Please, one without legs would implore, I can be drawn! Pull me like a sack! Men would promise gold when they got home, all their fathers owned. Others appealed in the name of the gods or of filial piety, of boyhood bonds, oaths sworn, trials endured in common.
The order came to move out. The sick pressed their treasure upon the able-bear me only a mile, friend! — while the well forced all they had into the fists of the disowned. Here, mate, buy your life if you can. The distress of those pleading for deliverance was exceeded only by the agony of their comrades, possessed of no option but to deny them. I begged Simon to depart with us. What good could he accomplish, holding here to die? The failing ringed him about, imploring him to heed. Go-and take me with you!
Others importuned Lion and Telamon, who, with kind hearts steeled, sought to deflect them. Suddenly a youth lurched from the press. This was the petty officer of the Pandora called Rosy Cheeks, who had taken a spike through the foot. He clutched at my cloak.
“Friend, I can hobble. I beg you, lend me your arm!” In two years of campaign I had not yielded to terror or rage. Now my belly failed. I flung the beggar off me, cursing him and all the sick. Why don't you croak, the mob of you, and get it over with! I pleaded with Simon not to cast his life away on these who were already dead. He responded by requiring my blessing. I called him a fool who deserved to die. He struck me in the face. “Give me your blessing.”
“Take it to hell.”
My brother caught me from behind. We embraced our cousin, weeping.
“See my boy gets his schooling and my lass her dowry.” Simon pressed into my palm his rings and an ivory charm he had won for a solo at the Apaturia. “For Road's Turn,” he said, meaning Acharnae, his tomb.
The track beyond the palisade ran across the marsh held by the enemy throughout the sea fight. It had been vacated. The men took cheer and accelerated the pace. “He's afraid of us,” someone proposed, meaning Gylippus. The Syracusans were behind their city walls, celebrating. You could hear their cymbals and drums.
We were missing a hell of a party.
We must link with the Sicels inland, then drive to Catana, twenty miles north. The way round, for we dared not skirt Epipolae, climbed stony slopes from the harbor. The army was to advance in a hollow square with the noncombatants in the center, but great flocks of camp wives pressed out, seeking their men.
Lion's Berenice and her sister Herse trekked beside us; it went with excruciating slowness. The formation extended on both sides of the road; every time it came to a wall the mob bunched to a standstill.
Near dawn enemy scouts overhauled us. We could hear them, horseback, calling to each other in the fog. By night their whole army would be on us. The women must get out now. Lion parted from Berenice on the move, pressing into her kit the packet of his notes and all the cash he had. Others groped godspeed. A few got in a farewell fuck. You saw them, grappling in the dirt or humping each other against trees.
There was a holm oak beside the track. Someone had hung a kypridion, fillets of wool bound with the passion knot, the sign of Bridal Aphrodite, which the women tack for luck above the lintels of newlyweds. Who could have set such invocation upon this tree of blood, whose bloom produces the scarlet pigment that colors the war cloak of Sparta and Syracuse? She was our bride now, this dame called Death. I fell in step beside Lion.
At noon the column reached the first river. The Syracusans had either dammed it or diverted its course; it was dry. We learned this, miles back in the column, from enemy cavalry, who called across as they fired the underbrush on our flanks. They shouted, too, that our camp had been taken. The wounded and those attending had been slaughtered to the last man. I sank in grief on the roadside and must have remained unmoving for a term because we again, Lion and I, became separated from our company, the third or fourth so far in the retreat. “Get up!” My brother tugged me.
“Pommo! We must keep with the column!”
The track ran through underbrush. Enemy cavalry had fired this to windward and now the passage clotted with smoke. “This is why Gylippus opened the gate!” a trooper at our shoulders snorted.
“Why attack us behind our walls when he can let our brilliant officers lead us into this waste where thirst will drive us mad!”
At last a rider came down the line. Our men were digging wells in the dry riverbed, seeking the underground flow. “What's the holdup?” an infantryman shouted. “Attack upstream! That's where the enemy is-and the water!”
The rider relayed the generals' decision: that the brush was too dense, we may march into even worse. “I haven't drained a drop of piss in two days, mate. How much worse does it get?”
Cavalry hit when we reached the plain. There were not many yet, as their main raced ahead to fortify the way against us. The column pressed on, in that infuriating spread-and-compress repetition of large bodies on the move. We came to a farm with a springhouse. The site had been assaulted by the thousands before us. Nonetheless men fought over the oozing clay, which they held in wads above their lips and squeezed like pomegranates for the juice.
The column reached the second river at nightfall. The wells produced muddy soup. Each got a cup. We moved on.
Men were melting by twos and threes into the brush, taking their chances on their own. Telamon fell in beside us. Time to fold the flag. Would we join him? Athens, Lion replied, is our country.
“With respect, friends. Screw your country.”
We laughed. He took our hands. He was no man for long farewells.
Two dawns later the column came to a great plateau. A pair of ravines cut through at the southwest; there was no way round; the enemy held the heights. We must force it or never see Catana. Lion and I were incorporated into a company under a captain whose name we never learned, a garrulous fellow whose men clearly loved him. We got to the base of the track just past noon. Men were going up and dying. That was all there was to it. Our company was shunted beneath a hastily cobbled palisade. We would go up next.
Behind us stretched the column. Syracusan cavalry made rushes at a hundred points; you saw nothing for miles but their dust ascending from the scrub. The earth at our feet was cracked clay; I observed that we must get water or die. Lion indicated the “beaten zone” beyond our palisade, where the foe's missiles and stones rained.
“Step out there and solve your problems.”
Three times our company went up the hill. The pass narrowed to a single wagon-width; the enemy had sealed it with a wall.
Behind it he was massed twenty across and a hundred deep; thousands more blanketed the cliffs ides. They sent stones and javelins, even landslides upon us. By postnoon they had the knack; they let the attackers advance to the wall, where the facing rocks compacted them into a body; then they opened fire. Each assault company bore it in turn; when enough had gone down, or simply cracked, the unit fell back and another went up in rotation. The track had acquired a name, Blood River, though this was a misnomer, as all fluid soaked at once into the desiccated dirt.
Exposed on the uptrack, we pressed ourselves like lizards against sheltering rocks or hunkered beneath makeshift palisades, burrowing into these clefts, while the foe's stones and darts crashed upon us. You could see the shields of the fallen, great piles dragged back by their comrades repulsed in subsequent assaults or toppled or slid downslope on their own. Their oaken chassis had been bashed to splinters by the stones and boulders of the foe, signia and blazons effaced beneath a paste of dust and blood.
The track up had become a calf-deep furrow, riven to powder by the soles and knees of the assault troops as they mounted, marinated by their piss and sweat, then reground by their backs and heels as their corpses were passed down by others who mounted to take their place. The companies assaulted the hill all day. Next day the same. We had learned to shiver the enemy's javelins where they struck, for each time we fell back the foe retrieved them to fling upon us afresh. The lances slung downhill terrified the men, not just the impact but the sound, and the
stones and boulders were worse.
A cavalry captain galloped up, calling for volunteers. Gylippus had got in the rear of the column with five thousand; he was throwing up another wall to pen us for the slaughter. Lion and I leapt to it. Anything to quit this hellish ravine.
In the rear, our ten thousand assaulted Gylippus' five. By nightfall the foe fell back, depleted of missiles and stones. The company ahead of ours took the wall. They tore through the abandoned kits of the foe but could find no water. These companies must rejoin the main body. Ours and two others were ordered to remain, to bury the dead and set up a night perimeter.
We flopped atop the wall, dirty as death, and watched the units trudge back. From our vantage we could see the enemy cavalry, the dust of more squadrons than could be counted, and across the plain additional plumes, columns of infantry converging from the north and east-a hundred thousand, two hundred thousand, massing for the kill.
Thirst tormented the army. Men cursed Nicias and Demosthenes, and Alcibiades too; him more than them, for he had abandoned us. I hated him too, for my cousin and all the dead, but most for not being here to preserve us.
Twice Nicias passed on horseback. One must give the man credit. Though racked with disease, he displayed tireless resolution, passing up and down the line absent all care for his own affliction. I heard him, an hour past dark of the fifth day, surrounded by two thousand:
“Brothers and comrades, I must speak with haste. I know we have no water and this goes hard with us and the beasts which bear our armor. But we will turn about tonight and march back to the sea. There are rivers along the track to Helorus of greater volume than the enemy may dam.
“Be of steadfast hearts, my friends, fortifying your resolve with this knowledge: that the forty thousand of our army is not only a formidable force but a city in itself, greater than any in Sicily save Syracuse. We may go anywhere, drive out the inhabitants and establish ourselves in their places. We may find food and water.
We may build ships and get home. Remember this and be not downcast. As for the reversals you have suffered, do not let them make you lose heart. Fortune cannot hold herself indifferent forever; even the sternest of immortals must be moved by our plight. For those decisions which have brought us to this pass, I take responsibility. You are not to blame. Never has your fighting spirit shown itself wanting, but your exertions have been set at naught by the gods' perversity and our own ill generalship.”
Lion studied the men as they listened. He was struck, he said later, by the intelligence of their faces; they recalled to him the countenances one beheld in the theater on the morn of a competition. Now they seemed, my brother observed, to assess Nicias as they would an actor and to class him of the leaden and the second-rate. Nicias, his hearers' expressions betrayed, is pious; he is valiant, even noble. But one thing he is not: he is not Alcibiades. Neither, for all his craft and courage, is Demosthenes.
Desperate as the army's pass now was, could any doubt that, Alcibiades in command, he could not overturn it? Nicias was right about one thing: we were an army, redoubtable even now as any on earth. Yet we were broken and we knew it. I hated Alcibiades the more. There was none to replace him. As Nicias spoke, men's hearts cracked, apprehending this.
“Lastly, my friends, remember that you are Athenians and Argives and Ionians, the sons of heroes and heroes yourselves. You have won great glory in this war and, fortune willing, will claim more. Remember your fathers and the trials they have undergone with courage. Hold fast, brothers. With heaven's aid and our own exertions, we will endure to see again our homes and families whom we love.”
Orders came to light a multitude of fires. The army stoked them and packed out. By dawn the column had reached the Helorine Road, right back where we started. We would flee south this time, pick a river, and track it inland, to scribe the circle and try for Catana again.
All day long and all the next the Syracusan cavalry made rushes on the column. We had no horses or archers; we could do nothing but endure. The enemy attacked in squadrons of fifty and a hundred; we would form up at the double, so spent we could barely move, while the foe loosed volleys upon us. At first our youngest made rushes upon them, slashing at the horses' legs or seeking to drive their bellies through with the nine-footer. But a man on foot is an easy target. Two or three horsemen would converge; if our man fell the foe's cavalry trampled him or slung point-blank to open his guts. Others of ours must dash to the rescue. With each rush by the enemy, another two or three fell. A broken arm, gashed thigh, a concussion. Men must bear others.
The strong carried the weak, and when they failed, others carried them. An officer recruited the asses of the train for makeshift cavalry. But these were too spent and terror-stricken to be managed. We passed one mule, gutted; our men crazed with thirst licked its blood.
The column was in open country now, without shelter from the sun. One's skin ceased to sweat, only burned. Among soldiers on the march is this term, “sun stupid.” The column labored in fever, a procession of the doomed. The senses spawned mirages. A man would cry aloud the names of his children; his comrades, too abashed to call him to it, trudged on in mortification. At last one, unable to endure longer, would bark at the first to shut up, and he, roused as from a dream, would not even know he had cried aloud.
One tried to start a song, something crude to cheer the march. It failed before the second verse. Thirst hammered the column. One gnawed twigs and set pebbles beneath the tongue. “Here they come!” Another attack, another siege of terror leaving one yet more exhausted and in the aftermath, another three wounded, another three who must be borne.
Now one longed no more for Alcibiades for his leadership. Now one hated him for his absence. It was he who had sent this scourge upon us, out of his own pride and from the foe's embrace; he who, set upon that balance point between his country and himself, chose his own survival and directed hell on us, his brothers. God preserve me, a man cried to heaven, to see him paid out! Let me live, if only long enough to deal him death.
Two days later, mad with thirst, the column reached the Assinarus. We were at the rear and heard the story later.
The enemy had not dammed this river. Instead he was drawn up on the far side, two thousand across and ten deep, with five thousand cavalry on the flanks, funneling our column as it approached toward the massed armor and missile troops of their comrades. The Syracusan archers and slingers had been drawn up in the fore, on the opposite bank, less than a hundred feet away.
They began firing while our troops were still two hundred feet from the river. Nicias and the commanders sought to hold our men back. But the soldiers stampeded into the river, even as the enemy poured volley after volley upon them. Men were shot through and dying, yet still battling one another for drink. Thousands fell in the water; thousands more, fleeing, were run down or rounded up for slaves. Behind us, Demosthenes' division had been overrun by fifty thousand, the columns we had spotted from the summit of Gylippus' wall. Our force was tatters. Forty thousand had set out; under six remained.
Nicias surrendered next morning. Two nights later we were in the quarries.
Here is how they branded us. They had chutes, four of them, like a farmer's for sheep. We were driven forward in lines. At the end was a stanchion. This captured your skull. At my station the man with the brand was instructing a prentice. “Not like an ox, boy!
This is man skin, not cowhide. Kiss the flesh…just a sweetheart's kiss, like that!”
I remember rising to my feet, seeking a reflecting surface to behold my new slave self who bore the kappa brand. This was not necessary. One glance at your mates told all.
In the quarries men clung to the frailest vessels of hope. Many reasoned that because the Syracusans had not put us to death, they must eventually make us work or sell us. Others held out the hope of ransom. Lion made it his task to dash such expectations, the harboring of which, he felt, served only to demoralize us further.
We must make up our minds to die lik
e men. Those we had abandoned at the Great Harbor, he recalled to us, had already done so.
There were sixty-eight hundred in the quarries, all Athenians, Argives, and free allies. Fifteen thousand had been killed on the roads; perhaps five thousand had been rounded up by private soldiers and hidden from their officers for slaves. Of the remaining thirteen thousand-mercenaries, mechanics, camp followers-great numbers had been slaughtered; the rest had been sold.
The quarries were limestone defined by that cleft-the infamous spelaion, the cavern-which split the cliffside; the rest exposed, varying in depth from thirty feet to above a hundred. The site was immediately outside the city, abutting the sector of Temenites. Our captors let us down by ladders, then pulled the ladders up. When a man died he may not be buried, but the corpses collected in piles, emitting an unendurable stench. Those summoned by their captors for punishment, or fun, would be hauled out feet-first, elbows pressed tight for protection to their skulls, which banged into the stone at each heave on the tackle.
Rations were a pint of grain a day, uncooked slop, and a half-pint of water, both lowered in vats contrived to be too cumbersome for a man or even two to receive without spilling, and roped down at sites of such precipitousness as to make those who received them risk their necks from a fall. Our captors routinely urinated in our water; we plucked turds from our dinner every day.
The warders called us “ponies,” for the horse brand on our brows. Their officers took a census the first day by unit; we must count out eight times each day subsequent. All must be on our feet before dawn and not sit till dark. A man caught would be stoned or roped topside for a “pony ride.” Those who returned alive from these sessions did not remain so for long.
The Syracusans moved to crush our spirits by eliminating officers. Those whose identities they had obtained were hoisted to the pit rim, there to endure within earshot of their men below sieges of barbarity as long as two and three days. Beneath this torture, the names of other officers were extracted and these hauled up to undergo like atrocities. The dead were pitched back over the brink. Any who attempted to honor them by burial were shot down or stoned. This ordeal continued until no commander above the rank of subaltern remained.
Tides of War, a Novel of Alcibiades and the Peloponnesian War Page 23
