The Scarlet Banner
Page 41
CHAPTER XVI
PROCOPIUS TO CETHEGUS:
I have witnessed many a battle, many a conflict of Belisarius,--usuallyfrom a very safe distance,--but never have I seen so strange anencounter. In this, which decides the fate of the Vandal kingdom, wehave lost in all only forty-nine men, but solely picked warriors, andamong them eight commanders. Fara, Althias, and Johannes,--all threeare wounded. Yet we have not many--perhaps a hundred--wounded men, asthe Vandals fought only with the sword. That yields almost as manykilled as wounded. Most of our dead and wounded may be credited to thethree Asdings, two noblemen in boar helmets, and an apparently crazymonk. Eight hundred Vandal corpses covered the field, by far the largernumber of these fell during the flight. We have captured, sound andwounded, about ten thousand men; women and children unnumbered. In ourtwo wings we did not lose a single warrior, except one Hun whomBelisarius was unfortunately compelled to hang. He had stuffed pockets,shoes, hair, and ears with pearls and gems which he picked up in theVandal camp, especially in the women's tents, and which our Empress hashonestly earned.
Our pursuit of the Vandals was checked only by our greed. The fallenand captive Vandals had many ornaments of gold and silver on theirpersons, their horses, and themselves; our heroes plundered every onebefore passing on. Our horsemen, who reached the camp first, did notventure, in spite of their longing to pillage, to enter it at once;they thought it impossible that a force so superior in numbers shouldnot defend their own camp, their wives and children.
The King is said to have paused a moment as if stupefied; but whenBelisarius with our whole body appeared before the tents, he exclaimed,"The avenger!" and pursued his flight toward Numidia, attended by a fewrelatives, servants, and faithful Moors. Now all the Vandal warriorswho had reached the camp scattered in wild confusion, surrenderingtheir shrieking children, their weeping wives, their rich possessions,without a single sword-stroke; and these men are, or were, Germans! Itwould be no wonder if Justinian should now try at once to liberateItaly and Spain from the Goths.
Our men dashed after the fugitives. All the rest of the day and thewhole moonlight night they slaughtered the Vandals without resistance;they seized women and children by thousands to use them as slaves.Never yet have I beheld so much beauty. Nor have I ever seen such heapsof gold and silver money as in the tents of the King and the Vandalnobles. It is incredible.
Belisarius was tortured after his victory by the most terrible anxiety.For in this camp, filled to overflowing with the most beautiful women,treasures of every description, wine and provisions, the whole armyforgot every trace of discipline. Fairly intoxicated with theirundreamed of good fortune, they lived solely for the pleasure of themoment; every barrier gave way, every curb broke; they could notsatisfy themselves. The demon of Africa, pleasure, seized upon them.They roved, singly and in couples, through the camp and its vicinity,following the track of the fugitives wherever the search for booty orrevelry lured them. There was no thought of the enemy, no fear of theGeneral. Those who were still sober, laden with treasure and drivingtheir captives before them, tried to escape to Carthage. Belisariussays that if the Vandals had attacked us again an hour after we tookpossession of their camp, not a man of us all would have escaped. Thevictorious army, even his bodyguard, had entirely thrown off hiscontrol.
At the gray dawn of morning with the blast of the trumpets he summonedall the warriors; that is, all who were sober. His bodyguard now camehastily in deep shame. Instead of thanks and praise, he gave leadersand men a lecture such as I never before heard from his lips. We havebecome mere hired soldiers, adventurers, ruffians, fierce and brave,like greedy beasts of prey; well suited for bloody pursuit, likehunting leopards, but not fit to leave the captured game to the hunteror bring it in and fasten it in a cage; we must first have our share ofthe blood and the food. It is by no means beautiful; yet it is far moreenjoyable than philosophy and theology, rhetoric, grammar, anddialectics. But the Vandal War is over, I think. To-morrow we shalldoubtless capture the fugitive King.
* * * * *
I always say so. The most weighty decisions hinge upon the most trivialincidents. Or, as I express it when I am in a very poetical mood, thegoddess Tyche likes to sport with the destinies of men and nations, asboys toss coins in the air and determine gain and loss by "heads"or "tails."
You, O Cethegus, have condemned my philosophy of the world's history asold wives' croaking. But judge for yourself. A bird's cry, a blinddelight in hunting, a shot sent to the wrong mark, and the result isthis: the Vandal King escapes when already within the grasp of ourfingers; the campaign, which seemed ended, continues, and your friendmust spend weeks in an extremely tiresome besieging camp before anextremely unnecessary Moorish mountain village.
Belisarius had committed the pursuit of the fugitive King to hiscountryman, the Thracian Althias. "I choose you," he said, "because Itrust you above all others where swift, tireless action is needed. Ifyou overtake the Vandal before he finds refuge, the war will be overtomorrow; if you permit him to escape, you will give us long-continuedsevere toil. Choose your own men, but do not take time to breathe bynight or day until you seize the tyrant, dead or alive."
Althias blushed like a flattered girl. He took besides his Thraciansseveral of the bodyguard and about a hundred Herulians under Fara. Heasked me also to accompany him, less, probably, for the sake of mysword than my counsel. I willingly consented.
And now a flying chase, such as I had never imagined possible, began inthe rear of the Vandals. Five days and five nights, almost without apause, we pursued the fugitives; their hoofmarks and footprints in thesand of the desert were unmistakable. We gained on them more andmore, so that on the fifth night we were sure of overtaking andstopping them the next day before they reached the protection of themountain--Pappua, it is called.
But the capricious goddess did not wish to have Gelimer fall into thehands of Althias. Uliari, one of the Alemanni bodyguards of Belisarius,is a brave, strong man, but reckless, fond of drink like all Germans,and, like nearly all his countrymen, a passionate lover of the chase.He had been repeatedly punished because, while on the march, he pursuedevery animal that appeared. On the morning of the sixth day, just atsunrise, as we were remounting our horses after a short rest, Uliarisaw a big vulture perched on a prickly bush about the height of a man,which rose alone from the desert plain. To seize his bow, snatch anarrow from the quiver, aim, and shoot was the work of a single instant.The cord twanged, the bird flew away, a cry rose. Althias, who hadagain dashed forward in advance of us all, fell from his horse, woundedin the back of the head under his helmet. Uliari, usually an unerringmarksman, had not yet slept off his potations of the night before.Horrified by his deed, he set spurs to his horse and fled to thenearest village to seek sanctuary in its chapel.
But we were all trying to help the dying Althias, though he commandedus by signs to leave him to his fate and continue the pursuit. We couldnot bring ourselves to do it. Nay, when Fara and I, after our friendhad died in our arms, wished to go on; his Thracians demanded withthreats that the body should first be buried, otherwise the soul wouldbe condemned to wail around the place until the Day of Judgment. So wedug a grave and interred the dead hero with every honor. These fewhours decided Gelimer's escape; we could not make up the lost time. Thefugitives reached their goal, the Pappua Mountains on the frontier ofNumidia, whose steep, inaccessible peaks everywhere bristle with jaggedrocks. The Moors who dwell here are bound to Gelimer by ties of loyaltyand gratitude. An ancient city, Medenus, now a mere hamlet of a fewhuts on the northern crest of the mountain, received him and his train.To storm this narrow antelope path is impossible; a single man can barthe ascent with his shield. The Moors have scornfully rejected an offerof a large reward to deliver up the fugitives. So the watchword is"patience." We must pitch our tents at the foot of the mountain, barall the outlets, and starve the people into a surrender.
That may occupy a great deal of time. A
nd it is winter; the mountainpeaks are often covered in the morning with a light snow, which, it istrue, the sun soon melts when he breaks through the clouds. But he doesnot always break through. On the other hand, mist and rain continuallypenetrate the camel-skin coverings of our tents.