We had won. And yet…
The enemy still held both jaws of the vise, the city promontory of Ortygia and Plemmyrium, the Rock, the southern mandible of the harbor mouth, between which the wall of ships extended. He had fifty thousand at one end, twenty at the other, and they kept pouring out onto the wall. Where the line of ships had been breached, the foe's small craft flooded in and sealed the rupture.
Flea boats ferried replacements across the breaks, while others hauled themselves over the timber and chain bindings which yet anchored the embattled wall. Morning had gone; we were slaughtering the enemy in such numbers that he could not, it was certain, hold out much longer.
There is an error in densely packed fighting committed by those lacking experience of war, even brave men, as the Syracusans and their allies were, and this is called in Sparta “downstreaming” or
“rat-holing.” A man dueling in this fashion will stand against the individual facing him, receive or deliver a blow or several, and then, he and his antagonist unhurt, roll or shift laterally to the next of the enemy, to commence a second bashing match and in turn sideslip again. Fear makes him do this. He seeks a closet of refuge, a “rat hole” amid the slaughter. In Sparta boys are beaten who evince this habit. They are schooled instead to fight “upfield,” to seize one man and battle him alone until one or the other falls. This the Lacedaemonians call monopale, “singling up.” The Syracusans had not learned this art, for all Gylippus' direction. Now on the wall of ships the superior experience of the Athenians began to tell.
It came to this: fighting topside, twenty against twenty, forty on forty, a parataxis, pitched battle, in miniature. Or brawling belowdecks man upon man, in water thigh- and hip-deep, the walls, often afire, pinning friend and foe in the cylinder of slaughter. The Athenians had the hang of it. And they possessed a further advantage. Defenders on the sea must of necessity kill men, never an easy business. But attackers need only destroy things. The marines of Athens went after the wall with fire and the ax. Ship after ship had its belly gutted, hull torched; along the rampart hulks settled, sizzling, to the waterline.
I had found Lion and Telamon. Reunited, we were hacking through a jacket of timbers, eight logs bound with belts of iron, that yoked one section of enemy line to another. Too exhausted to stand, Lion and I straddled the timber, bashing with blades blunt as butter knives. Here came the foe. Flea boats bearing slingers hauled upon us from another smoking hulk. There were ten in our party. Telamon, Lion, and Chowder were the only ones I knew; the others had collected by ones and twos; I never learned their names. One with a red beard trumpeted to a cruiser, calling for fire. As he shouted, a bullet tore his throat out; he dropped like a gunny of rocks. The shooter vaunted, already reloaded with his sling whistling overhead. I heard an alarm from behind. Somehow another score of enemy had got onto the hulk we had just crossed from. Two more slinger boats closed from seaward. We had no helmets; all shields had been ditched. We were sitting ducks. Lead bullets screamed past. Telamon yelled go; we hit the drink. An hour later we were on another hulk, hacking through another sheaf of timbers, each man with only a pilos cap and whatever rags still clung to his body.
The enemy kept coming. They flooded in hundreds from Ortygia and the Rock. There was no end to them. They were strong and rested, they had food in their bellies and fresh legs beneath them.
They were not slashed or beaten or concussed. The shafts of their weapons had not been shivered by blows daylong struck and fended. They did not bear bone-weary, as we did, the third and fourth shield of the hour, snatched from the discards of comrades dead and dying. They breathed with lungs unchoked by smoke and unseared by fire; their guts held fresh water; they could still sweat.
Yet with all this, our men would still have prevailed if not for wind and tide. The sun had transited now, dropping hard toward shore; now the breeze got up. The tide turned in evil conjunction.
There is a channel called the Race, abutting the isle of Ortygia, through which the current, compressed by the configuration of shoreline and sea bottom, streams at tide's turn with unwonted velocity. Now the foe opened a break in his ships' wall. The race shot through, driving our vessels back. Worse, twenty warships of the Corinthians now appeared, rounding the point from the north.
Driven by the stiffening breeze and emboldened by this impetus of heaven, they fell upon the vessels of Athens engaged at sea, including Implacable, putting them to flight.
Our oarsmen could not drive into this rising gale. Broken with exhaustion, rowers “caught crabs,” fouling their mates' oars. The wind struck their slewed surfaces and began to head them. The tidal race heightened their way. Those vessels which managed to come bows-on to the gust, which they must merely to hold position, discovered themselves vulnerable to attack from the flank, by the inrushing Corinthians with their fresh crews and by those others of the Syracusans now rallying behind the cry that the gods had answered their prayers, by sending this gale to rout the foe. I was on the cruiser Aristeia now, the fifth or sixth ship of the day, when her commander turned to ram one of the oncoming Corinthians. Our ship was literally moving backward, so stout was the gale. The Corinthian slipped her with ease, put her helm over, and wheeled, outboard banks pulling while inboard backed, to ram us amidships. The cruiser fled stern-first, backing water amid fresh broadsides of missiles. The Corinthian, hampered herself by the wind as it struck her now from abeam, managed only a glancing blow upon Aristeia's prow, but this was sufficient to open a tear broad enough for a man and boy to pass through abreast. The sea flooded in. A mile still remained to shore.
The oarsmen pulled with the desperation of men who know they have been vanquished and that their conquerors, falling on them, will grant no quarter. They could hear Gylippus' men along the foreshore, ravening for blood. Men groaned in despair; limbs quaked as if palsied. The ship fled into the shadows thrown by Epipolae, across the dark water which now extended hundreds of yards out from the shore. It was cold, like the morning.
Aristeia ran afoul at the Athenian palisade. Earlier vessels, jamming up in flight, had beaten the stakes from alignment, or ripped out their own bellies rushing upon them. Marines and sailors now ganged the surface by hundreds, laboring to restore the front. I glimpsed Lion and Chowder, striving in this chore. Why did they have to be so noble? With a cry I plunged in to aid them. I had no weapon, shoes, nothing. My flesh had been wrung to enervation. So had everyone's. We could feel death, not alone in the cold and dark but in our bones.
I could see the battleships of Corinth and Syracuse sweeping down upon our rampart like great winged creatures of prey. They advanced as in a dream. By the gods, they were beautiful! Divers strove in the water beside me, seeking to rig to a float of timbers the chain that yoked two submerged hedgehogs. The weight kept dragging the float under; the men struggled to hurl its monkey fist to the marines astraddle the platform, but the strength of their arms failed; the rope flopped to the surface with a slapping sound, again and again short of the mark. Two ships of the foe had centered on our gap; they were closing so fast the first ironheads flung by their toxotai were already ripping the water at our elbows.
More men thrashed to our aid from shore. After ungodly exertions, the chain was at the last seated in its notch and drawn taut.
With titanic impact the foremost battleship flung herself upon the palisade. I saw Chowder, fouled among the lines. A pike drove through the gristle of his neck. Diving for our lives, Lion and I could hear the rampart's submerged stakes, massive as trees, plunge into the foe's guts and the hedgehog's spikes rend her belly.
Still the Corinthian's oarsmen heaved, seeking to tear a breach through which her sisters would pour, bringing fire to those vessels of Athens battered and broken behind the barricade.
The maddest melee of the day now ensued. Athenians like ants swarmed upon the impaled dreadnought. The dead made a carpet upon the sea. Our men hauled themselves bare-handed up the shafts of the enemy's oars, hacking at her bankers through the
hide-defended ports, while the foe's marines piked in return from topside and their archers rained fire point-blank. Pitch bolts which the enemy's bowmen had flung into the beached craft of Athens, our men now plucked still blazing and slung again upon the assailants. The Corinthian was going down now, adding her hulk to the fragile bastion which yet preserved us. Out beyond the stakes another dozen men-of-war had drawn up broadside, deep in shadow, archers launching their tow shafts upon us while their oarsmen sang the paean in triumph and joy.
I found Lion in the wash of bodies. Chowder was dead, Splinter slain earlier with an ax. The waves, barely enough to topple an infant, buffeted us to our knees; we must crab in on hips and elbows, shuddering with such violence as to no longer command our own limbs.
Our cousin Simon hauled us from the soup. He got wine into us, clasping me in his cloaked embrace; others swathed Lion, abrading his flesh to restore the warmth of blood. Despair rang from every quarter, such chagrin more acute among those unable this day to fight, the army and the wounded who could only look on without striking a blow. I glanced up the strand and thought, This is what hell must look like.
Above us a knot of seamen labored to resuscitate a comrade. No hope. At last the final man yielded and pitched. Night was on us.
Across the darkening field the warships of the foe quartered, piking the last of our seamen bereft upon the swell and calling that we would not tarry long to join them. Beside Lion and my cousin, the clutch of sailors peered hollow-eyed on this tableau.
“Did you see him out there?” one uttered in awe and dread. “He was on the ships, fighting for the enemy.”
“He was there when they broke us, leading them.”
“No one could stand before him.”
What nonsense was this? Would these morons claim to have descried Poseidon, or Zeus himself, among the champions of the foe?
“Who the hell are you talking about?” I demanded. “What phantom do you madmen think you saw?”
The sailor turned as if I were the madman.
“Alcibiades,” he declared.
XXIV
THE ISSUE OF DEFEAT
Later, in the quarries, one of our number inquired of a Syracusan warden if Alcibiades had in fact been present at the battle of the harbor.
The keeper laughed in his face. “You can concoct handier fictions than that, Athenians. Or can you still not believe you could be beaten other than by one of your own?”
There is a crime in Sicily which the non-Greek natives call demortificare. It means to occasion someone to experience shame or, equally blameworthy, to be aware of such distress and take no action to relieve it. Among the Syracusans, who have embraced the concept as their own, this is an offense graver than murder, which they regard as an act of passion or honor and thus sanctioned or at least condoned by the gods. Demortificare is different. lance witnessed a boy, one of our laundry urchins, beaten half-senseless by his father for permitting his female cousin to sit alone at a dance.
The Syracusans hated us for a thousand causes, but beyond all for having surrendered to them. It was Lion who remarked this, in the branding kennels, compiling observations for his historia, which he kept now in his head and recited aloud to keep his mates from cracking. “The Syracusans can absolve us for bringing war upon them. They may abide even the despoliation of their city and the slaughter of their sons. But they will never forgive us for our shame. ”
You are a gentleman, Jason, but you are also a warrior. And you call yourself a philosopher. I believe you are. Do you know why I sought you out to aid me in my defense? Not because I believed you could help. None can; my grave is dug. Rather I imposed on you out of self-interest. I wanted to meet you. I have admired you since Potidaea. Will it surprise you to learn that I have followed your career, as much as one may at the remove at which I found myself from the city of my birth? I know of the death, or murder, of your two dear sons at the hands of the Thirty. I know the ruin brought upon the family of your second wife. I am aware of the peril in which you placed yourself and your kin, defending the younger Pericles before the Assembly; I have read your speech and admire it greatly. To own to honor lifelong is no mean feat.
Yet I flatter myself that I share with a man such as yourself, if not qualities of honor, then of perception. Here is my crime, and to account it I haul all Greece into the dock beside me: to save my skin I abandoned my fellows, both on the field and within my heart. But let us plumb this unbosoming. I abandoned not only my brothers but myself. To save myself, I abandoned myself.
All vice springs from the flesh; your master Socrates teaches as much, does he not? As Agathon sets in the speech of Palamedes before Troy, himself on trial for his life:
… to the extent to which a man unites his self-conception to his flesh, to that measure will he be a villain. To the extent he unites it with his soul, he will be divine.
But who among us has done that? Your master indeed. Men hate him for this, because to acknowledge his nobility is to concede their own baseness, and this they can never do. They hate him as fire hates water, as evil hates good.
We who have abandoned our countrymen and our own nobler natures, we whom long and brutal war has compelled to such abjuration, is there one, other than ourselves, who may be called our object? One whom we have individually and collectively abandoned?
Who else but Alcibiades? Not once but three times did Athens spurn him, when he knelt before her proffering all he owned. And what made Athens hate him more? Just this: that he repudiated her abandonment. Compelled by his own proud nature, in which he confuted himself and his native land, Alcibiades demonstrated this truth of the soul: that which we cast out returns to revenge itself.
How apt that Athens reviles these twain as few others: the most measured of men, your master, and the most reckless, his friend.
And they hate both for the same reason. Because each-one bearing the lamp of wisdom, the other the brand of glory-illumined that glass in whose reflection his countrymen may see their own self-forsaken souls.
But I have strayed afield. Let us return to the Great Harbor, to defeat and its issue…
With Chowder's death and Splinter's, Pandora had lost all her original marines except myself and Lion. Of our fourteen after Iapygia had fallen to wounds Meton called Armbreaker, Teres called Skull, Adrastus called Towhead, Colophon Redbeard, and Memnonides; to disease Hagnon called the Small, Stratus, Maron, and Diagoras; deserted Theodectes and Milon the pentathlete. If the measure of an officer be the number of his command he restores to home alive, this roster speaks with its own eloquence. I may say in defense only this: none did better. Of sixty thousand free citizens, subject-state volunteers, and conscripts inclusive of both fleets, fewer than a thousand made it home, and these on their own and only after appalling trials.
The fault I own as mine, for my men. The tuition in obedience I had received as a boy, reinforced by the code acquired in the mercenary service, was too severe, too Spartan if you will, to be imposed upon Athenians, particularly the unpropertied roughnecks who constituted the bulk of the latter-day fleet marine force. Courage and initiative they owned in abundance.
They were born to debate and disputation, abashed by no authority established over them, brash and spirited and untamable as cats. Invincible when events ran their way, they could not summon the self-command to rally when the sky began to rain shit, nor was I, or Lion, capable of inspiriting it in them. They personified that type of warrior who beneath a commander of vision and audacity may roll resistlessly from success to success.
Compelled, however, to endure adversity over a sustained interval-not alone defeat but simply delay and inaction-the restless enterprise that made them great would turn upon itself and, like a caged rat, commence to gnaw its vitals. From Lion's observations:
A soldier must not own too much of imagination. In victory it overheats his ambition; in defeat it inflames his fears. A brave man possessed of imagination will not be brave long.
The soldiers an
d sailors of Athens had won so often that they did not know how to lose. Overthrow unmanned them, as a sudden blow will a boxer who has seldom been hit. I never saw men lose weapons and armor as these. Restless, easily bored, our citizen campaigners possessed not the patience of the warrior and did not care to acquire it. The virtue of obedience, in Sparta so highly prized as to be worshiped as a god, was to Athenians the same as want of vision or deficiency of daring. In victory they disdained their officers; in defeat they mutinied openly. One could not pound it into their skulls that obedience and command are reverse and obverse. Those generals of quality who by luck arose to command held up to their men the very virtues-forbearance, steadfastness, endurance-which to these youths were worthless as piss and imposed punishments which could not be enforced in a democratic camp. The best one may say to honor these dead is that they perished when the fight might yet bear the name of honor.
Two nights after the defeat in the Great Harbor, the army packed up and pulled out, all forty thousand who could trek, seeking any part of the island where survival could be fought for.
The sick and wounded would be left to die.
My cousin would not desert them. I confronted him as the army massed to move out. The night was pitch, yet one could see the shades of the maimed and mutilated, hobbling and even crawling to the formation of their fellows, pleading to be taken with them.
Tides of War, a Novel of Alcibiades and the Peloponnesian War Page 22
