by Tom Holt
The army (I use the term loosely) that trailed away from the camp was over forty thousand strong; larger than the Greek army that defeated a million Persians at Plataea during the Great War. A large part of our force was made up of allies, of course, but it seemed to me that the entire male population of Athens, or all that was left of it, was present in that army, and I was reminded of nothing so much as the end of the final day of the Festival when all the plays have been dreadfully bad.
I marched with Callicrates and his two closest friends, Myronides (who was a distant cousin of ours) and Cyon, who had been in a Chorus of mine. For an hour or so we marched on in silence. Now I come to think of it, nobody had said anything much for days; there had been none of those busy conversations or animated discussions that are a sure sign of the presence of more than one Athenian, ever since the night-battle on Epipolae. The whole camp had been quite unnaturally quiet. But Cyon, Callicrates’ friend, was one of those almost irritatingly cheerful people who cannot be miserable for long, and after a while he started humming one of the chorus-songs from the play of mine he had been in, and after a while I joined in too, since the song was one of which I was particularly proud. It was all about Demosthenes, as it happens, and a rather sordid business deal he had got mixed up in many years ago — something about a shipload of seasoned timber from somewhere in the north that he had an interest in — and parts of it now seemed strangely topical; something about Demosthenes being reluctant to abandon his beautiful ship riding on the wine-dark water of the harbour. Anyway, the men around us took up the tune, as marching men will do, and when we came to the end we started at the beginning again. As we sang, we quickened our step to keep in time with the music, and soon we were striding purposefully along roaring out this song of mine about the petty dishonesty of our great general, who was marching boldly at the head of the column, as he always did. I guess the Syracusan outriders who had been following us ever since we left the camp must have thought we had all finally gone quite mad.
But this euphoria didn’t last long, and when the song died away we were soon trudging along in silence once more. It wasn’t a cheerful sight, that column, and matters were not helped by Nicias son of Niceratus. Noting the despondency of his soldiers, he took it upon himself to hobble up and down the line cheering us along and saying a few words of hope and encouragement in his inimitably grave and pompous style. This was, of course, profoundly embarrassing to every man in the army. For a start, his illness had got much worse since the battle and he now moved very painfully (which many men found quite remarkably funny); furthermore, I don’t imagine there were that many men there who would willingly have given an obol to save Nicias’ life, after the mess he had got us all into. But he was still our general; and so not many men yelled at him or threw stones as he passed. They simply looked the other way, and spoke loudly to their neighbours to drown out what he was saying, until Demosthenes came rushing down from the head of the column to protect his friend from self-induced humiliation. As soon as they saw Demosthenes, the soldiers started cheering, which only made matters worse for poor old Nicias. For my part I was sorry for him; he was an idiot, and would probably prove the death of all of us, but he had been my producer for The General (another disaster, I remembered) and so I felt a degree of loyalty to him. Unfortunately, I couldn’t help bursting out laughing when he shambled up to our part of the line and launched into one of his tirades, since he repeated, almost word for word, that celebrated rigmarole of his about men, not walls and ships, making up a city with which he had reduced our rehearsals to a state closely resembling death. My laughter set off the men around me (who didn’t know the joke but who desperately wanted to laugh at something) and poor Nicias shot me such a look of pure hatred that I wished the ground would swallow me up. Then he gave up trying to encourage the troops and was helped back to the head of the column. Every man has his evil spirit — some person who always seems to be involved, actively or passively, in his worst misfortunes. Aristophanes has always been mine, and I think that I may have played the same role for Nicias.
I can’t remember when we first saw the enemy. As I think I said earlier, there had been Syracusan horsemen watching us ever since we left the camp, and the number seemed to grow all the time, though nobody could say that he had seen them come. But I remember looking up and thinking, There’s a lot of them now, where did they all come from? and I think Demosthenes must have had the same idea, because he reorganised our line of march with the baggage-train and the more inadequate parts of our army in the middle and the rest of us forming a sort of hollow square around them. It was a highly intelligent arrangement, now I come to reflect on it, except that we should never have taken so much stuff with us in the first place. It wasn’t food we were carrying with us; for all Nicias’ fussing over wax tablets, there simply wasn’t very much food in our possession. What was slowing us up was such things as supplies of arrows and sling bolts for the archers and slingers (we had no significant force of either), shovels, trowels, adzes and similar tools necessary for building walls and other operations connected with siegecraft, chains for binding prisoners-of-war, and other essentials such as plunder (not a large item) and the personal possessions of the dead (a very large item).
I do remember, however, that it was two days after we left the camp that the Syracusans first attacked. We were all heartily sick of marching by now; we were hungry and tired and our feet hurt, and many men were sick with fever and dysentery (marching in the company of men with dysentery is not to be recommended as a pastime). I was fortunate enough to stay relatively healthy, but I’m afraid that I showed far less fortitude and courage than many men who were genuinely sick, until I was shamed into pulling myself together by Cyon. He had the fever quite badly but never complained; and once, when I had been whining for several hours about how thirsty I was, he left the line and ran over to the river, which was on our right for a large part of our march, and brought me back water in his helmet. I drank it all and handed the helmet back to him, and then Callicrates started shouting at me and calling me all the names he could think of. Cyon told him to leave me alone, but Callicrates had clearly had enough of me and wanted to say his piece. Of course, when I realised how selfish I had been I tried to apologise, but Cyon wouldn’t listen.
That was just before we reached the river Anapus, where the Syracusans were waiting for us. At first we were very frightened, but as we looked around we could see no heavy infantry drawn up in line of battle, only mobs of light infantry and a few cavalry. At once we began to feel better, since every Greek knows that light infantry, being composed of men from the lower orders of society, is rather less dangerous to a force of heavy infantry than a mild shower of rain. We pressed on and waited for the enemy to run away, as we knew they would.
They didn’t. They stood their ground until they were within range of us, and loosed off a volley of spears and arrows. Now one expects such things in battle, but the unwritten rule is that the shooting of arrows and throwing of spears is primarily for the benefit of the thrower or shooter, to make him feel better and not quite so left out of the general fun. They are not meant to be serious contributions to the blood-letting, for the very good reason that a stray arrow can kill a brave man just as easily as it can kill a coward, and that sort of indiscriminate slaughter is downright immoral. The invariable practice therefore, ever since the Great Lelantine War between Chalcis and Eretria in which men first fought on foot instead of from chariots, has been for the light infantry to do their stuff in as cursory a manner as possible. There is generally no actual punishment for hitting someone, but it is regarded as the worst possible sort of clumsiness and makes the perpetrator feel particularly stupid.
After about the third volley, it dawned on us that the enemy were not doing it right. They were shooting and drawing back in relays, and inflicting quite serious losses on our heavy infantry. Demosthenes quickly decided to send out sorties to chase them away, but when he did so they would shoot and retire,
not running for their lives as they should have done but pulling back just fast enough to keep clear of our men, so as to draw them forward until their line became disorganised and they were left unprotected by the shields of their neighbours. Then they would dart forward, loose off another volley and repeat the process all over again. Our sorties were very severely handled in this fashion, and Demosthenes called them off. But the only result of this was to encourage the Syracusans, who came in ever closer, until some of our men lost their tempers and broke ranks to go charging off at them; and those men did not come back.
I can’t begin to describe the feeling of cold terror that this inspired in us. We had never heard of anything like this, for we could see no way to defend ourselves. It is one thing to accept and come to terms with the fact that you are probably going to die; it is another thing to have demonstrated to you well in advance the manner in which you are going to be killed, particularly if that manner is both new and humiliating and there is nothing at all you can do about it. I think some of us had been relying on a heroic death in battle to make up for the ignominy of being caught up in the worst military cock-up in the history of the City of Athens, and the sight of those Sicilian peasants darting backwards and forwards with bows in their hands like a lot of deer-hunters was more than they could stand. Our men started shouting and cursing at the Syracusans, and throwing things at them. At first they threw stones — they generally missed —and then swords and sandals and helmets and anything they had, which set the enemy laughing. This made matters worse, and there were a number of suicidal charges by individuals and small groups.
Then, almost as a sort of blessed release, we saw enemy heavy infantrymen forming a line on the other side of the river. I don’t think any army has ever been so pleased to see the enemy in the history of warfare. There were tears of joy on Demosthenes’ face as he ordered us to charge, and we went through that river and through the enemy line like an arrow through a rabbit. Unfortunately, not many of the enemy stayed to meet us, but those we managed to get hold of were chopped up so fine you could have made sausages out of them. But afterwards the light infantry came back, and stayed with us every step of our way until nightfall.
Although we were all exhausted, very few of us slept that night. We started off very early the next morning, I suppose in the hope that we might outrun the enemy; but they were with us again by mid-morning, and their attacks were exactly like those of the previous day. In the end we were forced back to the place we had camped the night before. The food had run out now, and the enemy cavalry made it impossible for us to go out and look for any. The next day we set off even earlier, and reached the blocked pass where we had been turned back the day before. There were heavy infantry waiting for us there, and we ran at them with a will; but the Syracusans had lined either side of the pass with vast numbers of archers and javelin-men who were able to shoot at us from above at short range without our being able to do anything to them, and I was reminded of that time on Samos when a handful of herd-boys with slings had briefly neutralised our column. We gave up trying to force the pass, and fell back over the dead bodies of our own men, both that day’s and the previous day’s losses. Then, just to add to the misery of it all, it started to rain very heavily, and through the rain we could just make out the Syracusans building a wall at the other end of the pass.
‘This is fun,’ said Cyon next to me. ‘The buggers can’t be doing with all this walking about, they’re penning us in to murder us.’
But Demosthenes wasn’t standing for that. He led the attack himself and threw down the wall, and we went desolately back to our campsite for the second time. The next day we set off in a different direction through open country, but this didn’t help matters very much. They still came at us (‘For God’s sake,’ Callicrates kept saying, ‘they’ve got to run out of arrows soon. There isn’t that much bronze in the whole world!’) and there seemed to be more of them every day. I think that the Syracusans had their heavy infantrymen at it now, throwing and shooting side by side with the serfs and peasants, which was a striking tribute to the levelling power of patriotism but no fun at all for us. We struggled on like idiots for the rest of that day and camped where we could.
But Demosthenes wasn’t finished yet. In the middle of the night the order came round to light as many campfires as we had fuel for, leave everything except our weapons, and move. Callicrates, I remember, suddenly became very cheerful as we discovered that we were now marching in a different direction; no longer towards Camarina but straight for Catana, which, as I seemed to remember, had been our intention in the first place.
‘The only reason they’ve been chasing us,’ he said, over and over again, ‘is that they’ve been afraid we were just pulling out to re-form and would come back again. Now it’s obvious that we’re going home, they’ll leave us in peace. They’re civilised people, they don’t want to kill us just for the hell of it. What earthly good will forty thousand dead Athenians do them?’
Put like that it sounded very reasonable, and I felt greatly relieved. Needless to say, this march by night was not a pleasant experience, bearing in mind what had happened the last time we went out after dark in this war. But Demosthenes had got things sorted out, and had rigged up a simple but efficient system of communications based on runners to keep the army together. Unfortunately, Nicias refused to co-operate — God knows why — with the result that his part of the army got separated from Demosthenes’ force and went wandering off on its own. I heard afterwards that Nicias had got it into his head that if he separated from Demosthenes and made a run for it, he might get to Catana while the Syracusans were busy butchering Demosthenes’ force; and it’s certainly true that Nicias’ men got quite some way ahead of us. But I refuse to believe that Nicias would deliberately have done such a thing, and I prefer to think that it was simply confusion and ineptitude.
Be that as it may; the army was now split into two parts, which made us that bit more vulnerable. We thought we would move more quickly without the rubbish we had been carting with us before; but now we had a large number of wounded men with us — the arrow attacks wounded many times more men than they killed, and since the wounded men invariably died sooner or later it made relatively little difference, except that the presence of so many dying men did little to improve our morale — and we refused to leave them behind. Many men attributed our present misfortunes to abandoning our wounded at Syracuse, and they were determined not to make the same mistake twice. So we didn’t move significantly faster.
When it became light and there was no sign of the enemy, there was such a feeling of jubilation in the army that you would have thought we were safely home in Attica. We soon reached the sea, and the sight of it cheered us up still further. We may not have had any ships, but we were still Athenians, and the sight of all that blue water somehow made us feel nearer home. We joined a main road, and gradually our speed increased. The general opinion was that Demosthenes would head down this until he came to a river called Cacy-something (I’m hopeless at place names more than two syllables long); he would then turn up country in the hope of meeting up with the savages who were on our side. Apparently they had plenty of cavalry and light infantry, and they hated the Syracusans, and would see them off in next to no time.
The sheer exhilaration of not being chased or shot at made many of us act as if we were drunk; we had had the Syracusans on our backs for four days, and the effect was cumulative. Now that we couldn’t see them any more we started singing and scampering along, speculating as to what they were up to and whether they were missing us. We wished we could see the expression on the faces of their mighty generals Hermocrates and Gylippus the Spartan, when they came out to play and saw nothing but an empty camp; and no way of knowing which way we had gone. Being Syracusans, we reckoned, they would immediately accuse Gylippus of letting us escape on purpose (they did, as it happens) and cut his head off (they didn’t). We imagined what they were saying to each other right now; for example:
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Gylippus: Well, you had them last.
Hermocrates: I’m sure I had them a minute ago. Hell, I’m always losing things; bits of string, old oil-jars, battles.
Gylippus: Where did you have them last? Have you looked in your other pocket? I’m sure I gave them to you to look after.
Hermocrates: We could ask Sicanus, he may have seen them. Hey, Sicanus…
We came to the crossing of the river Whatsitsname and found that there had been a battle. The Syracusans had built a wall across the road at this point, and obviously Nicias’ men had been through it, since it was smashed down and the ground all around it was littered with bodies. There was no way of knowing whether they were dead Syracusans or dead Athenians, but we naturally assumed they were Syracusans. We started cheering and yelling and waving our spears in the air as if we had lust won the victory ourselves, and suddenly it seemed to us that we might get away after all. Nicias had left some men behind, and they said that he had pressed on towards the river Erineus, which was a little way further on; he had been talking with some friendly natives, who had assured him that it would be better to turn in there, since that would be a better way into the mountains. The thought that there were friendly natives to give such advice was marvellously reassuring, and we set off towards the Erineus.
We were marching more slowly now, as if the urgency had gone out of it, and we realised we were extremely hungry. And sure enough we came across a large farm with five full barns, and nobody at home except a crazy old woman, whom the family had presumably left for us to kill. Since it was nearly time for the main meal of the day, we stopped and sat down to eat. I remember the buzz of conversation that rose from the army, for the first time in many days; it was like a hive of bees excited by the warmth of the sun after a long period of rain. Someone found where the farmer had buried his wine-jars and we helped ourselves. It was almost like one of those picnics City people love to take up into the country round Phylae.
