The Sword of Attila

by David Gibbins

  Rather than remaining safely caged in Ravenna, the lunatics had flown the nest, but they had only been released as a ploy by Heraclius to undermine Aetius’ plans. The farce of the western Roman emperor’s sole contact with Attila during a time of crisis and build-up to war being about his patently insane sister had convinced Attila of a fundamental weakness in the empire, something that made him foreshorten his own plans for conquest. For months afterwards everything had hung in the balance, Aetius becoming increasingly desperate to shore up his allies and create new alliances, with the spectre of Visigoth refusal hanging over everything. But finally the work of Pelagius in persuading the clergy of Gaul to push for an alliance had paid off, and Theodoric had come on board in the nick of time.

  Flavius remembered the gauntlet he had thrown Attila, the invitation to battle. Then, it had been a way of occupying time, a provocation more amusing to Attila than the platitudes and attempts at appeasement that he was used to receiving from other emissaries, but now it had a prophetic air to it, with all of the events of the last two years leading inexorably towards a showdown. All of the planning and expectation and fear had come to a head three months before when Attila had come bursting out of his homeland, reaching Gaul and taking Aurelianum before heading north towards the rolling grasslands of the Catalaunian Plains. Some thought that the arrival of Aetius and the comitatenses had driven Attila out of the city on an unruly flight towards northern Gaul, and it suited Aetius for them to think so. But Flavius knew the truth. He remembered what he had offered Attila, when they had talked that day in his stronghold in the steppes: a battleground of your own choice. Attila had not fled, but he was leading them on, drawing them to a place where the two armies could meet in the contest of his dreams, the mother of all battles.

  Flavius had last seen Pelagius four months earlier when Pelagius had handed him the sword, having kept it in secret since Flavius had passed it to him for safekeeping after his escape from the court of Attila; now Flavius carried it day and night swathed in the same old cassock he had worn on their adventure up the Danube. Pelagius too had been on his way to Britain, his work for Aetius done. Flavius had remembered Arturus’ parting words below the Alps, an invitation for him to join him as well in Britain, if Rome became too dangerous and soldiering for the empire had become too thankless a task; it was something that had been on Flavius’ mind over the last days as he contemplated what the future might hold in terms of Roman service for Macrobius and the surviving men of his numerus, all of them here today geared for the coming battle that for any of them could be their last.

  He reached up and twisted his thin leather necklace that he had worn constantly since Una had given it to him on the beach two years before, feeling the lump of polished blackstone that was hanging below. It was as if touching it stopped him from worrying about her, made him simply remember the warmth of her presence, took his mind from the voyage she had undertaken and the dangers and uncertainties that she must have faced on the way. Macrobius, the grizzled bachelor, had always told him that soldiering and long-term relationships were doomed never to work together, but it still did not make the parting any easier or help him when he lay awake at night wondering whether he should have done things differently. He let go of the stone and squinted up at the sky. Soldiering at least had the benefit of keeping your mind on practical issues of the moment, and right now he needed to ensure that he was primed and ready to give Aetius the best possible advice on Attila’s likely tactical plan. It might be the last task of any consequence that he ever carried out in the service of Rome, but it was a daunting responsibility as well as something that he was determined to do to the best of his ability.

  And still he wondered about Attila. How had he reacted when he realized that his sacred sword was missing? It was impossible to know; there had been no reliable intelligence from the Hun court since their departure. The death of Bleda would have been a blow – he had been a volatile, mercurial man with a savage temper, but an experienced adviser in war and Attila’s own brother; yet violent death was commonplace in the Hun court, and others would be there to replace him. Flavius had felt a chill of doubt course through him when he had first heard word of the Hun army rolling west three months ago – something that surely could not have happened had Attila lost his own confidence and that of his people in him. Flavius had steeled himself not to think of these things again until the time was right. The sword was a weapon of war, a symbol that could sway the outcome of a battle, and if it had the power that was claimed of it, then it was in battle that the test would lie, the proof that their mission had been worth the lives of Uago and others who had fallen along the way.

  A soldier wearing the insignia of a tribune came out of the entrance to meet them, Flavius having announced their arrival to one of the milites guarding the courtyard, who had then gone in to inform Aetius. The tribune saluted and gestured, and Flavius nodded in return. He let his horse finish drinking from the bucket he had been holding in front of it, and passed the bridle to Macrobius. It had been a long, hot journey, and watering the animals and the men would be a priority for the coming day. He took off his sword belt and handed that as well to Macrobius, leaving him to seek food and drink, and then picked his way among the piles of horse droppings in the courtyard and followed the tribune inside.

  Aetius was standing at the head of the room contemplating a charred wooden cross that the monks believed was one of the very crosses of the crucifixion set up on the hill of Calvary on the day of Christ’s judgement. Five other men stood around the table in front of him: Thorismud and two other Goths on one side, and on the other the two Roman magistri of the comitatenses armies that were present in the field, Flavius Aspar and Gaius Petronius Anagastus. Aetius saw his nephew entering and, stepping down from the altar, went over to the head of the table. ‘This council of war is convened. The two comitatenses commanders you all know. Flavius Aetius, my nephew, is a tribune who has ridden with Attila. Theodoric is not able to be present.’

  Thorismud turned to the Roman commanders. ‘My father and brother are walking among our men. It is the tradition of kings on the eve of battle, to be followed by a feast in the mead hall for the King and his captains, and around the campfires for the men. Oxen for the men and boar and deer for the king have been brought in for slaughter and roasted in preparation. I am here at this council to represent my father, along with my cousins Radagaisus and Thiudimer.’

  Aetius unrolled a soft vellum sheet that was lying on the table, and the two generals weighed down the ends with drinking cups. It was a map, the course of the rivers clearly marked in black, the disposition of the armies as blocks in other colours. The convention was instantly familiar to Flavius from map-making classes in the schola militarum in Rome almost fifteen years before; it brought to mind the last time he had been with Thorismud poring over a map like this, studying the Battle of Adrianople and the tactics of the Goths in defeating the Romans on that fateful day almost seventy years before. Aetius pointed out the features on the map as he spoke. ‘This was prepared in the past few hours by my fabri, and is based on their own survey as well as on the reports of the scouts from the reconnaissance numerus. You can see the river Aube, trending north and defining the west side of the battlefield, and to the south the point where it joins with the river Seine. The triangle of land created by that intersection is a potential killing ground if an army were to be trapped there by another pressing down from the north-east. Otherwise, the topography comprises low-lying, undulating plains, with a ridge in the middle bisecting the battlefield, and to the east open rolling countryside.’

  Aspar tapped the map. ‘Our army is to the west of that ridge with the river behind us, the Hun army to the east with open land beyond. Other than the one place where the river Aube can be forded, we have no escape route.’

  Aetius gave him a grim look. ‘Then we must fight to the death.’

  ‘Ave, magister militus.’

  ‘What of the terrain?’ Flavius asked.
‘Where my centurion Macrobius and I have just ridden, the ground was very hard, almost like rock.’

  ‘It has not rained for weeks,’ Aetius replied. ‘There will be no mud to contend with, though the hard ground will pose other problems. It will become slippery where it pools with blood.’

  ‘That is how it will be after I and my men have fought there,’ the Goth Radagaisus said, his voice guttural and his Latin heavily accented. ‘A place slippery with Hun blood.’

  Aetius carried on. ‘The only trees are along the line of the river. The fields are planted with wheat, but it is not high enough to provide cover. There is a stream running through the centre of the battlefield below our side of the ridge, fed by a spring, but the ditch is narrow enough for a man to leap across. There are no particular advantages to either side of this landscape from a tactical viewpoint, except that ridge that rises to a height of fifty to seventy feet above the floodplain. It’s not much, but whoever holds it might be able to dominate the battlefield.’

  ‘What of the dispositions of the troops?’ Flavius asked.

  ‘My scouts tells me that the Huns are concentrated with their wagons immediately beyond that ridge, with Valamer and his Ostrogoths to the north and Ardaric and his Gepids to the south. On our side, the comitatenses are ranged to the north and the Visigoths to the south, with the centre of the line opposite the Huns divided equally between Romans and Visigoths.’

  ‘That division was not necessary,’ Aspar grumbled. ‘My comitatenses alone could hold the line against the Huns.’

  Aetius glared at him. ‘Your faith in your men is commendable, magister, but you have not been ranged against a Hun army like this before. The Roman milites are more skilled as archers than the Visigoths, but the Visigoths are better at single combat. We cannot afford a Hun breakthrough in the centre of the line and we must strengthen it to our maximum advantage, regardless of the sensitivities of the commanders. If that means comitatenses share the task with Visigoths, then so be it.’

  ‘We have agreed to another compromise,’ Thorismud said, looking at the two Roman commanders. ‘We wished the main flank of our Visigoth army to confront the Ostrogoths to the north, but my father Theodoric agreed that instead we should face the Gepids to the south, and leave the Ostrogoths for the comitatenses.’

  ‘Your father may once have been my mortal enemy, but he is a wise and experienced general,’ Aetius said. ‘The blood feuds you doubtless have with your Ostrogoth cousins may stiffen your resolve against them, but blood feuds have no place in war. One chieftain may divert his men in order to encounter a particularly reviled cousin, whereas another might avoid a group with whom he has kinship ties and no animosity. To have placed your army opposite the Ostrogoths as some of your Visigoth chieftains wished could have created inconsistency in the line, whereas against the Gepids you can fight as one force.’

  ‘And Sangibanus?’ Flavius asked.

  Aetius pursed his lips. ‘I have placed Sangibanus and his Alans between the Romans and the Visigoths, but as soon as battle is joined we will close up and they will be forced back to form a reserve. They are our one liability. I offered Sangibanus a bribe of more land around Orléans for his Alans to settle as well as a place for his men in my army in return for his allegiance, after he had threatened to turn Orléans over to Attila and revive the traditional alliance of the Alans with the Huns.’

  ‘These are not Alans as we saw them with Gaiseric’s army at Carthage,’ Flavius said. ‘Macrobius and I passed Sangibanus and his men on the way up from Nîmes. The warriors who were once a tower of strength are now fat and indolent, softened by settled life and self-indulgence.’

  ‘Exactly what we had hoped for when we offered them land in the first place years ago. Give some enemies an easy life, and soon they are no longer a threat. But when I was forced to negotiate terms with Sangibanus, I did not yet know whether Theodoric would join us against Attila, and I needed every ally I could get. Had I known then that I could rely on the Visigoths, I would happily have kicked Sangibanus and his pigsty back to Attila.’

  ‘If they’re to be a reserve beside the river, we could use them to bring water up to the troops,’ Anagastus suggested.

  ‘They’re too unfit even for that,’ Aspar said. ‘In this heat, they’d probably collapse before they marched ten paces.’

  ‘I am more confident of the barbarians in the comitatenses,’ Aetius said. ‘As I formed my army on the way here I enlisted Salian and Ripuarian Franks, Burghundians, Armorican Celts, even a few exiled Britons. Because we had no time for training I only accepted veterans, offering them enlistment in the comitatenses and rank appropriate to their experience, as well as the all-important payout when the battle is over. Valentinian has assured me that the gold will be available, but these veteran milites know well enough how far they can trust the word of an emperor when it comes to pay. I gave them five gold solidi apiece on enlistment out of my own purse, and will probably be making up the remainder myself when it comes time for the survivors to demand it.’

  ‘What are the overall numbers?’ Flavius asked.

  ‘Almost evenly matched,’ Anagastus replied. ‘Nearly thirty thousand men of the comitatenses and twenty thousand Visigoths, against twenty thousand Huns and thirty thousand Ostrogoths. The comitatenses have more infantry archers, the Huns more mounted archers.’

  Aetius turned to Flavius. ‘I invited you here because you have ridden into battle with Attila, because you know the man. What is your assessment of his tactics?’

  Flavius stared at the map, remembering the Huns in their homeland and imagining what their encampment would look like now on the Catalaunian Plains. He thought hard, and then looked at Aetius. ‘Attila has never fought a pitched battle like this before. Most of his battles have been clashes of movement, of an army constantly on the move overtaking and bearing down on an advancing or retreating enemy, quick and ferocious encounters with little preamble or tactical forethought. Because he has no supply chain and is used to campaigning in the barren wastes of the East where the pickings from foraging are slim, war on the hoof is a matter of necessity, not choice. Unlike many of the Goth commanders, men like our own Theodoric and Thorismud, or his Ostrogoth general Valamer, Attila did not attend the schola militarum in Rome or Constantinople, so he has no training in the tactics of pitched battle. He has had no need of them before; all he has needed is the whirlwind terror of the Hun mounted assault, and that has carried him this far. But now it is different.’

  ‘Does he have good advisers?’

  ‘Valamer is a competent tactician. But like most of the Goth officers who went through the schola at Constantinople, he is obsessed with the Battle of Adrianople. After all, it was a Goth victory, and the battle site is just a stone’s throw from Constantinople itself. But Adrianople was a more close-run thing than many have been led to believe, and if Valamer does influence Attila, that obsession with Adrianople could end up being his biggest tactical weakness tomorrow.’

  ‘You mean the laager!’ Thorismud exclaimed. ‘The wheeled fortress of wagons.’

  ‘Precisely,’ Flavius said. ‘If our scouts are right, Attila has shown his limitations by going to the opposite extreme from the fluid, mobile warfare in which his warriors rule supreme, opting instead this time for the fortified compound behind wagons that allowed the Goths at Adrianople to resist repeated Roman assaults and then sally forth. But we too have learned from Adrianople, and that is precisely not to make the same mistake again: not to make frontal assaults on a hot day against a wagon laager, wearing down our men with exhaustion and casualties to the point where they can be overwhelmed by a force erupting from the compound.’

  ‘So instead you surround them and starve them out,’ Thorismud said.

  ‘And you force him to sally forth, to send out his mounted archers in lightning attacks in an effort to keep up the morale of his men and to erode ours,’ Anagastus said. ‘But by maintaining our defensive line in strength, we resist his attacks and keep ou
r line unbroken, and his casualties mount up higher than ours.’

  ‘Our sagittarii in the comitatenses use bows that have a greater range than the Hun cavalry bow,’ Aetius said. ‘I have made a special study of them at the butts on the Field of Mars in Rome with the emperor Valentinian, who exercises his fascination with archery whenever he allows himself out of the clutches of that eunuch Heraclius. If we can reach high ground and rain arrows down on the laager, then we might win the day.’

  Anagastus stood back, put his hands on his hips and shook his head. ‘This is still going to be a battle won mainly by attrition. We have been talking about a scenario where Attila has already been forced back into his laager, and for that to happen we still have to confront his army in open battle and drive the Huns back over that ridge. It may just be a bump in the ground, but for many men tomorrow that ridge will seem like an insurmountable mountain.’

  ‘We do have one crucial advantage,’ Aetius said. ‘We can keep our supplies coming, and he cannot. If we can avoid outright defeat and hold a stalemate for more than twenty-four hours, then his army will begin to suffer. Attila has depended on foraging as his army has made its way east, whereas we can still call on the military stockpiles in the diocesan and provincial capitals. When I was a young candidate in officer school we were taught that the three pivots of battle were strategy, tactics and supply, and this could be one of those battles where that third pivot is decisive. I must go now to meet my quartermasters.’

  ‘And we go to feast,’ Thorismud said, rising from his chair, the two Goths beside him doing the same. ‘In your absence, I ask that Flavius Aetius take your place in the tent we have laid out as a mead hall.’

  Aetius nodded at Flavius, who turned to Thorismud and bowed. ‘I would be honoured to attend king Theodoric and feast alongside his sons and captains.’