East & West- Catharsis

by David Capel

  Then, like swirling clouds, the men parted in front of us, and we saw the enemy.

  Just a hundred yards of stony ground in front of us were the dark ranks of the Turk. Mostly on foot, they seemed motionless, and I could not understand why we had not closed with them, stumbling and ragged though we were.

  Another volley of arrows whooped among us, to my surprise hitting no-one. I waved my spear. “Forward, Seventh Taron,” I cried, then tripped as I stepped forward and nearly fell on the body of a soldier, the blood from his arrow wound already blackened on his leather cuirass in the heat.

  “Forward the Seventh!” I shouted again meaninglessly, and staggered onwards.

  A group of Romans to my left rushed forward, well armed these, from some professional tagmata, attempting to engage the enemy. To my surprise the Turks opposite them and us fell back slowly, and the volleys of arrows intensified towards the attackers. Then, when they were perhaps half way to their target, a group of horsemen emerged in front of me, springing like furies as if from nowhere, and charged towards the Romans.

  As one we yelled in warning and consternation, but they had no chance of hearing us, let alone turning to meet the onslaught. In a flash the forward group was taken in the flank, and I saw the savage curved swords rise and fall, up and down, thudding home with shocking violence.

  The reaction in our ranks was for some to spring forward in vengeance, and others to hang back cautiously. Overall our part of the army’s formation dissolved further and the arrows fell once more, pricking, and stinging, and draining the blood and energy and courage from our men.

  I called for our own bowmen to respond, and a few shafts disappeared into the dusty haze. Stethatos had succeeded in bunching a large group of our men together, perhaps fifty or sixty in all of the original force, corralled by his veterans.

  The heat and smell and sound were extraordinary. We were in a great furnace of throbbing noise, as if we were waiting at the very gates of Hell. I glanced at the sun and was astonished to see that it had climbed behind me. It was early afternoon.

  Forward we crept into the cruel arrows, and the dust was such that the enemy were now only fleeting shadows in the haze, which perhaps saved us from more accurate fire. I still had not encountered one of the enemy until we came across a Turk kneeling wounded and gasping in agony, his knee transfixed by one of our own few shafts.

  Like a pack of dogs six of our men ran towards him and he disappeared in a mêlée of hacking swords and stabbing shafts. “Stop!” I croaked, unthinking, at the butchery, and one of my own men stared up at me, uncomprehending, his bloodshot eyes red in his dust-grey face.

  On we pressed, losing a man here and there to arrow wounds, and though I feared for them a ghastly death, uncared for in the heat, I marvelled at the lack of casualties. Partly it was the dusty haze that masked us, and partly the fact that Stethatos had us in good order, raising our shields against the arrows in front as the August sun beat down on our necks from behind.

  I would have expected that constant arrow fire would play havoc against a large body of men. And so it can, if they stay motionless for a long time. Yet at this moment the hail of arrows was surprisingly ineffective, while we retained some semblance of discipline and movement.

  So it was that the right wing of the Roman army advanced towards their pagan foe, disorganised and chaotic, but unstopped. New shapes appeared in the grey white haze, and we stumbled into the Turkish encampment. There were few of the enemy even there, mostly the wounded, but some prisoners also, and all were hacked down unthinkingly before we realised that they were fellow Romans. But the sun was now behind us, and in our enemies’ eyes, and the arrows slackened, and although we were exhausted and had not even engaged the enemy, I felt hope rise up in me for the first time since that shambolic assault began.

  The advance came to a natural, involuntary pause there, as some stopped to seek for plunder in the noisome tents of the barbarians, and others rested in weariness. I urged my men onward, and thought to venture a little in front of the others, hoping to see beyond the dust at what lay ahead. And indeed the air cleared awhile. The Turkish host was a little further away, neither advancing nor retreating, but looking to my imagination as though it, too, paused to sense which way the day would swing.

  Just as I turned to urge my men forward, hoping to start a final advance that might rout the enemy, a brazen trumpet sounded, quite close by, and I saw horsemen among the Roman ranks. For a second I feared this was some surprise flank attack by the enemy, but the cavalry were few and they stopped, dispersed among the great, amorphous body of foot soldiers, and blew their notes, once, twice, thrice, repetitively.

  I stood there, expecting the charge, but nothing happened. Then there was a great, shuddering movement, and slowly the Roman army started to drift away from me, first in ones and twos, and then in small groups, as the heralds sounded their call.

  Stethatos ran out to me. “Retreat! It’s the call to retreat! We must retreat!” he shouted hoarsely. “Back to camp! Back to Manzikert!”

  “No!” I cried. “Wait, Stay!”, and I sank to my knees in despair and exhaustion. But I could hear Stethatos shouting, and I felt his strong hands grab me and drag me to my feet. He shook me. “Look!” he yelled in my ear, and I lifted my gaze and followed his.

  Behind us the Turks were advancing. Their line lanced towards us like a great boiling storm of cloud, and we heard their shouts and the thunder of the hooves of their cavalry.

  “Come on, retreat!” shouted Stethatos, as I stood there, stunned by our reversal of fortune. Then it came to me that if the enemy host caught our men in this ragged retreat we would witness a massacre just as we had in that earlier Turkish counter-attack, except on a catastrophic scale.

  “Quick, Stethatos, summon our men!”

  “What? Sir, we must fly! We cannot be caught here!”

  “Not here. Step by step. We must go back, but not like this. Not running. They’ll catch us and kill us all. Call the men together!”

  There was barely enough time. But the retreat was not yet a rout, and somehow we had kept most of our regiment together, and Stethatos and his comrades dressed them once again among the thinning ranks of the Roman right wing, and others joined us. So we attempted that most difficult of manoeuvres, a steady, fighting retreat.

  It was our first taste of battle proper on that long, hot day, but even so it came quicker than we wanted. There was a shout and a clash of arms, and a group of Turkish horsemen crashed headlong into our rank a dozen yards to my left. In seconds it looked like our stand would be over before it began, for the enemy were amongst us, hacking with their sabres. The sturdy men of Taron stabbed back with their spears and held fast but before I could see the outcome of the struggle there was a cry in my ear, and a man next to me went down with an arrow piercing his chest, then there was a line of screaming, Hun-like devils upon us, thankfully on foot, and I saw one sallow face glaring straight at me with death in his eyes. He slashed at me with his sword, but with sudden coolness I parried up with my shield and then thrust with my spear in the approved fashion, catching him in the armpit, and for a moment I could have been a regulation legionary in Caesar’s army long ago.

  The strangest thoughts flash through your head, even in the heat of battle, and then another Turk almost threw himself upon me, and I hardly had to move my spear for it to catch his side. But there it stuck, and he struggled like a landed fish as I was borne down, and then I saw him reach for a dagger at his belt.

  “Die, why don’t you die?” I shouted in panic and anger, and finally had the wit to release my spear so that I fell back and his stroke just missed me. I started to tug at my sword, but it was much too late, and he lunged forward, his ragged black clothes drenched with sweat and blood, and I thought I was done for. But then from the corner of my eye a spear struck down like a bolt from the sky and hammered into the Turk’s head, smashing into his brain in a spray of red and grey liquid.

  I looked up and i
t was Loukas, one of the men who had acted as a servant to the old taxiarch, Tornikos.

  “A brave stroke, thank you,” I muttered to him, as he dragged me, shaking, to my feet.

  There was a lull in the fighting around us, and though the Turks swirled nearby, they seemed reluctant to engage, as if seeking easier meat elsewhere. And indeed as I looked to the right I could see the black and dun cloaks of the enemy in amongst the Roman ranks there, and I knew that unless we fell back we would be surrounded.

  “Stethatos! Back! Fall back to the North there.” The centurion nodded in understanding and bellowed his orders. So we resumed our steady backward march, and by and large the Turks left us to it. For elsewhere they were running the Roman infantry ragged, which fled now in panic, streaming past and away from us, with the enemy amongst them.

  Once again I had time to look on in grief and bewilderment at the collapse of our arms. Was this the betrayal I had dreaded at last? Otherwise there was no understanding the seemingly senseless decision to retreat when for a moment it seemed that we had weathered the storm and looked set to conquer.

  I was becoming familiar with the chaos of battle. For the soldier in the ranks, the experience is always a confusion of stops and starts, meaningless waits in the sun or the freezing cold, unexplained changes of position, and the sudden, violent shock of the fight. As often as it ends in the slated lust of victory, or the misery and fear of defeat, there is the empty, indecisive result. For his part, even the finest general cannot control events once the mayhem and slaughter have begun. The unexpected always happens, and if you add that to the terrible physical and mental strain of fighting, you cannot hope to predict the outcome.

  At Manzikert the right of the Roman army was made up mostly of theme troops like our own, lacking in equipment and experience. With such men in particular it is a risk to attempt a change of plan half way through the battle, let alone a risky manoeuvre such as an ordered retreat. As I learnt later, the Emperor Diogenes felt that we had achieved enough for the day in driving the enemy from the field. We had captured their camp, but failed to engage properly, and he decided to rest and try again the next day afresh. On such straight reasoning can disaster hang.

  For of course as soon as the retreat was called, our men lost what cohesion they had. Apparently the reserve, under Andronicus Ducas, fled first of all, without ever encountering the enemy. And so he fulfilled his part of the plot. But all might not have been lost even so. Some say that Alyates mistook the signal for full scale flight, and others say that he, too, wanted to betray the Emperor. I do not remember his name from the letter I had lost, so I can only report what I saw, which was that we were called to a retreat in good order.

  Either way, the Turks saw their opportunity and struck. So now we retreated doggedly in the red dust, back towards the division at the centre of the Roman army, as the rest of the right wing streamed past our front in flight. I took a grim pride in the Roman discipline that we showed, but in fact it was a mistake that was near fatal to me. I should have run like a rabbit with the rest of the cowards.

  We were weary now, turning and stepping back in line, and turning again to face the foe. At one point I saw a black dot in the sky and realised just in time that it was an arrow heading straight for my face. I ducked and tripped and fell over a body, my face thudding painfully into the ground next to it among a cloud of flies. To my amazement I recognised the very same officer that had been killed amidst my brief conference with Alyates, hours before. It seemed extraordinary to me that we had striven and bled so much that day only to arrive where we had started, and I wept at the waste of it all.

  I lay there for a moment, heedless, in momentary relief at the rest, ignoring the flies and the stench of the bloody corpse beside me. And then there were renewed cries, and someone kicked at me to get up, and we were under attack once more. Then a shadow fell over me and I looked up to see a monstrous figure, bearded, with bare arms streaked with blood and gold, and he wielded a mighty axe, roaring, which he swung back and forth and I heard the crunching, sucking noise of bone and blood, and with that I scrambled to my feet.

  We had somehow joined the central division of the army, and there were Varangians around us, berserkers from the North, and my heart leaped at my deliverance by them, just as it had done in the Church of Holy Wisdom months before. The Turks swirled around us and then rushed to the charge, foot and horse together. Our ranks were packed tight together and I was squeezed back between two men, the big Varangian pushing to the fore.

  The Turks yelled as they pressed home their attack, but this time they were easily repulsed, met by a controlled butchery of the swords and axes of the heavily armed tagmata that surrounded the Emperor.

  The assault broke like a stick splintering on a rock, and when the enemy faltered the Roman foot-soldiers stepped forward to drive them back and dispatch the wounded before resuming their places in the serried ranks.

  They did not come again. Instead they held back, moving like wolves to encircle us beyond the range of our spears, and then the arrows began to fall again. Like a black hail the deadly shafts fell among us, and though the Romans held up their shields, inevitably many of them found their mark. For this time we were close-packed and motionless, a perfect target for the bowmen. My big Varangian took an arrow in his eye and was killed instantly, falling like a tree before me, so that I was pushed forward to the front rank.

  There I stood, shielding myself as best as I could from the enemy. I could see the archers, not forty paces away, clearly taking their aim at one or another of us. Before long an arrow thudded into my shield with surprising force, knocking it aside, so that for a moment I was exposed. Instantly another shaft sped past me and hit someone behind.

  “Shields up, shields up!” a voice bellowed from the rear.

  Quickly the battle lust drained from me, to be replaced by a growing, gnawing fear. My shield arm trembled with the strain of holding it at an unfamiliar angle, and eventually I followed some of those around me and sheathed my sword so that I could use my right hand to support the other. I heard myself whimpering a prayer, while the man to my left muttered again and again,

  “Let this be over, oh Lord have mercy – Kyrie eleison!”

  Still the arrows fell remorselessly, and the enemy began to shift towards us once more, sensing the growing weakness of their prey.

  “Kyrie eleison,” said the solider on my left, and others took up his words. “Lord, have mercy.”

  I do not know how long we stood there, waiting for death. I could not see Stethatos or any of my men nearby, though in truth I wanted no witness to my misery and despair.

  “Kyrie, eleison,” said the men around me, their throats hoarse, but the chant rose in rough unison from the ranks. Even the western mercenaries took it up in their Latin accents, like a dirge of earthly hopelessness.

  “Christ have mercy!”

  “Kyrie…” said the man next to me, but then an arrow smashed straight through the metal rim of his shield and struck his jaw, and he went down.

  And then it stopped. There was another of those strange lulls that fall over the battlefield when least expected. The arrows stopped, and the world held its breath for a moment. We stood there, caked in dust and blood and sweat, waiting for the final assault.

  But it did not come. Horsemen galloped to and fro among the enemy ranks, and behind us trumpets blared. A swelling murmur swept through the Romans which soon found voice.

  “A truce! The fighting has stopped!” And then, “Surrender!”

  Officers pushed their way from the back, saying “Lay down your arms, the Emperor has called a truce!”

  We stood there, blinking in defeat and some threw themselves on the ground and others sat with their heads in their hands. One or two repeated the ‘Kyrie’, but then some Turks came towards us, drowning them out, shouting and gesturing for us all to sit down, and one by one we did.

  I cannot remember how long we sat there. It seemed an age. But when th
e fighting stopped it was already late afternoon, perhaps three of four hours before sunset. And by nightfall the chains of captivity were upon us.

  It was an ordeal of misery, and thirst and exhaustion, sitting there in our rows, while the enemy poked and prodded at us. Looking around I recognised many of my men dotted not far from me, and I tried to go over to them to whisper my thanks and encouragement, but as soon as I stood I was thrust back to the ground by one of our new masters.

  At no stage did we see a general, let alone the Emperor. But our predicament needed no explanation. We sat as sullen as cattle, all the fight gone from us. I remember a scuffle broke out not far from where I was, and several Turks converged upon a huge Roman and dragged him out from among us and set about him with their swords until he lay still with a pool of his blood spreading around him. Not one of us tried to help.

  The sun had begun its plunge into the western hills and the fort of Manzikert was silhouetted black against the horizon when a new group of Turkish officers started moving among us, picking out men here and there who would be dragged to stand in a separate group in front. We all looked at them curiously, and I noticed that the selected men were all officers. They were given water and bread, and it seemed clear that the enemy was obeying the courtesies of war in treating them well. I watched them get closer, hoping despite myself to stand out from the crowd.

  Then one of the Turks turned towards me, searching the ranks with his eyes, and I froze in horror.

  It was Erkan.

  Ο

  “Well well, look who we have here”, said Erkan.

  He came over and stood over me and I looked into his face transfixed, like a rabbit with a snake.

  “I did not imagine to find you here, my friend. I confess I thought it most unlikely.”

  His voice was all oily hostility.

  “I hoped to find you. Yes, I did hope that you would be here, either killed, or maybe maimed. But I did not think…” and he swept his arms, indicating the huge mass of humanity around us.