Count Belisarius (30 page)

King Geilimer, however, was not at Carthage, but at Bulla with most of his fighting men, some days' journey away inland. His brother Ammatas, to whom the courier delivered the message, immediately forwarded it to him. The post-system in the Vandal kingdom being very well organized, Geilimer was able to reply on the following day. His message was that Hilderich was to be put to death at once, and that Ammatas was to prepare to hold the road by which we were approaching, at the tenth milestone from Carthage, where there is a narrow defile between hills. Ammatas's forces must be in position by the third day of July. He would himself hurry up with cavalry reinforcements and take us in the rear on that day, unless the situation had meanwhile altered. Of this exchange of letters Belisarius knew nothing as yet.

We continued our march by way of Leptiminus and the great cornport of Hadrumetum, covering twelve miles a day. Meanwhile we were well supplied with fruit and fresh bread by the country people, who greeted us with the utmost enthusiasm, poor souls. Every night we entrenched. To build the necessary stockade, each soldier carried a long, pointed stake, which was planted in the rampart. The fleet kept pace with us on our right, and the wind remained favourable. Armenian John, with 300 of the Household Regiment, formed the vanguard, and the Massagetic Huns protected our left flank. Belisarius commanded the rearguard. At last we reached the neck of the promontory and must part company with the fleet; but our regret was soothed by the beauty of the place that we came upon at this point, the Paradise of Grasse. This is a royal palace which Geiserich built and surrounded
with a noble park. There are great groves of trees here, of every variety suitable to the climate, and fish-pools and fountains and lawns and shady walls and arbours and beds of flowers; and an immense orchard consisting of trees arranged in quincunx, that is, in groups of five, each quincunx consisting of trees of five different varieties. The African climate is hotter than ours, so that at midsummer there was ripe fruit, which we had not expected to find until early August – second-figs and peaches and grapes and the like. The troops camped under these trees and were permitted to eat what they could, but not to carry any fruit away. We all gorged ourselves on bullaces and damsons and figs and mulberries, yet when we marched on again the trees still seemed as heavily laden as ever.

This was the day on which we heard of the execution of Hilderich, and on which King Geilimer's scouts first made contact with our rearguard. But Belisarius continued forward without lagging or hurrying. By the sixth day, the fourth day of July, we had crossed the peninsula and, skirting the Lake of Tunis, drawn near to the Tenth Milestone. Here there was a small village and a posting-station; we halted five miles away from it. Belisarius chose a defensible site for the usual fortified camp, where we dug ourselves to safety as usual, each man fixing his stake in the stockade.

Meanwhile the Vandal forces were closing in on us. Ammatas led out the garrison from Carthage; Geilimer's nephew, the son of Zazo, advanced against our flank; and Geilimer himself threatened our rear. Now, the Vandals, like the Goths, were fine horsemen and clever with lance and broadsword, but only their infantry carried bows. They had no recent experience of horse-archers like ours, for their only enemies in this country, the wild Moorish horsemen of the desert, used javelins. This was greatly to our advantage. As for their fighting qualities: these fair-skinned, fair-haired Northerners had now, by the third generation, become acclimatized to Africa. They had intermarried with the natives, changed their diet and yielded to the African sun (which makes for ill-temper rather than endurance) – and to such luxuries as silk clothes, frequent bathing, spiced foods, orchestral music, and massage instead of exercise. This enervating life had brought out strongly a trait common to all Germanic tribes, namely an insecure hold on the emotions. However, their fighting forces had increased in numbers since Geiserich's time from 50,000 to 80,000, apart from their numerous Moorish allies.

Armenian John with the vanguard pushed on ahead, and on the third day of July, about midday, turning a corner in the road close to the Tenth Milestone, he came upon a force of 100 well-mounted Vandal horsemen halted negligently outside the posting-station. John's men, who were riding in column, could not deploy, because of the narrowness of the defile through which the road passed at this point. There was no opportunity for using their bows, so they immediately charged with the lance, just as they were. The Vandals formed up hurriedly and stood their ground. In the ensuing skirmish twelve of our men went down; but then Armenian John pulled a weighted throwing-dart from his shield and with it struck their leader, a handsome youth in gilded armour, full in the forehead at short range. He toppled from his horse, dead, and the Vandals then broke away, with cries of dismay, pursued by our men. More Vandals, leisurely trotting up the road in troops of twenty or thirty, became involved in the rout; and as a snowball rolled down a hill picks up new snow and grows to monstrous proportions, so with the Vandals in flight. With lance and throwing-dart and arrow the cuirassiers pursued, killing methodically, not allowing the enemy the opportunity to reform, driving them headlong out of the defile.

It was possible to deploy in the plain beyond, and the slaughter was even greater there. Armenian John pushed the Vandals back to the very walls of Carthage, and by a view of the corpses dotted here and there over the plain in those ten miles one could have imagined that an army of 20,000 men, not a mere half-squadron, had been at work.

Meanwhile King Geilimer's forces and those of his nephew converged on the Tenth Milestone. In a plain which had once been a salt marsh the nephew had the ill-luck to come suddenly upon the Massagetic Huns. He outnumbered them by 3,000 to 600, but the outlandish look of these hollow-eyed, long-haired fellows (who lived, remember, a year's journey away from Carthage and had never before been seen on African soil) scared the superstitious Vandals, and the unexpected, stinging showers of arrows were terrible. They fled unanimously without coming to blows at all, and were massacred almost to a man. As for Geilimer, he was unaware of his nephew's fate and had lost touch with Belisarius's rearguard, because of the hilly nature of the ground. Belisarius knew by now that Armenian John had cleared the defile of the enemy; but had received no further reports from him, and feared that he might have been ambushed and
stand in need of assistance. Leaving the infantry behind in the stockade, he ordered the Herulians under his blood-brother Pharas, and a squadron of Thracian Goths, to gallop ahead and investigate; he followed at a more leisurely pace with the main body of cavalry.

King Geilimer was close to the Tenth Milestone now, with 30,000 cavalry. At the stockade my mistress had taken command and organized the defence in a very capable way; for she had studied these matters with Belisarius, and her courage and humorous manner of address inspired great confidence in all. However, her military capacities were not put to any severe test: Geilimer passed by our stockade without seeing it, for a hill lay between. He missed Belisarius too, who was advancing by a different road.

When Pharas and the Thracian Goths reached the posting-house where the skirmish had taken place, they found the people there in a state of the greatest excitement; because the dead Vandal in the gilded armour was none other than Ammatas himself, Geilimer's brother.

Pharas and his Herulians pushed on in search of Armenian John. Hardly had they gone when a cloud of dust was seen to the southward, and a look-out signalled enormous forces of Vandal cavalry-King Geilimer's men. The Thracian Goths immediately rushed to seize the hill commanding the entrance to the defile, but the Vandals soon thrust them off it by sheer weight of numbers, and they retreated at a gallop on the main body. Thus King Geilimer, with an army five times the size of ours, was left in possession of the highly defensible defile. Armenian John and Pharas were on one side, and Belisarius on the other, our fleet was far away – the battle was as good as lost to us.

Now, in Constantinople there is a square called ‘The Square of Brotherly Love' with a fine group of statuary in it, on a tall pedestal, commemorating the fraternal devotion of the sons of the Emperor Constantine – who subsequently destroyed one another without mercy. And among the Greeks and other inhabitants of the Mediterranean lands true fraternal devotion, because of the laws of inheritance, is so rare that its genuine occurrence, even in less exalted persons than young men born in the purple, would indeed be worthy of sculptural commemoration. Why, the oldest poem in the Greek language, the
Works and Days
of Hesiod, grew out of an instance of fraternal squabbling. But with the Germanic tribes brotherly devotion is the rule rather than a rarity, and the luxurious life that they lived in Africa had by no means weakened this trait in the Vandals. When,
therefore, King Geilimer reached the posting-house by the Milestone in the middle of the afternoon, and the news was broken to him that his brother Ammatas had been killed, this was a terrible thing for him. He gave himself up to barbarian grief and was incapable of taking stock of the tactical position: he could think only in terms of sepulchres and funeral elegies.

Belisarius had rallied the Thracian-Gothic fugitives and pressed on with them to the Milestone, where the Vandal forces were now crowded together in complete disorder. The cavalry had descended from the commanding hill in order to observe what was happening, and remained to join in the general lamentations over Ammatas's death. Geilimer, who now heard also of the defeat and death of his nephew at the hands of the Massagetic Huns, was blubbering disconsolately, and no military thought or action could be expected of him.

Belisarius, surprised but gratified by what he saw, at once divided his squadrons into two compact masses and sent them up the hills on either side of the defile; and, when they were in position, signalled a simultaneous attack on the mass below and between. Volleys of arrows lent sting to that impetuous charge, the slope of the hill lent it irresistible momentum. Hundreds of the enemy went down at the first onset. Then our squadrons disengaged and, after withdrawing a little way up the slope and letting loose another volley of arrows, charged once more. They repeated this manoeuvre again and again. Within half an hour all the surviving Vandals but two or three squadrons, who were cut off in the defile, were away in full flight towards the salt-marsh, where a great number of them were headed off and killed by the Massagetic Huns. As for Armenian John in the plain outside Carthage, his men had become so scattered from plundering the dead that he could not easily rally them. Pharas's arrival did not help matters, for there was loot for his Herulians too, and it was some time before the combined force of 700 returned to Belisarius's assistance, arriving just before the close and completing the victory with a charge up the defile.

It was a battle of which Belisarius said: ‘I am grateful but ashamed: as a hard-pressed chess-player might be when a temperamental opponent has thrown away the game by sacrificing his best pieces. Perhaps, after all, I should have taken the Admiral's advice, and made straight for Carthage by sea; for the Milestone defile was an impassable barrier, had it been resolutely held.'

On the following morning my mistress came up with the infantry' and we all went forward together to Carthage. We arrived late in the afternoon, and found the gates thrown open to us. But Belisarius forbade any of us to enter the city, not so much because he feared a possible ambush as because he could not trust the troops to refrain from plundering. Carthage was a Roman city redeemed, not a Vandal city captured, and must be offered no violence. The jubilant citizens had lighted candles and lamps in almost every window, so that the city was illuminated as if for a festival; and very beautiful it looked from where we were, being built on gradually rising ground. Excited citizens came running out to visit our camp, with wreaths and presents for the soldiers. What a pity, they cried, that we were not allowed to participate in such marvellous scenes of unrestrained jubilation. All the vile Vandals who had not been able to escape had sought sanctuary in the churches; and there were tremendous processions in the streets, led by the bishops, of singing and cheering Orthodox Christians!

That evening the fleet arrived, for the wind had turned just as they were rounding Cape Bon; and anchored in the Lake of Tunis – all but a small division of warships that went off on an unauthorized expedition to the outer port of Carthage, the crews plundering the warehouses. When Belisarius knew that the fleet had arrived he said: ‘Yet if, risking unfavourable winds and a sea-battle, I had taken the Admiral's advice, I see now that I should have chosen wrong. For a sea-attack upon Carthage would have been madness. The defences of the harbour could not have been pierced, the sea-walls being lofty and well-manned. And if it had not been for the panic raised by the news of King Geilimer's defeat, which caused the Vandal garrison to remove the huge booms from the entrances to the Lake of Tunis and the outer harbour, so as to escape themselves in all the available ships, our fleet would not have been able to enter. It was a problem that had no solution. We should never have attempted the expedition with such small forces. Yet with greater forces would we have been so successful?'

The next morning, when it was fully day, he disembarked the marines. After giving strict orders as to the importance of keeping on good terms with the natives, he marched the whole army into Carthage. Then, billeting arrangements having been made on the previous night, each detachment moved off to the street assigned to it in as orderly a manner as if this had been Adrianople or Antioch or
Constantinople itself. My mistress Antonina went with Belisarius to the Royal Palace, which they made their home; we all sat down in the banquet hall at dinner-time to eat the very banquet that Ammatas had ordered for King Geilimer, the royal servants waiting upon us. Afterwards Belisarius sat on Geilimer's throne and dispensed justice in the name of the Emperor. The occupation of the city had been so quietly undertaken that business was not in the least disturbed. Apart from the matter of the warehouse robberies, into which he made a stern inquiry, there was no crime that called for punishment and very few complaints.