rearing and screaming and plunging back onto their haunches. Their yelling riders were thrown, or shot from the saddle, and fell under the churning hoofs of the riders in the second line.

  “Loose!”

  A second flight of arrows, darkening the skies, and a third, and a fourth, pouring like hail into the Gothics, mowing down riders and horses and throwing their ranks into desperate confusion.

  “At them!” screamed one of my Isaurians, “kill them all! Just kill them!”

  He would have broken ranks and rushed forward, taking others with him, but I seized his shoulder and dragged him back into line.

  “Stand your ground, fool!” I hissed into his ear, “or I’ll have your skin flayed off your back and made into a sword-belt!”

  He grinned at my threat, which wasn’t quite the reaction I wanted, but at least he obeyed, and the line held firm.

  Our trumpets sounded from the walls, signaling the retreat. Belisarius had no intention of trying to rescue the battle now. He merely aimed to withdraw in good order and get the remnants of the army back inside Rome.

  Executing a fighting retreat is one of the most difficult manoeuvres, especially with darkness falling and terror pounding through your veins, the screams of dying men and beasts sounding in your ears, the stench of death curdling in your nostrils, and you’re so frightened and deafened you can barely think or hear or speak.

  My Isaurians were up to the task. I barked at them to keep the line straight as they withdrew, spears presented to the enemy, but they would have easily done so without me. Step by step, calmly and unhurriedly, they moved back towards the Salarian Gate. Our retreat was covered by the archers, who continued to shoot until the Goths, sickened by the casualties they had suffered, turned and fell back.

  They left a great pile of wreckage on the field
, human and animal, wounded beasts thrashing and screaming in their death-throes, men trying to crawl back to their own lines, or simply flopping down to die. Isaurian mountain men are superb archers, as good as any Huns or Scythians, and not to be despised as mere infantry.

  We got back inside, along with the rest of the infantry and surviving cavalry, and the gates slammed shut before the Goths could regroup and pursue.

  Procopius left our fire just before midnight, having exhausted his fund of stories. Most of my Isaurians had taken themselves to bed, weary but not dispirited by the defeat, for none of them had died. Our cavalry had suffered, true, but so had the Goths, and Rome was still secure.

  I sat up late with a few men around the flickering embers of the fire, brooding over the conduct of the Romans. If not for their arrogant stupidity, we would not have lost so many men in a futile and pointless sally, and Belisarius’ record would not bear the stain of a defeat, only the second he had ever suffered in the field.

  The hour was extremely late, and I was drowsing alone over a final cup of wine, when I heard a commotion. I looked up, blinking in the sudden harsh glow of torch-light, and saw Photius sneering down at me.

  He was as luminously handsome as ever, and his breastplate polished to a shine that hurt the eyes. He held a spatha in his right hand, and leveled the keen blade at my throat.

  A dozen guardsmen stood behind him, tall and forbidding in their cloaks and crested helms. I glanced at their grim faces, silhouetted by the light of the torches they held, and my heart fell.

  “Coel the Briton,” said Photius in a gloating voice, “you are under arrest.”

  20.

  The plot my enemies had hatched against me was a squalid one. Frustrated in their efforts to have me murdered, they changed their strategy, and tried to have me disgraced and condemned to death on a false charge of theft.