The Ghosts of Cannae: Hannibal and the Darkest Hour of the Roman Republic (17 page)

Enter a delegation of elders from the local tribes. Bearing olive branches and purporting to be cowed by Hannibal’s recent victory over the Allobroges, they offered him provisions and guides to lead him over the mountains. Hannibal may have been skeptical, but he was also probably desperate for supplies and directions; so he went against his instincts, took some hostages, and once again became dependent upon the kindness of strangers. It was a near fatal error.

For ambush, not guidance, was their intent. Over the next two days these Gauls led the Punic force in the general direction of the Italian frontier, but all the while funneled warriors from the network of surrounding villages into a trap calculated to produce maximum lethality. So for the second time Hannibal found himself standing before the entrance of a long, narrow, very deep gorge. Sensing Gallic treachery, he took the precaution of re-forming his column with the pack train in the middle, the elephants and cavalry at the head, and the heavy infantry to the rear. Polybius (3.53.1) says it saved the army from utter destruction. Still, Hannibal stood on the precipice, about to become ensnared in a deadly combination of bad company and bad country. Of the approximately forty thousand men who entered the gorge, only 65 percent would survive the week or so it took to reach the Lombard plain.
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Initially the atttacking Gauls were divided into two elements: those stationed along the cliffs above, and a larger group shadowing the Punic column at ground level. The Gauls waited until virtually all of the Carthaginian army had been swallowed up by the defile and then delivered their first thrust against the rear guard, which, turning in unison, checked it. Had the heavy infantry not been in the back, the Gauls might have rolled up the entire force from the rear. Still, the Carthaginians could not prevent a devastating assault from above, as the tribesmen once again began bombarding the column and especially the pack animals with rocks, boulders, spears, and arrows—a hail of projectiles that this time could not be stopped, only endured. The Gauls even managed to establish a blocking force on the narrowest part of the path, effectively cutting the Carthaginian army in half. Still, there was only one way out, and that was forward, so the vanguard pushed ahead.

It was at this point—the first and only during the entire campaign—where the Punic pachyderms truly earned their keep. Doubtless enraged by the barrage of rocks, the elephants were even more intent on exiting the gorge than their compatriots, and they proved considerably more effective at doing so, since the Gauls blocking the exit had never dreamed such beasts existed, and scattered in terror before them. Spilling out of the far end of the defile the forward portion of the Carthaginian force was saved. Hannibal, never slow to grasp an advantage, seems to have led the elephants back to break up the Gauls obstructing the rear of the Punic column, thereby rescuing the remainder of his army, minus the heavy casualties they must have taken.
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All told, it was far from Hannibal’s best battle, and things would soon get a lot worse.

At high altitude, with winter breathing down his neck, a hungry army at his back, and now without guides, Hannibal was plainly disoriented. He had been led into this valley partly because of its gorge and the opportunities afforded for ambush, but also apparently because it ended with one of the highest and most remote of all the southern Alpine passes. Which brings us to an equivalently bewildering intellectual pass: Which Alpine pass was it?

There are two basic routes Hannibal could have taken. He might have left the Rhône and followed the Isère River to the Arc and then passed over the Petit Mount Cenis or possibly the col du Clapier (the two favored by most scholars).
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Or he might have passed over the Savine-Coche,
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which was close at hand. Alternatively, he could have turned off the Rhône slightly farther south and passed along the Drôme and Durance rivers and climbed through the col de la Traversette.
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All lead to the vicinity of Turin, where we know he emerged. In the absence of definitive archaeological evidence, of which there is not a scrap, the truth will remain buried deep in the past, despite a mountain of argumentation, opinion, prejudice, jealousy, and perhaps even hatred—a perfect example of an academic dispute grown bitter because so little is truly at stake. For our purposes, all we really need to know is that he and his army suffered horribly but eventually made it across.

There was no turning back; time was too short. He had to push ahead as rapidly as possible. Wanting no part of the elephants, the tribesmen pretty much left the Carthaginians alone afterward, and the march to the summit proved relatively straightforward, with the vanguard making it by noon of the next day. So, nearly three weeks since leaving the Rhône and nine days after entering the Alps, they were literally in sight of their goal.

After resting the troops for two nights and waiting for stragglers at a camp just below the crest, Hannibal rousted his army at daybreak for the descent into Italy. The top of the pass provided a splendid vista of the Po valley and the green plains that stretched beyond; so he gathered them here for a pep talk, promising that from this point it was all downhill—a few battles, and Rome would be theirs.
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He was right at least on the first count, but the icy path down was a great deal steeper than the ascent, and shortly the mountain was shedding Carthaginians and their animals like so many flakes of dandruff. After several hours of baby steps and the progress of only a few hundred feet, the column lurched to a halt blocked by a landslide. Hannibal came forward and thought there might be a way around by climbing to a ledge overhead, but the men in the caravan, after making some headway in the fresh snow, began slipping and plunging off the thousand-foot cliffs when the tracks of those ahead turned to ice. Realizing this would never work, the general ordered his army to settle down for the night and conferred with Adherbal and his engineers.

Ten thousand feet high, his men strewn over a frigid wind-whipped mountainside without food, this might have been literally the end of the road had not the planners had a plan. They were for carving a completely new path along the side of the mountain to replace the part obliterated by the slide, and in the morning Hannibal ordered his Numidians to start excavating.

All went well until they encountered a huge boulder too big to move and impossible to circumvent. Livy (21.37.1–4) tells us the engineers came up with a unique solution. They built a great fire with wood transported from lower altitudes, and when the rock’s surface was sufficiently hot, they poured the troops’ rations of sour wine over it to create fissures that might be enlarged with iron picks and wedges until the entire mass was broken apart. With this obstacle removed, the remainder of the detour was completed in short order, enabling Punic scouts to find their way to the valley floor in a matter of hours.

Over the next day the engineers widened the entire path sufficiently to allow the beasts of burden and vital cavalry horses—by now certainly near starvation—to pass safely down to the lush vegetation of the foothills and begin grazing their way back to health. The men set about building a base camp and presumably foraging for anything they too could sink their teeth into. Thousands of feet above, the Numidians still toiled, further widening the path for another three days to accommodate thirty-seven very special members of the Carthaginian force, the panzer pachyderms.
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They made it down, but in such poor shape that it looked as if none would survive. But remarkably, after a few days of grazing, they all regained their strength. Hannibal must have been relieved. After all, every team needs mascots.

On the whole, though, his army was not what it had been, especially in terms of numbers. When roll was taken of the infantry at the base camp, only 40 percent were Spaniards—eight thousand remnants of what must have been the bulk of the force when the journey had begun at New Carthage. On the other hand, fully twelve thousand of the African foot soldiers—the tough core of Hannibal’s father’s army—had made it.
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It’s also interesting that half of the original cavalry force—now amounting to six thousand—survived, especially since equine attrition is proverbially higher than among humans.
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Hannibal would need every one of the cavalrymen and would use them to great effect, particularly the Numidians. Still, the entire army now amounted to only twenty-six thousand members of a force that had originally numbered more than a hundred thousand. Many had been left behind or had deserted, but still, the two weeks or so in the mountains had plainly taken a huge toll. With the exception of Scipio Africanus, of all the enemies Hannibal faced over the next sixteen years, none proved more lethal than the Alps. Yet he had escaped their craggy clutches and descended upon Italy with a viable force structure, and once it got some food and some rest, it would prove effective beyond all expectation. His was now a freeze-dried army, hardened by the danger and cold of the mountains and capable of immediate expansion…. Just add Gauls.

V

THE FOX AND THE HEDGEHOG

[1]

H
ad the ancient Greek poet Archilochus and the modern philosopher Isaiah Berlin been magically transported to northern Italy in November of 218 B.C., they might well have speculated on the strategic prospects. “Hannibal knows many things, but Rome knows one big thing,” the Greek might have proposed. To which Berlin might have replied, “Perhaps at the outset. But then the fox could get stuck in a rut, and the hedgehog might learn new tricks.” This would have been the Second Punic War epitomized.

It has been called “the first world war in the history of humankind,”
1
a plausible statement at least within the confines of the Mediterranean basin, since the strategic action extended to Sardinia and Sicily, even spilled east into Macedonia, and had to be decided by a two-step process beginning in Spain and then moving to Africa. Yet the conflict is remembered as an Italian war; it was here that the most sustained and vicious combat took place, and the most damage was done—although the nature and longevity of the effects remain controversial. Still, it’s a safe bet that most of the suffering occurred in Italy. Adrian Goldsworthy, one of the very best historians covering this era, counts twelve major land engagements taking place between 218 and 202—three times the number of the First Punic War—with more than half being fought on Italian soil.
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And during the entire conflict, Romans lost only battles that took place on the Italic peninsula. This can be attributed to a single factor … Hannibal, the central agent of destruction, their nemesis. Elsewhere, with the exception of the running fights that killed the Scipio brothers, and a few other skirmishes, the Romans were uniformly victorious. Their armies were better, their navy had become utterly dominant, and their commanders were at least as good as the other Carthaginians. The sole exception was the eldest Barcid brother; he was the hand that stirred the Second Punic War. In all respects—causal, tactical, operational, political, even sociological—it was truly Hannibal’s war.

But if he held the spotlight throughout, he left the stage a loser. In the end he was smacked down by the central non sequitur of the Western way of war: victory in battle does not necessarily mean victory in war. One triumph simply led to another triumph and another, until he found himself confined to a rut in the toe of Italy and eventually back in Africa. Meanwhile, the Romans fell back on a hedgehog who taught them to avoid being mauled by the fox, while they gradually mastered the fox’s tricks and conjured his equal. But first they would writhe and bleed beneath his claws.

[2]

Since Hannibal had lost much of his army in the Alps, his outlook was not likely to have been improved by what he found waiting for him in the Po valley—Gauls grown coy, and Publius Cornelius Scipio … again. He would deal with them in turn. The Taurini occupied the area into which the Punic force had descended, and were at the time preoccupied with fighting the neighboring Insubres. Hence, when Hannibal sent emissaries to their principal stronghold—probably at the site of modern Turin—asking for alliance and supplies for his starving troops, they rebuffed him. In no mood to be trifled with, Hannibal promptly laid siege to the place and took it in three days. He then made an example of the inhabitants, executing the men and boys and letting his soldiers loose on the women and food stores—both devoured, no doubt, with alacrity. All the Gauls in the immediate vicinity took the hint and sent representatives with pledges of allegiance, and very soon the Punic ranks began to swell with increments of both native cavalry and infantry.

But if, as Polybius (3.60) tells us, the remaining Celts of the northern plain were also inclined to join him, they were blocked from doing so by the advance of Scipio’s legions, moving west from Placentia, even pressing some reluctant Gauls into service as they went. Hannibal for his part had decided his best course was forward, hoping his army would attract Gauls as he proceeded. The lethal contest between fox and hedgehog had begun.

Publius Cornelius Scipio was already in trouble. Although Hannibal was surprised and impressed by how fast the Roman consul had made it back from the Rhône, this was only the same general and not the same army Hannibal had avoided earlier.
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(That force had been sent to Spain with brother Cnaeus.) After reporting to the senate that the Carthaginians were crossing the Alps, Publius Scipio had been told to proceed to the Po and delay them as best he could, while the other consul, Tiberius Sempronius Longus, and his legions were recalled from Sicily to support Scipio. So, for the second time in his consulship, Scipio was forced to build himself a new army, this time with a combination of raw recruits and the veterans who had been roughly handled by the Gauls under L. Manlius Vulso.
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But if Scipio had any doubts about his soldiers, he was also a Roman and anxious to engage the Carthaginians before they had time to fully recover from their Alpine journey. Therefore, he marched his army purposefully along the north bank of the Po, crossed its tributary the Ticinus with the Roman equivalent of a pontoon bridge, and moved to within a few miles of where the Punic army was known to be camped.

Meanwhile, Hannibal had been acting vulpine, toying with a few victims, and in the process reminding his troops of just what was at stake.
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Calling them together he had a number of Allobroges captives brought in. He asked if any were willing to engage in single combat, the prize to the winner being freedom, arms, and a fast horse; and the prize to the loser being freedom from the present misery in the form of death’s oblivion. When all volunteered, the winning pair (or pairs, if you believe Livy’s version) was chosen by lot and fought to the death, at which point the remaining prisoners congratulated victor and vanquished alike as being far better off than themselves. Hannibal then elaborated on the theme, reminding his men that their situation was exactly that of the Allobroges. They could conquer, or die fighting—both alternatives much preferable to being captured and led away in chains to a life of servitude and misery. Message sent and received—only desperation would trump Rome’s determination.

Sensing combat was near, Hannibal recalled Maharbal and the five hundred Numidian horse he had sent out to forage, and gathered virtually all of his cavalry to accompany him in an initial attempt to make contact. Scipio, likely remembering how easily the Numidians had been scattered on the Rhône, was also in a combative mood here at the Ticinus. To reconnoiter he brought with him a smaller force of heavy cavalry, along with a body of pedestrian
velites
, whom, after the Punic force had been spotted by its dust cloud, he sent forward, expecting the
velites
to act as a screen with their javelins. They crumpled instead. For Hannibal, having realized that his cavalry significantly outnumbered the Romans’, had placed his heavy Spanish troopers in the center and Numidians behind each wing, in position to envelope, and then he had charged, driving the terrified
velites
back through the advancing Roman horse before they’d had a chance to do any damage with their javelins. When the heavy cavalry of both sides came together, combat took the form of a vicious dismounted mêlée—one characteristic of Roman horsemen but also likely prompted by the run-down condition of the Carthaginians’ mounts. Here the Romans easily gave as good as they got, but on either side the Numidians drove around the flanks, first riding down the fleeing
velites
and then turning back upon the rear of the Roman cavalry, causing them to flee.

It was probably around this time that Scipio was seriously wounded and in danger of being captured. Most sources credit the consul’s rescue to his seventeen-year-old son, who led a band of horsemen back into the fight to surround and protect his fallen father.
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This was more than just an inspirational tale of filial loyalty; the young man, also named Publius, would eventually earn the moniker Africanus as Hannibal’s conqueror at Zama. But that day was far off, and in the meantime this young Scipio would spend the remainder of his adolescence suffering at the hands of the Carthaginian, and, evidently, learning from him.

The fight itself has been dismissed as little more than a skirmish.
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Still, it must have been a confidence builder, demonstrating what the Punic force most needed to know—that it could fight successfully in Italy. Even more important, the encounter demonstrated the same thing to the Gauls. It also unveiled what would be Hannibal’s most devastating trick—pinning the center and then attacking the rear through double envelopment.
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Cavalry would prove very important in the upcoming war, and this encounter near the Ticinus River left little doubt whose was better. Not only did Roman horsemen display an unfortunate tendency to fight on foot, but they also showed little ability to work effectively with light troops, who themselves would prove chronically inferior to their Carthaginian counterparts. All these revelations of weakness Hannibal would use to great effect to counter and manipulate Rome’s real strength in heavy infantry. So if Ticinus was simply a prelude, it was nevertheless a prophetic one.

Publius Scipio was now in a desperate situation, both personally and with regard to his suspect force structure; yet he was apparently a man who knew his own limitations. Before Hannibal—who expected a major battle in a day or two—knew what had happened, the Romans were gone, crossing to the south bank of the Po on their pontoon bridge and racing east toward the relative safety of Placentia. By the time the Carthaginians reached the bridge, Scipio’s engineers had cut its moorings; six hundred stranded Roman troops were captured, but immediate pursuit of the main body was now impossible. Instead, Hannibal marched in the opposite direction, up along the north bank of the Po until he found a place suitable for fording. He left it to Hasdrubal, head of the service corps, to get the army across, while he went ahead to meet with Gallic emissaries, who were now ready to jump aboard the Punic bandwagon with solid offers of soldiers and supplies.
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The Carthaginian pursuit of Scipio could now resume, probably picking up Gauls like a rolling snowball as the army proceeded along the south bank of the Po. Two days later Hannibal reached his goal and deployed for combat in front of the Roman camp, apparently set slightly west of the River Trebia, a challenge Scipio declined to accept. This was a signal of Carthaginian dominance that no Gaul was likely to miss, including those currently pressed into Roman service. That night a body of two thousand Gallic infantry and two hundred cavalry massacred and beheaded a few Romans sleeping nearby, then bolted from the camp, going over to Hannibal, whose army was parked a few miles away.

Scipio realized that his position was untenable—if his own Gauls betrayed him, soon all the Gauls would flock to Hannibal. So he prepared his army to slink off under the cover of darkness, a barometer of his sense of urgency being the pain he would inevitably suffer from his wound along the way. Withdrawal in such close proximity to the enemy was inherently dangerous,
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and upon learning that the Romans were on the march, Hannibal instantly launched the Numidians to ride them down. Fortunately for the Romans, the Numidians were apparently still hungry and stopped to loot the abandoned encampment, a distraction that gave Scipio time to get his army across the River Trebia and heading for higher ground, where he might construct a fortified camp sufficiently strong and well placed to keep the Carthaginians at bay.

Hannibal, at least for the moment, was apparently content to not pursue Scipio and instead play the Gaul magnet, but feeding his army was and would be a continuing preoccupation. Nearby Clastidium, the place where Marcellus had won the
spolia opima
four years earlier, was known to be a major Roman grain storage site. The Carthaginians were about to attack it when the commander, one Dasius, and the allied garrison went over to the Punic side. A number of sources suspect that this was more than simply a matter of good luck.
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The traitor in charge was a native of Brundisium in the south, where loyalty to Rome was most problematic, and this event may indicate some initial penetration by Hannibal’s agents into an area where he would later have his greatest political success. That Dasius’s subordinates were most likely Latin allies may have also given Hannibal hope that the alliance might be broken at other points—a chimera, as it turned out. Nevertheless, it is also true that from this point until shortly after Cannae, Hannibal appears to have enjoyed an uncanny awareness of Roman intentions and capabilities. While the armies were in the north, this can partly be explained by Gauls serving on both sides, and later by the flow of deserters. Still, there remains an intelligence advantage that is never adequately resolved by the historical sources. This advantage whispers of a mole or moles with ears close to the top of the otherwise sacrosanct monolith on the Tiber.