Where the old phalanx was deep and solid and unwieldy, the legion was made up of units—maniples and cohorts—that afforded it more tactical flexibility. They were deployed in a quincunx formation: a chessboard pattern where all the black squares are troops and the white squares the spaces between, with the black squares covering the white squares in front of them and able to move up as reinforcement when necessary. And what was writ large was also writ small: The legionaries’ armor reflected this highly mobile segmented pattern. The upper-body cuirass, the lorica segmentata, was made up of metal bands stitched onto a linen or leather undergarment, thus combining protection with flexibility. The legionary was primarily a swordsman rather than a spear pusher, and he required more maneuverability than the heavy bell cuirass of the old phalanx could have afforded. His weaponry, too, was light and wieldy, quick to the thrust and fast in the slash. Even his shield could be used as an offensive weapon. The heavy central boss gave it the added heft to bang down an opponent, exposing his torso for a gladius or pilum (a type of javelin) thrust, while the rim of the shield was handy for hooking and smashing. A strong legionary could inflict considerable damage on his opposite number with shield alone.
The first tactical objective (as true whether fighting a Macedonian phalanx or a Gaulish or Germanic host) was to get into the enemy ranks where the wicked short sword, the 2-foot-long double-edged gladius hispaniensis (“Spanish sword”), could do its business. First, the carapace of enemy shields had to be cracked in order to expose the flesh. At about twenty paces the first two rows of legionaries would hurl the pilum—more harpoon than spear—where its solid weight might penetrate an opponent’s shield and wound him. Fighting in Gaul, Caesar writes of pila driving through “several of their overlapping shields … the iron head would bend and they could neither get it out nor fight properly with their left arms. Many of them, after a number of vain efforts at disentangling themselves, preferred to drop their shields and fight with no protection for their bodies.”89
Once they were through the outer shell of enemy shields, the legionaries went to work with the gladius. To those who had never seen Roman swordsmen in close combat, the results were shocking. Livy writes, “When they had seen bodies chopped to pieces by the Spanish sword, arms torn away, shoulders and all, or heads separated from bodies … or vitals laid open … they realized in a general panic with what weapons, and what men they had to fight.”90
Caesar described close combat against the Germans: “When the signal was given, our men rushed forward so fiercely and the enemy came on so swiftly and furiously that there was no time for hurling our javelins. They were thrown aside, and the fighting was with swords at close quarters. The Germans quickly adopted their usual close formation to defend themselves from the sword thrusts, but many of our men were brave enough to leap right on top of the wall of shields, tear the shields from the hands that held them, and stab down at the enemy from above.”91
Caesar, for obvious reasons, wants us to see his soldiers as dashing heroes, and there’s no doubt that this sort of fighting occurred on a regular basis. Virtus, the combination of courage, daring, and determination to close with the enemy, was highly prized in the Roman military, but the general truth of close-quarter combat is that it tends to be much more tentative, messy, and confusing at the contact face: “Hand-to-hand fighting was physically very fatiguing and emotionally stressful. Actual hand-to-hand fighting can only have lasted for very short periods and the relatively light casualties suffered at this stage seem to support this.”92
If no immediate and viable bridgehead was established within the enemy ranks, the opponents tended to stand off. The reluctant had to deal with pressure from officers, the press of men behind making it difficult for the front-rank fighters to escape (optiones, the centurions’ NCOs, literally pushed men forward from the rear ranks), and the knowledge of severe punishment if they tried it. The practice of decimation, the execution of one man in ten in a unit that had performed particularly poorly, was not a Roman invention. Alexander had used it, and had himself borrowed the practice from earlier Near Eastern armies. All of this, as well as the men’s soaring adrenaline, bore down to create the pressure that might lead to reengagement. But:
The longer the unit was close to the enemy the more its formation and cohesion dissolved. Men increasingly followed their instincts, the bravest pushing to the front, the most timid trying to slip away to the rear, while the majority remained somewhere in the middle. At any time they might follow the example of the timid and the unit would dissolve into rout, a possibility that became greater the longer a unit did not advance or make progress. Significant casualties on an ancient battlefield occurred when a unit fled from combat. The ones who died first were those who were the slowest in turning to flee, so the men in the center of a formation, able to see little of what was going on, were always on the verge of nervous panic.93
And what got the legionary killed? As with the Macedonian phalangites the legionary was wedded to specific tactical forms and attitudes and was superb in their execution. But this dedication to a specialized tactical model brought its own potentially fatal weaknesses, which two catastrophic defeats illustrate.
The legion, like the phalanx, was a war machine designed to go forward. And like the phalanx, it was vulnerable to attack on its flanks. Also like the phalanx it needed to strike a balance between compaction (which gave it solidity and heft) and yet allowing enough space between warriors for the effective manipulation of their weapons. At Cannae in 216 BCE, Hannibal lured the legions into a frontal assault that was then compressed by attacks on its flanks and, eventually, its rear, so that legionaries, whose armor was designed primarily to protect the front, were exposed to blows coming in on their sides and backs. Committed to their traditional attack pattern, they would have found it extremely difficult to defend against flank incursions, and as the legionary mass became increasingly compacted, the rear ranks relentlessly and blindly pressed their more forward comrades into an ever more deadly cul-de-sac.
It was only the leading edge of the force that could fight effectively, while those behind were rendered either redundant or, worse, disabling. The result was that in one of the smallest killing fields in the history of warfare the Roman legions were surrounded and annihilated. This, the largest army Rome had ever sent into the field, died where it stood. Sources differ, but somewhere in the region of 60,000 legionaries were cut down.94 The Romans, themselves traditionally so merciless to their wounded enemies, were shown little compassion: “Many wounded had been hamstrung by marauding small bands, their writhing bodies left to be finished off by looters, the August sun, and the Carthaginian cleanup crews the next day. Two centuries later Livy wrote that thousands of Romans were still alive on the morning of August 3, awakened from their sleep and agony by the morning cold, only to be ‘quickly finished off’ by Hannibal’s plunderers.”95 In the two years or so of his invasion of Italy, Hannibal would kill, wound, or capture more than a third of the Roman military manpower pool.96 Rome absorbed these huge body blows and took its revenge. At Zama in 202 BCE the Roman general Scipio killed 20,000–25,000 of Hannibal’s army for the relatively modest investment of 1,500 of his own dead, and Carthage itself was so comprehensively destroyed that the city existed only in memory, like a golden ghost.
The Roman army was designed to engage, and its tactical ideal was to close, kill, and conquer. But on occasion the discipline, cohesion, and determination of the legion were neutralized by an enemy who simply would not agree to fight according to the Roman rule book. By standing off and bleeding their enemy with long-distance archery, they denied him any tactical traction and robbed him of his most valued assets.
The Roman consul Marcus Crassus was eager to strengthen his political position in Rome by a successful military adventure and to that end invaded Parthia (modern northeastern Iran) with an army of about 40,000. At the battle of Carrhae (53 BCE) his force, deployed in a defensive square, was surrounded by a much smalle
r Parthian host consisting primarily of horse archers and cataphracts (heavy cavalry). The well-supplied horse archers kept up a galling enfilade, and Crassus, desperate to bring on a close-up engagement in which his tactical strengths could be deployed, sent out his son Publius with eight cohorts (about 4,800 men), 500 archers, and 1300 cavalry.97 It was an instinctive response to tactical frustration, as is seen on many occasions throughout history. It is a particular characteristic of colonial warfare; one thinks, for example, of the US Army in the Indian wars (Fetterman massacre), the British in nineteenth-century Afghanistan (the Kabul expedition), and the French Foreign Legion fighting the Morrocan Rif uprising. The heads tend to come back on pikes, which was precisely the fate of Publius’s and, not long after, Crassus’s. The Romans were stalked and decimated by the archers and then hit hard with Parthian cataphract. None of the abandoned Roman wounded were spared, and the eventual death toll for the legions was 20,000–30,000. Ironically, however, one survivor, the officer Gaius Cassius, would later come to be bitterly regretted—by Julius Caesar.
TWO
TE DEUM AND NON NOBIS
Death on the Medieval Battlefield
It is not we who have made this slaughter but Almighty God.
—Henry V, after the battle of Agincourt, 1415
VISBY. THE ISLAND of Gotland, Sweden. 1361. The peasant army (army is perhaps too grand a word for this motley crew) stood outside the walls of the town. Inside, the worthy burghers, merchants, and assorted tradesfolk were disinclined to take up arms and later, when the bloody work was finished, would pay off the army that threatened them. In the meantime they bolted the gates and left the ragtag defenders to do battle with the invading Danes. The combat was swift, predictable, and merciless. After the slaughter, the peasant-soldiers—about eleven hundred of them—were stripped of their pitiably inadequate weaponry (mainly glaives and bills, the spearlike adaptations of farming implements) and armor (a few had some chain mail) and tossed unceremoniously into grave pits.
The naked bodies fell like puppets with their strings cut, limbs akimbo, jumbled and tumbled together in a gruesome confraternity, appalling in its mimicry of intimacy. They would lie together, lost, unnamed, and unremembered, until the pits were uncovered in 1905 and each skeleton was examined to determine the likely cause of its death. Those without marks on their bones—the majority—were killed by lethal flesh wounds, mainly spear and sword thrusts to the abdomen. Four hundred fifty-six wounds spoke of being struck by cutting weapons such as swords and axes. Piercing weapons such as arrows, spears, and the macelike “morning star,” a ball studded with metal spikes and attached to a handle, accounted for 126 wounds. One skull shows evidence of multiple hits. In its base it has three bodkin-tipped arrowheads lodged in a neat cluster. Was the man trying to flee? Or had he turned his back in an instinctive response to a hail of arrows? In addition, though, as a testament to the ferocity of a medieval battlefield, he was also struck twice toward the back of his head with devastating blows from a war hammer that left its telltale square imprint in his shattered skull. The destructive power of medieval weaponry is seen everywhere at Visby, but particularly in the cuts to the legs, where in more than one case a single sword or ax blow had severed both legs in one tremendous scything swipe.
The fate of the anonymous dead of Visby was the lot of most of the slain common soldiers of the time. In many battles the foot soldiers, the archers, the crossbowmen who, through some unlucky turn of battle’s fortune, were left exposed and unprotected, were invariably slaughtered. They had little value, could not be ransomed, and were more profitable dead and stripped of their gear, however meager. In a sense, though, they were condemned to death for the same tactical reasons their social betters, the knights, also perished. If they became isolated, unsupported, separated, they would be shot to death by bowmen, ridden down by cavalrymen, or hacked and stabbed by the exultant infantry. The battle of Falkirk in Scotland (1298) is a good example. The English knights drove off the Scottish cavalry and archers who provided some protection for the pikemen of the infantry massed in dense, circular formations—the schiltrons—that were a characteristic of Scottish battle formations of the period. Faced with the bristling hedge of pikes, the English cavalry milled about, unable to break in, but nor could the Scots advance or retreat for fear of being broken. So they stood and died under the devastating hail of Edward I’s longbowmen (a significant proportion of whom were Welsh). Their defensive cohesion shot to pieces, the survivors were hacked down by the English horse followed by the infantry. Of the original ten thousand Scots pikemen, more than half were dispatched.1
On occasion the infantry were tricked into breaking their defensive unity and suffered the consequences. At Hastings in 1066, the Norman cavalry, riding up and down the Saxon line, had fruitlessly tried to break down the shieldburgh—the formidable shield wall behind which the Saxon frydmen, the foot militia, stood fast. It was only by feigning retreat that the Normans induced a large block of the Saxons to break ranks and chase downhill, abandoning their strong defensive position on a ridge, in what seemed like victorious pursuit, only to have the pursuer turn around and cut down to a man the exposed Saxon foot soldiers. By nightfall the flower of the English army lay dead around the fallen dragon standards and its slain king.
If the fate of the medieval infantry soldier was in many instances brutal and bloody, what of the warrior from the opposite end of the social and economic scale? How did the knight fight and die?
One of the most significant differences—in both combat and death—between the noble warrior and the common soldier was identity. The medieval knight’s surname was a specific identifier, whereas the common soldier had a generic surname very often drawn from his trade—Tanner, Cooper, Fletcher, et cetera. Similarly, the medieval samurai had surnames, whereas the common soldier, the ashigaru (literally, “light feet,” meaning unarmored), had none. In the time before 1587, when it was possible for an ashigaru to fight his way into samurai status, his first acquisition was a surname.2
By the mid-twelfth century, the heraldic symbols painted onto the knight’s shield proclaimed him uniquely, unlike the signifiers of generic tribal membership with which common soldiers’ shields were decorated. The knight’s symbol also told the story of his ancestral history and proclaimed his position in the world. Of course, the heraldic advertising had one decided disadvantage in that it attracted the attention of the enemy—either those intent on capture and ransom or those somewhat more homicidally inclined who wished to decapitate (often literally) their opponent’s command structure and thereby demoralize his army. The horo, a ballooning capelike cloak worn by elite samurai, advertised not only his identity but also his role as a key battlefield messenger (roughly equivalent to an aide-de-camp). As a particularly conspicuous target (similar to the standard-bearer in the Western tradition) it also increased his risk and would serve as the receptacle of his severed head should he be killed in battle. It not only invited attack but, ironically, served to guarantee that its wearer’s body would be treated with respect.
In an echo of the Homeric proclamation, knights would on occasion ride out to pronounce their lineage and seek an opponent of similar caste. Like their European counterparts, the samurai were fixated by lineage and determined to establish their status before battle. In the first clash between the Taira and Minamoto clans on July 29, 1156, two samurai approached an opponent and declared: “We are Oba Kageyoshi and Saburo Kagechika, descendants of Kamakura Gongoro Kagemasa, who when he was sixteen years old … went out in the van of battle and was hit in the left eye by an arrow.… The arrow tore his eye out and left it hanging on the plate of his helmet, but he sent an arrow in reply and killed his enemy.” Quite a declaration before even one blow has been exchanged.3
One of the paradoxes of both knight and samurai is that the passion to establish identity through heraldry and proclamation is countered by the anonymity of armor. For example, the close resemblance between the Viking helmet and face mas
k of the Sutton Hoo burial trove and a samurai mask, complete with its false mustaches, is striking. Other examples of “hiding” identity behind decoration are seen, for example, in the painted faces of North American Indian warriors and the “Huron” haircuts and painted faces of American airborne warriors going into Normandy on D-Day. All chose an adopted identity, terrifying to the beholder and reassuring to the wearer. It is as though the battleground is a theater, and to step into a role, to become a character, makes the warrior’s task easier.
The knight was a warrior designed to fight warriors of a similar caste. The mode of fighting—the technology (the most advanced of his day) and the method (drummed in by training since a tender age)—was intended to be not only practically effective but symbolically charged. The way he fought was meant both to overcome his enemy and to proclaim his status. The high stylization of combat (the way the knight was trained in specific techniques; the weaponry and armor that distinguished him; the protocols of combat he was honor-bound to observe; and, almost above all, the identity proclaimed by his heraldic logo) was a reflection and a projection of his social and economic standing. And it was war that sustained him and gave him identity. The noble troubadour Bertran de Born (who ends up in Dante’s hell, carrying his severed head before him) revels in it: “I tell you I have no such joy in eating, drinking or sleeping as when I hear the cry from both sides, ‘up and at ’em!’ or when I hear the riderless horses whinny under the trees, and groans of ‘Help me! Help me!’ and when I see both great and small fall in the ditches and on the grass, and see the dead transfixed by spear shafts! Barons, mortgage your castles, domains, cities, but never give up war.”4
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