Masters of the Battlefield

by Davis, Paul K.

  The local food supply was running low for both armies, so, after a few days of skirmishing, battle was inevitable. Paulus and Varro alternated days in command, and Varro was in charge on the day of battle. Livy and Appian describe tension between the two commanders, but the more dependable Polybius makes no mention of it. In any case, the Roman army marched to the south bank of the river and formed up in its usual fashion, with infantry in the center and 3,000 cavalry on each wing. The primary difference from Roman protocol was that the men were deployed in maniples deeper than they were wide, possibly to facilitate keeping formation and possibly for extra power at contact. “The price was a loss of flexibility,” writes Adrian Goldsworthy, “for the reduction in the gaps between maniples made it virtually impossible for these to change formation or wheel to face another direction.”31 Apparently, the Romans had learned nothing from the Battle of the Trebia, as they sacrificed maneuverability for power. Given that a Roman infantryman needed a six-foot frontage to properly use his gladius, a massed formation denies him that necessity. The formation would have better served a phalanx of pikemen.32 Still, the massed Roman heavy infantry had broken the Carthaginian center at Trebia, so Varro decided to try it again with more men.

  Hannibal also arranged his infantry in the center and cavalry on the wings—4,000 light horses on his right and 6,000 heavy on his left. He was outnumbered in infantry; each side had about 8,000 skirmishers, but Hannibal’s heavy infantry probably numbered around 20,000 in the center compared with three times that (estimates go as high as to 70,000) for the Romans. Hannibal deployed his Spaniards and Gauls in the center and forward, in echelon back on both sides. His African infantry, in two columns of 6,000 each, trailed on the flanks. He had also learned the lesson of the Trebia, so his convex formation offered bait to the Roman commander, whom he was tempting to attack his center. It also was a way of buying time. As J. F. Lazenby points out, “This move would tempt the Romans into the center but also buy some time, tiring out the Romans as they moved forward, robbing them of their momentum and squeezing their formations.”33 The longer the infantry held, the more time Hannibal’s cavalry forces would have to do their job.

  Once the forces were in place, the skirmishers withdrew through the ranks and the battle began. The initial cavalry contest on the river side of the field quickly turned into dismounted combat. This gave the Romans little advantage, apparently, for, according to Polybius, “although the Romans resisted with desperate courage, most of them were killed in the hand-to-hand fighting. Their opponents drove the rest remorselessly along the river bank.”34 The Romans had hoped the cavalry could hold on just long enough for the infantry to prevail, but such was not to be. Hannibal’s brother Hasdrubal’s Spanish cavalry then rode to the opposite end of the field to assist the Numidians, engaging the larger allied cavalry force under Varro, who fled the field rather than be surrounded, with the Numidians close behind.

  The stronger Roman infantry advanced on the convex Carthaginian line while two cavalry battles started on the flanks. The Roman infantry made good progress against the enemy center, pushing it back into a concave position. Goldsworthy argues that the Spaniards and especially the Gauls probably had reached the point where they were no longer the “literary cliche of the fickle and easily tired barbarian.”35 Two years under Hannibal’s influence must have stiffened them. The intermingling of Spaniards and Gauls showed that the Carthaginian force was by this time more unified, and indeed gave them more incentive to prove their worth. Putting together soldiers of two warrior societies created competition to see which could fight hardest. Add to all of that the fact that Hannibal himself was with them, shouting encouragement throughout the fighting until he finally joined in it himself. These were not the same soldiers who failed to hold the line at the Trebia.

  Free from their initial responsibilities, the Carthaginian cavalry now turned and struck the Roman rear, creating what Bevin Alexander calls “a cauldron battle.”36 It is a tribute to the discipline of Hasdrubal and his men that they refrained, twice, from chasing the broken enemy in order to fulfill Hannibal’s plan. This has been called a high-water mark of cavalry achievement in ancient times. To have two cavalry forces cease their pursuit to such an extent that most of them would turn around and assist in the main conflict was virtually unheard of.37 The Romans found their advance halted and their retreat cut off as the Carthaginian army slowly tightened the circle. Eventually the Romans could barely move, much less fight. Hannibal’s skirmishers, now on the outside of the ring, pelted the mass of men inside while the front ranks did their work hand to hand. As the great German military historian Hans Delbruck remarks, “It was impossible for any missile hurled into the mass of Romans to miss, and the more the terrified Romans allowed themselves to be pressed together, the less capable they were of using their weapons and the more certain was the harvest reaped by the enemy swords.”38 By day’s end, between 48,000 and 60,000 Romans lay dead; the Carthaginian losses were about 6,000. Livy describes the disaster by saying, “The fleeing consul had with him barely 50 men, and almost the entire army shared the fate of the other consul who died there.”39 As Goldsworthy notes, this was a devastating loss. “These figures need to be put into perspective. On 1 July 1916, the British Army began its offensive on the Somme, suffering an appalling 60,000 casualties on this first day. It was a disaster which still haunts the national psyche, much as Cannae was to remain a powerful image to the Romans for the remainder of their history.”40

  IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY, German field marshall Alfred von Schlieffen published his study of the battle as a background for his massive plan of attack against France in World War I. Pointing out that Clausewitz had argued that “concentric action” didn’t favor the weaker force, and that Napoleon had advised against turning both wings simultaneously, he noted that Hannibal had done both. “The weaker Hannibal had, in fact, acted concentrically, though in an unseemly way, and turned not only both wings but even the rear of the enemy.”41

  HANNIBAL SET UP THE BATTLE at Cannae by capturing the citadel and storehouse and awaiting the Roman army. Although the Romans chose which side of the river on which to fight, either bank, as Hannibal knew perfectly well, was well suited for him to employ his cavalry, making his enemy’s selection of little importance. He therefore took the operational defensive to set the battle up and then switched to the offensive. Varro engaged in a deliberate attack, assuming he would be able to depend on Roman discipline and mass to break the enemy center. While Hannibal probably did not have the time or opportunity to learn as much about his opposing generals as he had prior to Trasimene, he knew that neither of them was Fabius; they were there to fight, so he could assume they would fight in the traditional Roman fashion—which they did.

  When the two armies deployed and faced each other, the arrangement of troops in a cavalry-infantry-cavalry line was standard. It was the bowed-out center that was different—and the first of Hannibal’s surprises. Varro apparently took no special actions when he saw the enemy center bowed toward him, a very unorthodox formation.42 As noted earlier, the Carthaginian center probably wasn’t weak at all, and as a result Hannibal could manipulate the Roman concentration of forces to his own ends. The arrival of the cavalry just as the African infantry were attacking the flanks presented yet another surprise to the Romans: fresh troops to face as they were becoming exhausted.

  Everything about the course of the Battle of Cannae indicates Hannibal’s total control of the tempo of the fighting, from the speed of the cavalry to the slow withdrawal of the infantry. As Clauswitz argued, small forces aren’t supposed to surround larger ones. With the Romans engulfed and pressed from all sides (and pelted from above by the skirmishers using slings and spears), exploitation was total. The only survivors were the cavalry, which fled early in the battle, and the men left behind to guard the camps. Cannae is described by many historians as the greatest tactical masterpiece in history.

  In the wake of this disaster, the Roman go
vernment wisely returned to the Fabian strategy—waiting Hannibal out. Many of Rome’s allied provinces remained loyal, and Hannibal could not be everywhere at once. He still managed to campaign throughout the peninsula for a decade and a half but was never able to gain the upper hand and, without sufficient siege equipment or supplies, could never besiege and capture Rome. He finally left Italy to rescue Carthage from attack in 202 BC. There, he faced the Roman hero of the Spanish campaigns, Scipio, who defeated him at the Battle of Zama. Scipio’s tactics bore a striking resemblance to those Hannibal used at Cannae, where Scipio had been one of the few survivors of the Roman debacle.

  Hannibal’s Generalship

  A LIFE LIVED AROUND MILITARY MEN had prepared Hannibal for his career. Like Alexander, he suffered the same privations that he asked his men to endure. “On campaign he shared the physical hardships of his men,” as Adrian Goldsworthy has it, “sleeping in the open wrapped only in a military cloak, and wearing the same clothes as the ordinary soldiers.”43 Thus, the first and most important characteristic of Hannibal’s leadership was his ability to raise and then maintain morale. This was extremely difficult at first, as much of his army was composed of Gauls who did not know him and tended to want quick payoffs. His early battles were fought primarily to impress the Gauls into joining his struggle against Rome. The men he brought from Spain knew his strengths and qualities, and the Gauls learned soon enough. By the time of Cannae, Hannibal had gained their loyalty and trust—a fact that became evident as they held the Carthaginian line and crushed the advancing Roman forces.

  Maintaining morale among troops who were enjoying successive victories was one thing, however. It was far more difficult for Hannibal to maintain morale while campaigning around Italy for another dozen years after his grand strategy had failed. He had to hold his army together by mere force of will, as neither victory nor spoils would change the situation. Still, Hannibal managed to keep an army of ragtag mercenaries functioning. In his classic work The Great Captains, Theodore Dodge comments, “His troops had often neither pay nor clothing; rations were scant; their arms were far from good; they must have foreseen eventual disaster, as did Hannibal. And yet the tie between leader and men never ceased to hold.”44 Perhaps of greatest use to Carthage was that he kept Rome afraid. Even as the number and quality of his forces dwindled, no Roman general would fight Hannibal head-to-head. As Dodge notes, “Weak as he was, no Roman consul dared come within reach of his arm. His patience and constancy under these trials, and the dread his name inspired, show him up in far greater measure than any of his triumphs.”45

  Another significant aspect to Hannibal’s generalship was his use of maneuver. In his three major battles, he brought the Romans to ground he had chosen. Scipio chose the region near the Trebia River by establishing his camp, but Hannibal found and used the best ground in the neighborhood. The feigned retreat before that battle coupled with the hidden ambush force put the Roman troops at his mercy. The devastation of the countryside to lure Flaminius to Trasimene played on his opponents’ vanity. The Romans came to him at Cannae when he seized a local center of gravity, a supply dump. The deployment at Cannae to entice and surround the Roman infantry showed that a feigned retreat can take place even in a restricted environment.

  Additionally, all three major victories involved elements of surprise. Though Hannibal was famous for his use of elephants, in fact elephants played a relatively minor role at the Trebia. The battle was won because Sempronius never considered Mago’s force hidden off the battlefield. Everything about the battle at Lake Trasimene, of course, was a surprise, it being one of the greatest ambushes in all of military history. And finally, the Carthaginian deployment, quality of infantry, and speed of cavalry all were unexpected at Cannae. In other more minor battles throughout his career, Hannibal showed himself again and again to be masterful when it came to using surprise to catch his enemies off guard. In one battle he duped Fabius’s troops with torches tied to bulls’ horns, and in another skirmish used broken terrain to hide a number of units that popped up all around Menucius’s troops outside Gerunium. No wonder Roman generals were afraid to attack him even years after Cannae.

  Nonetheless, massive and humiliating defeats on the battlefield hurt but never completely broke Roman morale, and ultimately time was their key ally. Hannibal’s inability to conduct siege warfare saved Rome, and Fabian tactics kept the allies leery of embracing Hannibal’s crusade. He kept his army together for more than a decade and a half, but could not attract the local support he ultimately needed to overthrow Rome. Meanwhile, Carthage was being hurt in its extremities and finally threatened at home, which was ultimately what forced Hannibal to abandon Italy.

  5

  Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus (235–183 BC)

  Roman General

  The art of generalship does not age, and it is because Scipio’s battles are richer in stratagems and ruses—many still feasible today—than those of any other commander in history that they are an unfailing object-lesson to soldiers.

  —B. H. Liddell Hart

  AS WITH HANNIBAL, details of Scipio’s early years are extremely sketchy. He was born into Rome’s upper crust, descended on both his father’s and mother’s side from the Cornellii, a family from whom consuls had been elected for 150 years. Other than that, little can be confirmed. Even Polybius, who wrote at length on Scipio’s military career, glossed over his youth. He was well educated and admired Greek culture, which in his day was not a respectable characteristic, as the Greeks were viewed as a declining and somewhat profligate society; he must, however, have absorbed some of the Greek rationality in thinking, given the innovations he brought to the battlefield.

  Also as with Hannibal, the first anecdote of Scipio’s life concerns his relationship with his father, also named Publius Cornelius Scipio. At age seventeen or eighteen, Scipio the younger accompanied his father into northern Italy to confront Hannibal’s invasion in 218 BC. At the Ticinus River, Carthaginian and Roman cavalry units unexpectedly collided. Scipio the elder led the charge, leaving his son in the care of a unit of veteran cavalry. As the battle began to turn against the Romans, Polybius tells of the younger Scipio rushing to his father’s aid when the elder was wounded and surrounded: “[H]e at first endeavoured to urge those with him to go to the rescue, but when they hung back for a time owing to the large numbers of the enemy round them, he is said with reckless daring to have charged the encircling force alone. Upon the rest being now forced to attack, the enemy were terror-struck and broke up, and Publius Scipio, thus unexpectedly delivered, was the first to salute his son in the hearing of all as his preserver.”1 This episode may have proved his bravery but it was likely not his only combat experience. He may have been at the Battle of the Trebia and was almost certainly at Cannae, after which he rallied many of the disheartened officers. He therefore had firsthand knowledge of how Hannibal fought.

  There is also some debate on Scipio’s religious views. Livy recounts a story strongly reminiscent of Alexander. Since the age of fourteen Scipio had gone to the temple daily and stayed there in seclusion for some time, “and it generated the belief in the story—perhaps deliberately put out, perhaps spontaneous—that Scipio was a man of divine origin. It also brought back into currency the rumor that earlier circulated about Alexander the Great, a rumor as fatuous as it was presumptuous. It was said that his conception was the result of sexual union with a snake.”2 Livy also quotes Scipio’s prayer to the gods prior to his expedition to Africa. Before the Roman attack on Novo Carthago, on Spain’s southeastern coast, Scipio told his men that he had had a dream assuring the army of Neptune’s aid in the upcoming operation.

  Polybius, writing a century earlier, dismisses such notions. “As for all other writers, they represent him as a man favored by fortune, who always owed the most part of his success to the unexpected and to mere chance … whereas what is praiseworthy belongs alone to men of sound judgment and mental ability, whom we should consider to be the most
divine and most beloved by the gods.”3 It has also been suggested that the story is false because a Roman temple was not a place for prayer and meditation but for sacrifice. Hence, the regular worship is implausible, though not impossible.4

  Thus the same question regarding Alexander arises concerning Scipio: did he believe himself of divine heritage, or at least divine inspiration? Basil Liddell Hart supposes that Scipio, like Alexander, used such beliefs among his men to his own advantage: “Such supernatural claims only appear occasionally in Scipio’s recorded utterances, and he, a supreme artist in handling human nature, would realise the value of reserving them for critical moments.”5 Appian takes Scipio’s acceptance of divinity as a given. After Scipio’s quick victory at Nova Carthago, Appian says, “He himself thought this, and said so both then and throughout the rest of his life, beginning from this moment.”6 Why not be both religious and practical? After all, it is no more or less likely that he combined rational calculation with religious conviction than did Stonewall Jackson.7