Total War Rome: Destroy Carthage

by David Gibbins

  Gulussa reckoned that they still had five days’ hard ride ahead before they reached the dried-up marshland below Carthage, their final stretch after weeks spent trawling the outer limits of his father’s kingdom for men to join the cavalry force that he and Hippolyta were readying to counter further Carthaginian incursions into the territory of Numidia. They were all here now, over a thousand men with their horses, teeming in the wadi below, their breakfast fires dotting the edge of the shallow stream where they had watered the animals and would sleep through the heat of the day. Coming to the wadi had been a diversion of a few hours to the west of their main route, but Scipio had planned at the outset to visit this place; Fabius himself had been given strict instructions by Polybius to write down everything he saw. Polybius had yearned to come himself, but his return to Rome to report to Cato on their reconnaissance into Carthage had kept him there for months longer than expected, lobbying hard in place of the increasingly ailing Cato, now well over ninety years old. Despite their overwhelming evidence of Carthaginian war preparations, the argument had continued to be an uphill struggle against those who dismissed the importance of Africa in favour of Greece and the east, and who even argued for withdrawing support from Masinissa in his attempt to defend the integrity of his kingdom against the resurgence of Carthage. Fabius knew that Polybius had kept their most potent ammunition until last, the evidence for the complicity of Roman senators at the highest level with Carthaginian plans, fearing that a premature attempt to expose the culprits would be disbelieved and count against them unless they had a majority of the Senate already in their camp. But they also knew that time was running short, that this waiting game could not go on much longer while Carthage continued to rearm. Polybius would have to play his cards soon, risking censure and proscription for himself as well as Scipio, if there was not movement in their favour very soon in the Senate.

  Fabius took a swig from his water skin, and then poured water over his horse’s mane, leaning back as it shook its head and neighed. Soon they would be back at the watercourse, and the horse would be able to drink its fill. He watched Gulussa ride up the ridge from the wadi to join him, still wearing his cloak against the chill of the night, and together they made their way further up the rocky ground to the figure on the escarpment. For Scipio, coming to Zama was a personal pilgrimage: it was here that his adoptive grandfather Scipio Africanus had won his greatest glory almost sixty years before, when two armies had come to this place on the edge of the unknown to decide whether Carthage or Rome would hold sway as the greatest power the world had ever seen.

  They reached the crest of the escarpment and reined in beside Scipio. Ahead of them the ground dropped into a plain like a shallow bowl, bounded to the south and west by further ridges. They knew that the Roman camp had been just below them now, and the Carthaginian one a mile or so away below the opposite ridge to the west. There was little to see – just a wasteland of scrub and rocky ground, a goatherd and his few desultory animals making their way across the centre of the depression in the distance – nothing to suggest that one of the most decisive events of history had taken place here only two generations before. Over the far ridge lay the frontier of Masinissa’s realm, not with another kingdom but with the African desert, a vast tract that extended from Egypt to the Atlantic shore and south into the unknown. Fabius remembered riding with Scipio and Polybius ten years before in the Macedonian forest, and Polybius sketching out Eratosthenes’ map of the world; they had been close to the northern edge then, and now they were at the south. Whether they reached the other extremities, to west and to east, would depend on what happened here in Africa, on whether Scipio would be able to stand above a vanquished city and see through the haze of war to horizons far beyond the restricted world that the senators in Rome had mapped out for themselves.

  Fabius spoke the word under his breath: Zama. It was a name the veterans had come to call this place, after a nearby Berber settlement, and it was one that Fabius had grown up hearing on the lips of drunken old men in the taverns and crumpled up begging on the streets around the Forum. It was a place that few in Rome who had not fought here could have envisaged, so far was it removed from the landscapes of Italy. At the academy Polybius had said that North Africa was the perfect terrain for set-piece battles, and Fabius could now see why. There was little human settlement to hamper large-scale army manoeuvres, or high mountain ranges or complex coastlines to hinder transport and communications. Hannibal and Scipio Africanus had chosen this battle site, a place where the terrain would afford neither side a clear tactical advantage and everything would depend on the nature and disposition of the formations: infantry, cavalry, elephants. It was the nearest equivalent he had seen in real life to a war game played out on a flat board, the type of abstract exercise that the boys had started with in the academy before moving on to dioramas representing real battles where terrain and topography were important variables.

  Scipio spurred his horse and they followed him towards the centre of the battlefield. Along the way they passed the piled-up rocks and thorny branches that delimited the site of the Roman encampment, still visible after more than sixty years, and then the scorched rock strewn with blackened bone fragments that marked the place where the Carthaginian prisoners had been made to mound up and burn the dead. Further on, over the battlefield itself, Fabius looked among the scrub and dust and saw detritus that had escaped the scavengers of battle, some of it perhaps buried for years and recently uncovered by the desert wind: the rusty heads of spears, a broken Celtiberian sword, a mass of rusty mail with the mummified skin and toenails of an elephant’s foot still attached. Gulussa pointed to the bleached leg-bones of a human skeleton, denuded of weapons and armour with the skull crushed, the ribs already pulled apart by the wild dogs and foxes that would undoubtedly finish the job here as they had in the past for any other human remains that emerged from the dusty terrain.

  They picked their way forward until they were in the centre of the depression, and then Scipio stopped and turned his horse around so that he was facing the Carthaginian lines, just as his grandfather Africanus must have done. Fabius did the same, and then closed his eyes for a moment, hearing only the breathing of the horses and a faint westerly wind that brushed the low-lying scrub, making the horses turn their heads towards it. He remembered his father, who had fought here as a young legionary and then been one of those old veterans in the taverns, telling the same stories of battle to the few who would listen. Fabius had been one of those, and opened his eyes. His father had told how the Carthaginian war elephants had charged, eighty of them, like nothing the Romans had ever seen. Hannibal and his elephants had gone down in history, but in the years since he had led them over the Alps the Romans had learned their weaknesses, and Africanus had used a technique he had learned from ivory hunters: a herd of elephants will always go for gaps if they can see them, refusing to charge into a dense mass of men. At Zama they had been channelled into spaces that opened up in the Roman line and then been hacked down one by one as they charged into the trap, all of them dying behind the Roman lines. After that, Masinissa’s cavalry and the Roman alae on the flanks had charged, routing the Carthaginian cavalry and chasing them off the battlefield, leaving the infantry to slog it out. Only with the return of the Roman cavalry was the day finally decided, forcing Hannibal down on a bended knee before Scipio and leaving thousands of dead and dying strewn over the battlefield.

  But it was not the tactics and the course of the battle that Fabius found himself trying to envisage. It was the moments of combat that his father had described: periods of a few minutes each of unparalleled savagery, hacking and stabbing, punching and biting. The infantry at Zama had been like two equally matched beasts engaged in mortal combat, clashing and retreating, over and over again, wearing away each other’s reserves but never faltering. For his father, those minutes of combat had shaped his life; he had never been able to shake them off. They were memories that had kept him awake and sweating at night,
that he had only been able to control with the drink and violence that had destroyed his life and made his family fear him. Fabius had hated him for it, had derided him and walked away when the same old slurred stories were repeated to him, but years after his father’s death, when he himself was a soldier, he had bitterly regretted it – after Pydna, when he had experienced the maelstrom and horror of battle and had begun to understand what his father had gone through.

  Fabius had learned at Pydna that only those who have experienced battle can ever truly understand what it is like. But here at Zama, even as a combat veteran, he felt an interloper. This place belonged to those who had fought and died here, and its history was locked up with them. Polybius could write all he liked about the grander scheme of the battle, about its tactics and the lie of the land, but the truth of it lay with individual experiences that could never be told, or were only half remembered by those few still alive who had endured the shadow of that day. In the dust and rock of this place were imprinted deeds of valour and desperate last stands that would remain forever here, known only to the gods who presided over this battle just as Scipio and the others had presided over the war games in the academy in Rome.

  Gulussa drew up alongside them, and Scipio turned to him. ‘Your father Masinissa must have brought you here. Zama was the scene of his greatest triumph, as well as that of Scipio Africanus.’

  ‘We came here after I returned from the academy in Rome, when you and the others were appointed tribunes for the war against Macedon. I told my father how envious I was of you going into battle, and he brought me here to try to show me what it was like. Back then, there was much more to be seen, human bones and the collapsed and desiccated carcasses of elephants that had failed to burn fully in the funeral pyres. It was a bleak scene, and I learned that even the greatest of battles can be forgotten at a whim, and leave little trace. My father told me that battles are only worthwhile if you use them to destroy an enemy, or they are doomed to be repeated. He was right: here we are again, confronting Carthage just as we were before Zama.’

  ‘In the academy it was the other way round, Gulussa. We envied you. We knew that Masinissa was constantly at war with his neighbours, and we thought you had a glorious future in store.’

  Gulussa gave him a tired smile. ‘Not glorious, Scipio. That’s not exactly the right word. Twenty years of raiding, of chasing down marauders and brigands in the desert, of retaliation against desert villages for housing fugitives. I’ve killed often enough, hundreds of times, but rarely with any glory, and it’s only with Carthage now encroaching on our land that I’ve led my cavalry for the first time against a proper enemy, in skirmishes and chases. I’ve lived my life planning for it, but I’ve not yet been in a proper battle.’

  ‘Your time will come, Gulussa. You will follow in your father’s footsteps.’

  ‘My father Masinissa gave me an interesting piece of advice that day. It was something he’d been trying to get to grips with through more than sixty years of experience in war, and witnessing numerous battles. He’d been schooled as a boy in Carthage with a Greek mathematician as one of his favourite teachers, and that made him think that there might even have been a formula to his observation.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘He had seen enough battles with very similar starting conditions go very differently from each other to observe that one small alteration of a variable at the outset could change the entire course of events, resulting in certain victory becoming resounding defeat. There would sometimes be no apparent logic to it, no obvious sequence of effects from that one change, but instead – at a certain point in the battle – the whole structure would seem to collapse. Because small variables are changed all the time, such as the movement of a century or a cohort in the order of battle, he had become doubtful that battles could ever be forecast at all, that beyond ensuring that your line-up was strong enough to put up a good fight, everything was in the lap of the gods. But then he began to observe a very interesting thing. The more uniform your force – the more homogeneous – the less likely a small change was to produce a catastrophic outcome. The more varied your force, the more heterogeneous, the more likely you are to be in trouble. He said Scipio Africanus was lucky to win that day at Zama, because his force had precisely that weakness.’

  Scipio leapt off his horse, smoothed down an area of ground and unsheathed his sword, using the tip to inscribe three parallel lines in the dust. He glanced at Gulussa, his face flushed with excitement. ‘That fits perfectly with what I argued when we simulated Zama at the academy. This is Scipio’s order of battle for each legion: hastati in the front rank, principes in the second, and triarii in the third, with velites on the flanks. Everyone who’s studied that battle knows that the balance was nearly tipped against us when the hastati were thrown back after the initial Carthaginian attack. But the weakness that Masinissa identified was in the overall division of forces: in the line of battle, the legions were not homogeneous. Why do we persist in organizing our legions in this way, with divisions that go back to the days of individual citizen warriors, when their weapons and armour and their role in battle were based on their own personal wealth? We claim to have done away with the wealth test, now that all recruits have access to basic arms and equipment, but we still maintain these divisions in training and in battle order based on age and experience. How can it be sensible to put all of the inexperienced men in one division, the hastati, and put them up at the front as if they are no more than a human buffer, expendable and practically useless?’

  ‘The centurions have been grumbling about it for years,’ Fabius said. ‘Like the disbandment of legions after each campaign, it’s something that prevents the experience of veterans from filtering down to the new recruits. Unless you mix them up in the same units, the recruits have to learn everything the hard way by themselves and the generals have a much less effective fighting force.’

  ‘Precisely.’ Scipio kicked away the lines in the dust and slapped his sword against the palm of his hand, staring out at the battlefield. ‘Rome needs a professional army. It is the only solution.’

  ‘You would have a hard time persuading the Senate of it,’ Gulussa said. ‘Those with no experience of battle, and that’s most of the Roman Senate these days, would look at Zama and say that the existing army organization was good enough to beat Hannibal, so why change it? And stronger, more cohesive legions would make stronger armies and produce stronger generals who might return to Rome with their eye on dictatorship, or more. That’s what really frightens them.’

  Scipio sheathed his sword and mounted his horse, then took up the reins. ‘We’ll see about that. To take Carthage is either going to require a professional army, or a general who will already be seen as a threat by those in the Senate who oppose change.’

  ‘There’s something else my father told me,’ Gulussa said. ‘Hannibal was an honourable man who accepted defeat. But Hasdrubal is different. In Spain you experienced the resilience of the Celtiberian chieftains, those who would die rather than dishonour themselves by surrender. Hasdrubal is more than that: he has a huge grudge against Rome, and he’s obsessively defiant. That’s a far more dangerous thing. There will be no honourable way out for him, no single combat as you fought with the chieftain at Intercatia. Hasdrubal will fall only when the city of Carthage falls. That is something else that the Senate in Rome must understand. The surrender of Hannibal does not provide a foretaste of what is to come if Carthage were to be besieged now. This new war, if it happens, can only end in the utter destruction of Carthage and of Hasdrubal.’

  ‘Let’s hope that Polybius has luck in his mission,’ Scipio said grimly. ‘But, for now, we must honour those who fell here that day, whose shades watch us from Elysium. There is one who must join them, whose wishes I must now fulfil. On his deathbed I promised that I would one day return to Zama, and that I would see that their general would rejoin his beloved legionaries for all eternity. I must ride along the lines of battle, and they must se
e that Scipio Africanus has returned. Leave me now.’

  Fabius had seen the sealed alabaster cremation canister in Scipio’s saddlebag, something he had rarely let out of his sight. As long as Rome lasted, Scipio Africanus would be honoured by his gens in his family lararium and at the tomb on the Appian Way, but his spirit would be here, alongside those he honoured the most. Fabius thought of his own father, and of the old centurion Petraeus, both men who had been here on this battlefield alongside Africanus, and both now among those shades too. Fabius swallowed hard, closed his eyes and spoke their two names under his breath, then spurred his horse and followed Gulussa, who was already part-way up the ridge. He could hear Scipio galloping away across the plain behind him, but he did not look back. In a few minutes the sun would break through the haze, and he wanted to return to the watercourse to let his horse drink and then to find a rock to sleep behind. He was dead tired, and they still had a long hard slog ahead of them before they reached the Roman camp on the plain outside Carthage.

  * * *

  Three weeks later they sat drinking wine in Scipio’s tent at the cavalry depot that he commanded some ten miles east of Carthage, on the edge of a wide lagoon within sight of the twin-peaked mountain of Bou Kornine. Polybius had arrived back from Rome two days previously, with the news that Cato had died. He and Scipio had conferred together for hours after that, with Fabius always in attendance, running over various possible courses of action. It had become clear to Fabius that the only way forward would be for Scipio himself to return to Rome; for him to stay in Africa any longer as a mere tribune would advance neither their cause nor his career. There were now enough veterans in Rome who had served alongside Scipio in Spain and Africa to bolster his popularity among the plebs, and Cato had died with the satisfaction of bringing the tribunes of the people to their cause. If Scipio could be persuaded to return now, the pendulum might swing in their favour. One thing seemed certain: if he were to return to Africa, it would no longer be as a tribune. If there was to be war, Scipio would accept nothing less than a legion, and as a senator with support from the tribunes of the people he had the chance of an emergency election to the consulship, even though he was still officially too young. Events could now move very fast if Scipio seized the opportunity that Polybius had been presenting him to bolster their case by returning to Rome itself.