Attila: The Judgement

by William Napier

  His men groaned. He grinned. He himself appeared to need no sleep.

  Towards dusk, fresh war-parties came in to join them. Not large, but good for morale. Stocky Bretons from Armorica, Burgundians from the north, noblemen from Aquitania, moustachioed Frankish fighters with their lethal franciscae or thowing-axes.

  ‘Rome’s a bit like your health,’ Aëtius commented dryly at this sudden show of alliance.

  ‘Sir?’ said Tatullus.

  ‘You never appreciate it till it’s on the wane.’

  Tatullus laughed. True enough. Suddenly every citizen of the empire, from the most indolent patrician to the near-barbarian on the fringes, with the Hun war-machine on their doorstep, seemed to have become intensely appreciative of the benefits of Roman civilisation.

  They rode out at dusk under a rising summer moon and the golden globe of the planet Jupiter. The great column, lit by torchlight, was a magnificent sight, like something out of the ancient world.

  By the strong moonlight they could see the devastation the Huns had wreaked: vineyards and orchards ravaged and burned; entire villages razed to mere circles of charcoal and ash; slaughtered cattle all along the road, like boulders haloed by moonlight in the darkness. If the Huns could not take them, no one else would have them, either. Already there was a bitterness in the Huns’ savageries which looked like the last retribution of a defeated army.

  Aëtius and his men might even have taken comfort from that thought had the atrocities they encountered not been so foul, nor the glimpses of unhoused and starving people been so frequent. Filthy, snot-nosed children scurried away from them like frightened animals, to find what shelter they could in the remnants and ruins. They were the lucky ones - luckier, at any rate, than those who had been roped and torn apart by horses, or crushed under wagon wheels, their split limbs left at the roadside for the dogs.

  This was the nightmare landscape that the Huns had carved out of the most civilised and affluent of all the Western provinces. A land of vineyards and orchards, fine towns and elegant villas, rendered down to a primeval country of well-fed wolf-packs howling under the moon, dark smoke drifting across the extinguished land. Some ancient sorceress with sloughed snakeskins knotted into her hair, stirring a foul-smelling pot by a dung fire. Naked horsemen taking scalps with hand axes. History itself erased.

  Lastly they came to a village where a group of naked children hung from the lower branch of a chestnut tree. They had been tied back to back and a heavy rope wound round their necks, bunched together like dried flowers. The rope had been lashed over the lower branch and they had been hauled up to hang there, turning slightly in the night breeze on that creaking rope, ghostly in the dappled moonlight through the lanceolate leaves above their heads, their naked bodies white and innocent still, but above the rope their heads black like old and withered seedheads on young flowers.

  Men of war as hardened as Tatullus and Germanus and Knuckles were frozen in horror for a moment, staring up in disbelief.

  ‘Cut them down!’ said Aëtius savagely.

  To think that only lately he had entertained thoughts of noble, copper-skinned warriors on the free and windy steppes. He yanked his horse away. He was a dreaming fool. Nobility and evil mixed in the Huns, as in all men.

  The battle-hardened legionaries lowered the bodies down. There was no time to bury them decently: atrocity would follow atrocity along the road ahead. But of course they did bury them decently, and set a wooden cross in the fresh-dug earth for each and every one of them. Afterwards, Knuckles was seen taking his club to the trunk of the tree itself in maddened but silent anguish.

  Aëtius called him over. The hulking Rhinelander stopped and wiped his brow and then came slowly over.

  ‘We were never going to give Attila quarter,’ said Aëtius. ‘Now you see why.’ He looked away down the dark road. ‘Back on your horse now, man. It’s Huns we’re here to fight, not trees.’ Then he addressed all the men within range. ‘We catch up with them and harry them tonight. They are going slowly because their horses are starving, and because they have ... amusements to practise along the way, which slow them still further. They’re defeated and out of fuel. Now it’s their turn to suffer.’

  There was a terrible shout, and the column moved out at a grimly determined pace. The miles raced by beneath their horses’ hooves.

  At the front of his army, Attila heard the distant hubbub. It was the Romans falling on his Gepid rearguard and taking it apart piecemeal. Others of his followers were harried bloodily away into the night, losing formation and quickly being destroyed. The vast horde was being eaten up from behind, driven east in bewilderment and terror along the dark roads.

  Attila rode on regardless.

  Only towards dawn did the Romans fall back and give them respite.

  The day was unseasonally cold for summer, and there was a thick mist, an unseen sky. It was a country of tall poplars and slow-moving streams, tributaries of the River Matrona. The Catalaunian plain: a flat, sodden land which filled the steppe horsemen with heaviness and dread.

  For three nights Aëtius’ forces harried the invaders, and then let them camp, exhausted and deeply demoralised. There was a river running roughly east-west, wych elm and alder, heavy ploughland, stretches of forest, and a thick mist again. No moon.

  The Romans camped, too. They would do battle in the morning.

  In the night there was the sound of approaching horsemen, but it was only the returning Moorish cavalry. Mission to destroy the granaries fully accomplished.

  At last the two great opposing armies faced each other in the Catalaunian Fields. Dawn broke slowly on that mist-shrouded day, and as soon it broke a shape was seen looming up on the Huns’ right, the Romans’ left. In the moonless, misty night, neither army had seen it as they drew up their lines and committed themselves to battle. Yet this could change everything. It was a hill. A solitary round-headed hill, maybe a couple of hundred feet above the plain, lightly scattered with beeches. It commanded the entire field. And it was nearer to the Hun lines than the Roman.

  No sooner did the dark green bulk of the hill loom out of the thinning mist, the sun itself not visible yet, than horsemen from each side were galloping for it. From the Hunnish lines came a stream of warriors on shaggy ponies, bristling with spears and without formation. On the Roman side, Prince Torismond vaulted onto his horse bareback, seized his spear from where it stuck butt-first in the soft ground, and led his wolf-lords racing across the wet grass for the slopes.

  Aëtius circled his bare sword in the air and ordered his Augustan Horse round the side of the hill to hit the oncoming Huns in the flank. They rode off at all speed, their horses stretched out, ears flat and nostrils flared in a furious gallop, but it was clear that they wouldn’t make it. The Huns were already streaming up their side of the hill towards the tree-crowned summit. As the Roman cavalrymen neared the enemy lines, not one of them having had time to don helmet or cuirass, the Hun arrow-storm hit them and took a terrible toll. Aëtius instantly called them back.

  Both sides tensed and waited. Somewhere away to his right, Aëtius heard old Theodoric bellowing at his armourer, but it would all be decided by the time he was done.

  Mist still shrouded the summit of the hill. There came the sound of horses’ hooves galloping in soft turf and beechleaves, and the muffled cries of men.

  Prince Torismond did not hesitate for a moment, though he had neither saddle nor armour, not even a sword, only that long ashwood spear. Grief for his sister still drove him. His forty or fifty wolf-lords were similarly light on armaments. So were their enemies, but the Huns had gained the summit and were aiming their first volley of arrows at the hated Visigothic horsemen galloping arduously uphill over wet ground towards them. Yet the timing was wrong. Some of the Huns managed to let fly, and inevitably found targets at such close range, but so ferocious and unflinching was the charge of the big horsemen that in the next instant they crashed into the Huns and sent them reeling.

 
Beside Torismond rode the huge Jormunreik, showing his true mettle by revealing at this late stage that he had had no time to bring any weapon at all - his burning loyalty to his prince had been everything. There was no time for consideration, and so he had galloped uphill against the Huns entirely unarmed. As his big grey mare erupted between two startled Hun archers, the best he could offer was huge back-handed swipe of his fist which sent one spinning off his pony to the ground. The next instant he had snatched the bow from the other’s hands, and lashed him across the face with it, blinding him. Then he wrapped his forearm round the Hun’s neck and broke it. He pulled the dead Hun from his pony like a thing stuffed with straw and tossed him to the leaf-strewn ground, snatching the Hun’s ten-inch yatagan from his leather belt as he did so. With this as his only weapon, he fought on.

  Near Jormunreik, similarly disadvantaged by his own haste, Valamir was wielding a huge fallen tree-branch for a weapon, swiping startled Huns from their ponies to the ground and then leaning over and stoving in their skulls.

  The violence and unexpectedness of the wolf-lords’ onslaught was such that the Huns were already being pushed back in disarray from the hilltop.

  There came the stir of a breeze and a sliver of sunlight across the fields, and then out of the wind-thinned mist on the hill, figures came tumbling back down the slopes on the Hunnish side. Ponies rolled over and over, warriors staggered with their own arrows plucked from their quivers and driven through their torc-decorated throats. The mist thinned further, and it was a rout. The Visigoths’ white horses reared up against the eastern sunlight, snorting, magnificent, triumphant, swords circling overhead and flashing silver in the morning air, and the Hunnish archers broke and fled.

  ‘Palatine Guard, second cohort!’ roared Aëtius. ‘Consolidate the position on that hill! Improvise brakes, trenches, whatever it takes. That hill is ours and it stays ours. Move it! You’ve got about five minutes before the shooting starts.’

  The black-armoured Palatine Guard ran as swiftly as four hundred Achilles over the wet fields to the hill and up, while the wolf-lords drove the dispossessed Huns all the way back to their own jeering lines.

  ‘Call them back, Sire!’ Aëtius galloped over to King Theodoric, who was by now firmly seated on what looked like an eighteen-hand ploughhorse, in a huge and elaborate carved and painted wooden saddle with solid gold finials, thoroughly enjoying the grandstand view of his wolf-lords’ heroics.

  ‘Your Majesty, call them back! The Hun archers will kill them all when they come in range.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ bawled Theodoric. ‘Let them have their glory. My son Torismond is a fine lad, is he not?’

  Aëtius could hardly bear to look. Yet even though they rode as near as eighty or seventy yards to the Hun lines, the wolf-lords took not a single hit, veering away well after the last moment and galloping back round the hill towards their own lines. They returned to festive cheering as if they were all at an afternoon of the games and their chariot team had just won. King Theodoric’s voice sounded most loudly of all, as he cuffed his boy jovially round the head.

  Now the dispositions of the two opposing armies were clear.

  Attila had concentrated his own warriors in the centre, with the Kutrigur Huns to his right, their flank protected by a lesser river, and other peoples to the left and behind. At least a mile back or more were his baggage wagons and the non-combatants; for the women and children had followed even here to spectate at this great day in the People’s history.

  Aëtius’ dispositions were more complex. He had placed Sangiban and his three thousand Alans at the centre - as promised. They were dismounted, their long lances set in the ground like pikes. Behind them were ranged his best field-army legions, the Herculians, Batavians and Cornuti Seniores, and held in deep reserve were the remaining cohorts of the Palatine Guard. On the left wing he had his Augustan Horse, themselves saved from outflanking by the presence of the hill, along with the last few centuries of the frontier legions, excepting only the XII Fulminata, the Lightning Boys. Them Aëtius had despatched up to the hill to dig in their sling-machines and arrow-firers behind the fierce ranks of staves and trenches that the Palatine Guard would already have established. Only lightweight field artillery, but very effective from that commanding height.

  On the far right of the Roman field was the great, fifteen-thousand-strong wing of the Visigothic nation. Among the many brightly coloured pennants decorated with Christian symbols could still glimpsed the occasional likeness of a raven: Odin’s bird. Before them lay all the space of the desolate plain in which to arc out wide and scythe into the vast war machine opposite. They had already identified the banners of the Black Boar: the Vandals.

  Theodoric nodded gravely, gazing across at those fated ensigns from under his bushy white brows. ‘So let it be, for weal or woe,’ he rumbled. ‘Let us have one afternoon of righteous happiness, before our long evening-time of sorrow.’

  He summoned his sons alongside him, and laid his hand on his armoured breast; the princes did likewise. Beneath their bronze cuirasses, father and sons each wore a silver locket containing a single lock of a young girl’s fair, fair hair. They clasped their right hands together. For them, this battle was not about the future of the world.

  The sun was rising fast in the eastern sky, flashing on shields and swords. Aëtius rode ceaselessly among his lines on his white horse. He gave many curt orders but no great oration. There were multiple motives and loyalties here today - all nations from the Volga to the Atlantic were present. But he spoke to each legion and body of men in turn, and saw resolution in every face.

  Across from them, a mile off at most, was the army of Attila. It was impossible to count, but the Romans were probably outnumbered five to one. Yet it was only the second time that Attila had faced a professional army on an open battlefield - and the first time he had faced a commander who knew how to win. Already the Huns, and their less committed followers even more so, were haunted by a deep fear that the might of Rome remained intact, despite all assurances of decadence and decline.

  The sun rode higher, the plain burning clear of mist. It was the perfect terrain for the lightning attack of the Hun horsemen with their lethal arrow-storm. But Attila did nothing. He sat his muddy skewbald pony like a stone horseman, staring across at his adversary, the great Master-General Aëtius, as he tirelessly worked his lines.

  ‘Great Tanjou,’ said Chanat, coming alongside him.

  Attila did not react for a long time. Then he said something about how even an ancient and ivy-grown castle can still resist attack if its walls are strong.

  ‘My lord?’

  ‘But no matter.’ He turned to Chanat and showed his teeth. ‘My guide Enkhtuya has examined the entrails. “Today, the leader of your enemies will die in battle”: there is a simple and straightforward prophecy for you, old Chanat.’ He gazed out over the field again. ‘Aëtius’ day is almost ended,’ and he struck his fist upon his saddle so that his horse harrumphed and shifted.

  ‘Then let us fight, Great Tanjou. It is time.’

  Attila nodded. ‘My order is coming.’

  ‘General Aëtius, sir. War-band approaching from the north.’

  Aëtius sighed. Another little volunteer force to mess up his lines. He could do without them, frankly. He rode around the back of his lines and skirted the hill.

  Across the sunlit farmland came a neat column of, at most, two hundred men, spears to the sky. Aëtius’ heart stirred, despite his more rational reservations. Two hundred, coming to fight two hundred thousand. Here was valour.

  As they drew nearer he saw the leader of the column, a broad-shouldered fellow with a white beard. He gasped.

  The leader reined in and nodded. ‘Master-General Aëtius of the Romans. Ciddwmtarth of the western Celts and his knights, at your service.’

  Aëtius tried to speak but could find no words, could only seize Lucius’ arm in its studded leather vambrace.

  The old soldier’s eyes twinkled in his
lined face to see this famously stern Roman general so moved. He had a heart after all.

  ‘Gallant little Britain comes riding to rescue all of Europe from the hand of tyranny and the Hun.’ Lucius’ voice was deep and dry indeed.

  Aëtius spoke with deep sincerity. ‘You are welcome, friend, welcome. You asked for our aid and got none. Now you come riding to our aid unbidden.’ He shook his head.

  Lucius said nothing.

  ‘Are your people safe while you are gone?’

  ‘There will be more fighting to be done upon our return,’ said Lucius laconically.

  Aëtius recovered himself. ‘This will not be forgotten.’ He looked at the man riding behind Lucius: perhaps fifty or so but his hair still dark, his face unlined, his brown eyes observing this exchange with quiet attentiveness. ‘And you. You are ... ?’

  The man nodded. ‘My name is Cadoc, son of Ciddwmtarth.’ And he smiled. Yes, fate was strange.