A feature of the Carso is the occurrence of what the modern Italians call the doline, huge cup-shaped hollows that can hold a man or a horse hidden. Parties of archers could be set in these, to cover large areas with their field of shot.
The earth of the Carso is red, the limestone white. There is no vegetation greater than grass or low brush in the whole of the formation. The Vallone, cutting like a fissure through the high Carso, is a dry gulch murderously hot and breathless in the summer, and there is no water at all in its ten mile length.
These barren crags of the Doberdò and the Carso, the farthest south thrust of the Julian Alps, form their own mosaic of rocks, and combine to produce the effect of their own great face. It is the face of the Devil.
Except for the intervention of Fate, an army attacking from the east could not win. But the Emperor Theodosius and his Master General Stilicho intended to win. And both had previously demonstrated a masterful way with Fate. As Catholic men, or as Arians, their strategists and themselves could not believe in Fate. But as practical manipulators they understood the allegorical meaning of Fate as applied to political efforts. But Fate was plural: the Moerae, called the Parcae by the Romans.
The first of the Fates was Clotho, the spinner who spun out the thread of life. The threads of Clotho, however, could be counterfeited; and man-made threads could be wafted out to serve as the stuff of fife and affairs. Theodosius and Stilicho had already counterfeited some of them in preparation for the grand action.
The second of the Moerae was Lachesis, who dealt out chance and luck and fortune. But Lachesis was a vacillating woman who could be compelled by the intrepid. Should one present a draft for a certain amount of luck, and present it with enough assurance, it might very well be honored. Lachesis is short-sighted and cannot read the fine print of the credentials, only the bold heading. Theodosius and Stilicho had presented such credentials.
The third of the Fates, the Parcae, was Atropos who irrevocably cut all the threads of fife, and from whom there was no appeal. But Atropos, though she could not be reversed, could yet be anticipated. The threads could very well be cut before she got there; and there was no appeal from this prior cutting, either. Theodosius and Stilicho both practiced judicious assassination from a distance, when it would serve their high cause. By this they had somewhat thinned out the more competent men about Arbogast, and warned others—men who, had they lived till they were disposed of by the Fates, might have been troublesome.
Clotho who spun the thread of life; Lachesis who measured it and gave it fortune; Atropos who cut it off—the Three Fates. But the Christian men believed themselves to be the masters and not the servitors of these Fates. The threads that Theodosius and Stilicho had spread out were long and numerous ones, and they wafted several thousand miles across the Empire like webs of giant spiders. To every treason there is a counter; and to the intricate treason of Arbogast they had responded with their own manifold intrigue. They had set out their seeds, and they believed that enough of them would grow. This seed would root beyond their sight, but there should be a harvest ready to their hand when they came.
Theodosius believed that he would be able to predict that harvest. It was an unfortunate delay in it that made him believe it had failed entirely. It was for this reason that the Emperor was sick with sorrow when he came out above the battle site and saw the vast army opposing him. His harvest had not grown. There was nothing of the good wheat at all, nothing but the pagan cockle.
Theodosius had not received a single emissary coming covertly from the enemy forces, and he had expected half a hundred. He had failed, and his project had failed.
When the turning in their favor did come, some twenty hours later, Theodosius and Stilicho had already given up and despaired of it; and had resigned themselves to defeat and death. But when it did come, it was as the delayed fruit of their preparation and intrigue. Luck and fortune do not always come in prescribed form, nor on time.
But the Emperor Theodosius was without hope on that first morning of the battle. He ordered that the Viaticum—the Holy Eucharist for those at the hour of their death—should be administered to all his men, Catholic and Arian.
Alaric and his Gothic contingent were ordered by Stilicho to advance down the Vallone. It was then that Alaric and Stilicho gazed at each other over the heads of their tall soldiery. The whole action would be a death trap, but Alaric had enough apperception to realize that the Vallone would be a charnel house beyond anything else.
It could be that Stilicho had already recognized Alaric as a threat to the Empire and would not be sorry to see him dead—if it would serve the Empire, of course. It could also be that they would all be dead that day, and it would not too much matter who went first.
The main force, generaled by Theodosius and Stilicho and Timasius, would move into the narrow passage between the River Sontius and the Doberdò Plateau. The right wing, led by the Spanish commander Bacurius and including the raiding parties of Arabians, Scythians, and the dare-devil Gothic elite of horsemen under Sarus, would raid across the Sontius high above the main battle, and harry and disconcert the flankers of Arbogast. They had no real hope of establishing themselves in numbers across the Sontius. Their moves were diversionary, madly and successfully so in the circus antics of Sarus and his select Goths, and defensive, though seeming to be a precipitous offense. The move was to draw as many Western men as possible off from the terrible array that would be punishing the Theodosian force as it filed through the vulnerable narrow passage.
Alaric, commanding the left wing of the army, led his Goths sullenly down the Vallone to die. They livened up quickly, however. They did not know the name of defeat—certainly not of defeat before the battle was even joined.
The flutes and the trumpets were perfunctory. The sound of command quickly became the voices of the commanders—echoing like the cries of so many muleteers over the rocks.
The sun had not yet reached the floor of the Vallone when the men of Alaric entered its length and engaged the advance guards of Arbogast. Neither had the wind that gathered about the heights penetrated down into the gulch; nor would it do so all day. The breath of the Vallone was stale, and its history for thousands of years could be read in its stench.
This was not actually the third battle of Aquileia; it was more like the three hundredth. And in every one of them there must have been deadly flank action in the Vallone. One could have assembled a skeleton in short minutes from the wealth of old human bones there, though wagon loads of them had been hauled off and used for fertilizer. Doomed forces had passed their final very long day here before. There was the smell of bruised weeds and boscage, and of hot rocks and curling dust. The Vallone is a desert where the mountains nearly meet overhead.
There was a whisper and a cry, and the first Gothic foot soldier was transfixed by the first arrow.
A German gentleman in the time of Frederick II complained that his son had been five years to the wars and had killed, for his share, only a probable one fifth of a man. The gentleman thought that the thing should be put on a more efficient footing. But the proportion holds roughly, and has always held.
The killing in warfare goes monstrously slow. If every man got his man there would be none left to tell about it. It is the epics and the presentations and dramas that give the idea that it is an accelerated business—that each man gets a dozen in half as many minutes.
Even in a carnage like that in the Vallone—and it was a carnage almost without equal—the killing seemed to go slowly. There were, perhaps, fourteen thousand Goths strung out; by mid-afternoon they held most of the ten-mile length of the gulch. They were subject to shot of arrow and catapult and Frankish spear and rocks from above; and they were opposed by a series of barricades which they had to take one by one for ten miles. The further they advanced, the more they were exposed; for both heights were held by their enemy who shot down vertically on them from two hundred feet. There was no question of their finding cover at all; even the cov
er of overhanging rocks could be penetrated from the opposite side.
The Goths died every inch of the way and on every side, yet it would seem that they died slowly. Should only one die every quarter minute during that ten-mile melee, they would still be one-fourth of them dead by dark. Actually, three-quarters of them would be dead in the lengthy affair.
Alaric had more horse available than he chose to use. He would bring in several hundred horsemen every hour or so, to break the front of the opposing Western army details and to harry them another quarter mile down the gulch. But every assault must be prepared by foot soldiers, and every gain must be secured and maintained by them. In the rough course, the horses were more often led in than ridden in and were mounted only for the assault on the barricades. Provision wagons were drawn in where not normally needed, to give the Goths protection under them, not from the Western men facing them, but from the Western archers overhead on the heights of the Carso. Fire arrows set many of these blazing, and low-hanging, choking smoke added to the displeasures of the Vallone.
There were no troops in either force so green as to be intimidated by the charge of horse, even heavy horse. The Western footmen had repeatedly stood to horse before. But the mounted lancers of the Goths could slant in and cut swathes by their very weight, and permit Gothic foot soldiers to get behind groups of their opponents. The Goths all longed for the open plains where they could really use their horses; but open plains were the one thing that the astute Arbogast would not allow them.
The range was much shorter then, before gunfire. Though an arrow could kill a man at a hundred yards—a lucky lofted shaft could hit its mark at three times that distance—the swordsmen and lancemen would stand and size up their opponents, well out of range at fifty feet. It was engagement and disengagement. One man against one man was a draw, until one should fall by accident or weariness. It had to be suddenly two to one, or three to two, or four to three. Even with twelve to fifteen thousand men on either side in the Vallone there was no maintaining a solid front. It was a melee in depth with the front commonly a hundred yards wide (though sometimes less than fifty feet) and some two hundred yards deep. More than half of the Goths who were killed that day were killed by missiles showered down on them from the two opposite heights. The only safety from this rain of missiles was in the area of close combat with the Arbogastian troops, and the Goths were eager to take their chances in that area.
There were no particular heroics, no great chief rushing in to cut down a dozen or a hundred of the enemy. Nearly all the men present were superior fighting men. The very best of them—as Alaric might rate himself—would hardly be worth two of the worst of them, the minimum being very high. In the close fighting of the Vallone the best man in the world was hardly worth a man and a half. There was no room for brilliance, only for steadiness. One stood and killed, or was killed.
The greatest torture was thirst; there was no water at all in the Vallone. The Westerners had access to stores of it as they fell back, but the Goths were unable to bring sufficient water carts through the miles of the carnage. There was a dead heat hanging over the gulch all that day at the end of the terrible summer. All knew that, even for this place, the heat was unnatural—that it must soon come to a breaking point in one of the violent storms of the area. But the heat would hang on all that day and into the night, and by that time most of the troops of Alaric would be dead.
Alaric used his own skirmishers. They climbed the opposing heights and went about the business of killing and hunting down the archers and ballista men and crossbowmen stationed there. But they could get only a fraction of the thousands there, hidden in the doline. Alaric also brought a few horses and mules up the heights by the old secret paths to which there were always guides. Once up the cliff paths, the horses covered the high rocks well, for the tops of both plateaus were comparatively level though very rough. The elimination of a part of the snipers lessened the attrition on the troops below, and for the first time Alaric had some hope.
Should he break through the whole length of the Vallone—that terrible ten miles—to the head of the Adriatic, the enemy snipers on the Carso side would then be isolated; and they would know it from the trumpet calls, and from their own points of observation. If by that time, and it would be late afternoon, the numbers of the snipers had been reduced sufficiently by the skirmishers of Alaric, they might send emissaries to him and hold their fire. The snipers on the Doberdò side would not be isolated, but the Doberdò is not of great extent from east to west. Many more skirmishers could be put onto its heights; they would not be in danger of arrows in their backs from the Carso side as they climbed the cliffs now. The Doberdò could be further invested during the night, and a considerable force might be brought across to its western crest.
Assuming that this should be successful, the Eastern armies could doubly flank the Western at dawn or just before, around the south end of the Doberdò where the Vallone comes out on the narrow sea plain, and down the western face of the Doberdò which, old soldiers said, was not so precipitous as the eastern.
Alaric climbed up among the crags of the east face of that same Doberdò, keeping his thousands of men under his eye and under the command of his voice. There was one who later remembered that the voice of Alaric seemed to come out of the clouds or out of the sky, and always from directly overhead, wherever in the length of the Vallone one heard it. The clouds of that day are mentioned by several as peculiar.
The clouds would come in low and sometimes screen off the tops of both plateaus entirely. They were full of red dust or, as one said, brimstone. Lightning played in these low clouds, though the sun could still be seen high in the sky. Ball lightning bounced back and forth. There was unusual electric display and static discharge about the men down in the Vallone. The weather was ominous, and there were still soldiers among the Goths pagan enough to believe in omens. It all presaged a great slaughter, they said.
Alaric knew that there would be a great slaughter, and he thought that the fantastic weather would not have anything to do with it. But in that he was wrong. The fantastic weather would have everything to do with it, and would finally decide the whole affair.
Alaric remained hopeful till late afternoon. He still believed that he could do it—up till the time when he had almost done it. There was a constant concourse of messengers coming and going. Stilicho had sent once to ask whether Alaric wanted relief for his men, whether other troops were desired. “No,” Alaric had sent back in answer, “these will make dead men as good as any.” The answer of Stilicho, reported as coming several hours later, was to ironic effect—“You want to see dead men? On the Sontius I can show you dead men.”
But Alaric had already crossed and recrossed the top of the Doberdò, on horseback, and had looked down on the carnage beside the Sontius, between the heights and the river. Whether there were more dead in the main force or in the Gothic detachment—those of the main force were more concentrated and heaped up. The Gothic dead were strung out on a ten-mile course.
Alaric, in the action of that day, killed the first and the second man he ever killed. It is not known whether he ever killed other men in his life. A panegyrist ascribes thousands to him personally, but the form of the account argues against its complete validity.
It was late in the afternoon that Alaric realized he had lost, and he sent word to Stilicho to that effect. He could not have done differently in any case; there had been no other way to carry on the action.
The way of Alaric's men down the Vallone had been made too easy for several hours; it was murderous going, but it was still too easy. It had been a trap to get the Goths to overextend themselves, to go the final miles of the course instead of giving it up as impossible earlier in the day. Alaric could take the Vallone to its very end; but he would not have enough troops left alive to occupy the sea plain effectively, or to turn the corner for a flank attack on the main forces of Arbogast. Alaric had asked Stilicho whether he should begin the withdrawal up the g
ulch in order, or should wait until further reduction of his forces and the inevitable counterattack of the Arbogastians at darkness should turn the adventure into a rout. The answer from the Master General had not yet come. In the meanwhile Alaric decided, as a point of honor, to fulfill his assignment literally. He would take the Vallone to the very end of it, and then consider his own—and Stilicho's—decision.
It was an hour before sundown that the forces of Arbogast had let the Goths taste green grass and salt sea at the south end of the burning Vallone. Then the Westerners had mounted a supreme charge on the thin and overextended Goths. They overwhelmed them with five times their numbers of rested soldiery, and the Goths had sustained the fearsome heat and thirst of the Vallone for thirteen hours—since a little before dawn. The object of the Arbogastians was to harry the Goths back over the ten miles of stifling hell in the coming dark, to rout them and complete their annihilation.
It was then that the message came from Stilicho. It stated that, insofar as human forces and resources were concerned, they were defeated utterly at all points. Nevertheless, he ordered Alaric not to withdraw in either an orderly or disorderly manner. They were to hold the end of the Vallone till there was not one man of them left. And they were to continue to invest the two heights throughout the night—if they could find men at all for it. “You will find it as good a graveyard as any,” was the final cheerful word of the Master General.
Alaric told his men to stand and die, and they accepted his order. There was some bitterness among the Goths, however, when their own observers on the top of the Doberdò reported that the central forces of the Emperor Theodosius and his Master Generals Stilicho and Timasius had themselves withdrawn from the battlefield between the Sontius and the Doberdò, and had taken refuge up the defile of the Frigidus and its hills on either side. They hoped to find better graveyards, or none at all.
Summa Risus: Collected Non-Fiction Page 27
