Together this group seems to have formed an inner circle of advisors—a general staff, if such a thing can be applied to a decision-making process about which so little is known. Several others are named—Carthalo, an officer whose light cavalry captured two thousand fugitive Romans after Cannae; Gisgo, who worried about the size of the Roman army before the battle; Adherbal, chief of engineers; Bostar and Bomilcar, apparently aides.30 The remains of this group are obviously skeletal, an archaeology of bits and pieces, with no individual besides Hannibal even remotely taking shape as a personality. Yet corporately, they formed a cadre brilliantly attuned to their commander’s intent, instinctively carrying out his will with a timing that could only have come from complete and mutual trust. Without them Hannibal never would have made it to Italy, and with them, once there, he would win victory after victory.
[4]
He had a narrow window of time to arrive; the Alpine passes close down with snow and ice by mid-November. Conventional wisdom has it that he would have wanted to leave New Carthage in the early spring, but it seems more likely he had to wait until late May or early June. Once he left Barca land, his army would have had to forage, and the harvest would have begun to become available during this time frame, and progressively later as he moved north.31 This was to be a continuing theme for the entire war. Hannibal’s army would move or not move according to the rumbling of its stomach, and as much as anything else, the Romans’ understanding and manipulation of this most unrelenting fact of life would save them from defeat. A soldier on the march burns between four and five thousand calories a day, or between two and three pounds of food; for an army of fifty thousand that meant over sixty tons daily, and Hannibal’s initial force would have required more than twice that amount, plus forage for thousands of cavalry horses and pack mules—quite literally a tall order.32 For the initial 280-mile march to the Ebro, there were probably supply dumps, but once they passed this point, Hannibal and friends were on their own. This was their Rubicon.
It was here, Livy reports (21.22.8–9) that the aspiring conqueror dreamed of a ghostly youth sent as a guide. The apparition told Hannibal to follow him and not look back. However, like Lot’s wife, the mortal could not resist. He turned to discover an immense serpent amidst thunderclaps tearing up the landscape, and when he inquired what this meant, he was told “that it was the devastation of Italy: that he should continue to advance forward, nor inquire further, but suffer the fates to remain in obscurity.” Thus reassured, he headed off into the unknown.
But as he went, he apparently tried to create a buffer zone to the north by pacifying the tribes as far as the Pyrenees, stripping off an occupation force of ten thousand foot soldiers and a thousand horse under a certain Hanno (not his nephew) and also leaving him all the heavy baggage. Upon reaching the base of the Pyrenees, the army was more than half the distance to Italy but was still burdened by a considerable number of unhappy campers. During the ascent through the col de Perthus, an easy pass approximately twenty-six hundred feet high, a group of three thousand Spanish Carpentani mercenaries turned back toward home, apparently sending a thrill of apprehension through the entire army.33 Hannibal’s reaction was unpredictably mild; he not only made no attempt to stop them, but he also gave leave to another seven thousand he observed to be restless. There must have been another twenty thousand infantry and two thousand cavalry whose departure went unrecorded. Like a moon rocket shedding stages, Hannibal seems to have been consciously lightening his army for the tough road ahead. Polybius (3.35.7) tells us that, stripped of its malcontents and impedimenta, the remaining force entered coastal Gaul a much leaner fighting machine of fifty thousand foot soldiers and nine thousand horse.
Blocking the way near Perpignan was a confab of worried and potentially belligerent Gauls, uncertain of just what the appearance of this army of strangers implied. Anxious to avoid an unnecessary fight, Hannibal offered a barrage of gifts and assurances that he was just passing through, which won him a free march all the way to the Rhône. He followed the traditional route of what would become the Via Domitia and what is today the Languedoc coastal motorway, completing around seven hundred miles of the nine-hundred-mile journey and shedding another twelve thousand infantry and one thousand cavalry, possibly leaving them for garrison duty.34 Here, on the banks of the Rhône, probably sometime past the middle of September, things got a lot more complicated.
Glowering from across the river at the point where he wanted to ford—Polybius (3.42.1) tells us it was about four days’ march from the sea—was a concentration of particularly aggressive Celts, the Volcae, whose obvious intent was to dispute his passage. Hannibal’s reaction was clever and also characteristic; after spending two days collecting boats and canoes, he sent a strong force of cavalry under his nephew Hanno approximately twenty miles north, to a point near what is today Avignon, where they crossed and headed back down to lie in wait behind the Celtic camp. Smoke-signaled that they were in place, Hannibal ordered his main body to begin the crossing, which drew the Gauls racing from their encampment to stop the foreigners at the riverbank. Instantly Hanno attacked from the rear, leaving the Volcae flabbergasted and fleeing for their lives as the Punic vanguard carved out a beachhead sufficient for the rest of the army to cross in safety. It was a signature Hannibalic move, and the surprise cavalry attack from the rear was destined to seal the doom of many Romans. The strategy also harkened back to a nearly identical flanking maneuver that Alexander had pulled off at the Hydaspes River (modern Jhelum River) a century earlier. The Punic commander’s nearly endless bag of tricks was certainly energized by his tactical creativity, but, surrounded as he was by learned Greeks, we can also assume his choices were informed by state-of-the-art military history and perhaps a bit of hero worship.
The next day was a busy one, filled with implications for the future. First off—and this must have been a surprise—he heard that there was a Roman fleet anchored at the mouth of the river, and immediately sent five hundred Numidian cavalry to check out numbers and intent. Next, he assembled his men and introduced to them a delegation from Cisalpine Gaul—one Magilus and several other chieftains—as a way of reassuring the men that a happy reception awaited them on the far side of the Alps. When Hannibal noticed gloom concerning the prospective climb, he asked the men if they thought these Boii “had not crossed the Alps in the air on wings?”35 Then, as if on cue, once the gathering dissolved, the Numidians raced back into camp. They had gotten much the worst of an engagement with a reconnoitering band of Roman cavalry, who, having discovered the main body of the Punic army, had then turned back to report its presence. Very suddenly and most unexpectedly, the wraps were off Hannibal’s invasion.
Another general might have stayed put and readied his army for the inevitable Roman assault, but this Barcid was not easily distracted and seems to have understood that a delay of even a few days could have precluded crossing the Alps that year.36 He immediately ordered his infantry to start marching north along the river, and sent his cavalry south as a screen.
But if he was in a hurry, he was also a Carthaginian and therefore was not about to leave his elephants on the wrong side of the river. So Polybius (3.46) describes for us the construction of a massive two-hundred-foot-long dirt-covered pachyderm pier and ferry arrangement, onto which the great beasts were lured and on which they were then towed across the river. Most stayed on the ferry, but some panicked and fell into the water, drowning their mahouts but still making it to the other side by using their trunks as snorkels. This proved to be quite a spectacle, but it also represented considerable time and energy devoted to a questionable military asset.
The crossing ended well, though. When the army of Publius Cornelius Scipio (father of Scipio Africanus) and his brother Cnaeus (whom we last saw storming the capital of the Insubres) arrived at the Punic campsite, Hannibal was three days gone and far up the river. Without supplies, there was no way the Romans could chase him. Besides, there was no clear idea of his route or int
entions. It would have been like tracking a ghost in the wilderness. This would prove the curse of the team of elder Scipios, good generals but always just slightly out of phase with opportunity—the playthings of fate.
The Romans wanted to fight the war in Spain and Africa, and had it not been for Hannibal’s march, this would have been a perfectly reasonable plan—simultaneously striking at the nest of the Barcids and at Carthage’s vulnerable home front.37 Thus, for the year 218, the two consuls, Publius Cornelius Scipio and Tiberius Sempronius Longus, were sent to Iberia and Sicily with the appropriate military and naval assets. Sempronius sailed for Lilybaeum, the jumping-off point to Africa, and set about preparing for the invasion. But Scipio was detained.
Yet again Cisalpine Gaul was in rebellion. This time it was the Boii and Insubres, probably encouraged by rumors of Hannibal’s coming, chasing the Roman settlers from the new and unfortified colonies of Cremona and Placentia, blockading them at Mutina (modern Modena), and then taking a senatorial commission prisoner when the Romans attempted to negotiate. To make matters worse, a relief column commanded by the praetor L. Manlius Vulso was twice ambushed and then besieged at Tannetum.38 Publius Cornelius Scipio, who was in the north preparing to set sail for Spain, was an obvious source of troops to clean up this mess. Under senatorial orders, another praetor, C. Atilius Serranus, sheared off one of his own legions along with five thousand allies and quickly relieved Manlius, but then he kept the force to sit on the situation. This meant Scipio had to levy more forces, which took valuable time.
Finally, after a long delay, Scipio sailed from Pisae (modern Pisa), hugging the coast of Liguria and pulling into Massilia, a staunch Roman ally and a place where he might be updated on the state of play in Spain. Instead he learned, probably to his amazement, that Hannibal was just up the River Rhône. Being a Roman, he immediately sought to engage. But it took time to disembark his army, and having missed the Carthaginians, Scipio made a fateful and strategically prescient decision. Despite the improbable nature of the invasion route, Scipio seems to have understood that Hannibal was going to attempt a transalpine crossing, but neither had Scipio forgotten that the seat of Barcid power remained in Spain. So he split the difference, sending the bulk of his army on to Iberia under his brother, the former consul Cnaeus, while he himself returned to northern Italy to take command of the two legions there to await Hannibal, should he make it across intact.
Hannibal might not have made it, but for catching a lucky break. After four days of marching up the Rhône, the Punic force came to a place of indeterminate location, known in the sources as “the island,” inhabited by a prosperous tribe of Gauls in the midst of a leadership dispute between two brothers. The brothers turned to the outsiders to mediate, and Hannibal threw his weight behind the eldest, one Braneus, thereby earning his gratitude, and more important, grain supplies, replacements for worn-out weapons, warm clothing, and boots suitable for high altitude. Braneus even sent experienced guides and a cavalry escort all the way to the foothills of the Alps.39 Hannibal was not one proverbially dependent upon the kindness of strangers, but as he stared up at this forbidding wall of mountains before him, he may have suspected that the aid of these Gauls could spell the difference between success and failure.
[5]
Of all antiquity’s sanguinary events, none has drawn more ink than Hannibal’s passage across the Alps.40 It seems that almost as soon as the Carthaginians stumbled down onto the Lombard plain, quills began hitting the parchment in an endless orgy of speculation that proceeds to this day, most of it concerned with delineating the path Hannibal took.41 This question will not be settled here, or addressed beyond outlining a few of the more probable contenders. All that is necessary to know really is that he did it, and this is not only beyond dispute, but it overshadows all else, since this accomplishment set the conditions for one of the most important wars in recorded history. Certainly earlier bands of amorphous Celts had managed the crossing and had then surged down into Italy. But this was the first time a highly organized army attempted such a stunt, an army already far from home base and numbering in the tens of thousands—including cavalry, engineers, and logistical elements, not to mention elephants. The term “stunt” is no misnomer. For as desperate as the circumstances grew, there was a theatrical aspect to the episode; that is the way the ancients interpreted it and that is probably how Hannibal would have wanted it remembered, eclipsing Alexander’s sweep into Asia and recalling the mythical Alpine crossing of Hercules.42
The high Alps were inhabited by a thin penumbra of Gauls known as the Allobroges, eking out a meager living as subsistence farmers, supplemented by freebooting, and networked so that word of a large force of flatlanders to be preyed upon would reverberate rapidly from glen to glen. Almost as soon as the Punic columns began ascending the valley leading through the first and lower range of the Alpes du Dauphiné, Hannibal began noticing tribesmen shadowing them from the heights, each day growing more numerous and less concerned with concealing themselves.
Worried, Hannibal sent his scouts (probably companions of Magilus’s, since Braneus’s guides had returned to “the island”43) forward, and soon learned that to reach the pass over the initial range the army would soon have to thread its way through a narrow gorge, where the Allobroges were preparing an ambush. However, he also learned that the Gauls obligingly returned to the comfort of their village at nightfall. The wily Carthaginian therefore unveiled his “keep the campfires burning” trick destined to fool so many Romans. He marched his army to the mouth of the narrow ravine, settled down the main body, and then under the cover of night led a troop of light cavalry unobserved to the heights above where the Allobroges normally congregated.
When the Gauls returned the next day, they found Hannibal looming like a guardian vulture, which deterred them for a while. But then the sight of the Carthaginian column—so slow and vulnerable, often trudging single file on precipitous ledges—proved too tempting and the Allobroges tribesmen came charging down, hurling rocks, rolling boulders, and launching arrows. Pack animals began to bolt and plunge off the cliffs, dragging their handlers to the rocks below. Hannibal hesitated to intervene, wanting to avoid even greater confusion. Finally, realizing he risked losing most of his supplies and transport, he stormed down upon the attackers, killing some and driving off the rest. The situation stabilized, and a morose silence settled over the men as they moved out of the gorge and toward the pass above, followed by the elephants, which had been led carefully across the ledges without loss.44
A measure of revenge, though, lay just ahead in the form of the attacking Allobroges’ fortified township, now all but abandoned and primed for sacking by the angry Carthaginians. The fate of the remaining inhabitants goes unrecorded, but it cannot have been good, especially after the Punic soldiers found some of their compatriots, foragers who had been recently captured, bound and held as prisoners of an uncertain fate in hovels scattered about the village. The Carthaginians also picked the place clean, gathering enough grain and cattle to last the next three days’ march.
Proceeding down the first ridge and across the valley, the army at last came within sight of what the Alps were all about—truly high Alps. Where the peaks of the previous barrier had topped out at around five thousand feet, these loomed as high as thirteen thousand feet, an apparently impenetrable barrier to an army whose Cisalpine Gallic scouts seemed to have lost their way.
Enter a delegation of elders from the local tribes. Bearing olive branches and purporting to be cowed by Hannibal’s recent victory over the Allobroges, they offered him provisions and guides to lead him over the mountains. Hannibal may have been skeptical, but he was also probably desperate for supplies and directions; so he went against his instincts, took some hostages, and once again became dependent upon the kindness of strangers. It was a near fatal error.
For ambush, not guidance, was their intent. Over the next two days these Gauls led the Punic force in the general direction of the Italian fro
ntier, but all the while funneled warriors from the network of surrounding villages into a trap calculated to produce maximum lethality. So for the second time Hannibal found himself standing before the entrance of a long, narrow, very deep gorge. Sensing Gallic treachery, he took the precaution of re-forming his column with the pack train in the middle, the elephants and cavalry at the head, and the heavy infantry to the rear. Polybius (3.53.1) says it saved the army from utter destruction. Still, Hannibal stood on the precipice, about to become ensnared in a deadly combination of bad company and bad country. Of the approximately forty thousand men who entered the gorge, only 65 percent would survive the week or so it took to reach the Lombard plain.45
Initially the atttacking Gauls were divided into two elements: those stationed along the cliffs above, and a larger group shadowing the Punic column at ground level. The Gauls waited until virtually all of the Carthaginian army had been swallowed up by the defile and then delivered their first thrust against the rear guard, which, turning in unison, checked it. Had the heavy infantry not been in the back, the Gauls might have rolled up the entire force from the rear. Still, the Carthaginians could not prevent a devastating assault from above, as the tribesmen once again began bombarding the column and especially the pack animals with rocks, boulders, spears, and arrows—a hail of projectiles that this time could not be stopped, only endured. The Gauls even managed to establish a blocking force on the narrowest part of the path, effectively cutting the Carthaginian army in half. Still, there was only one way out, and that was forward, so the vanguard pushed ahead.
It was at this point—the first and only during the entire campaign—where the Punic pachyderms truly earned their keep. Doubtless enraged by the barrage of rocks, the elephants were even more intent on exiting the gorge than their compatriots, and they proved considerably more effective at doing so, since the Gauls blocking the exit had never dreamed such beasts existed, and scattered in terror before them. Spilling out of the far end of the defile the forward portion of the Carthaginian force was saved. Hannibal, never slow to grasp an advantage, seems to have led the elephants back to break up the Gauls obstructing the rear of the Punic column, thereby rescuing the remainder of his army, minus the heavy casualties they must have taken.46 All told, it was far from Hannibal’s best battle, and things would soon get a lot worse.
The Ghosts of Cannae: Hannibal and the Darkest Hour of the Roman Republic Page 13