The weeks and months that followed saw two teeming armies advancing slowly toward one another. With the ordeal of civil war scarcely over, Alexis, Helen, Isidore, and Bruince mustered all their forces in defense of the Empire, appealing both to the spirit of tradition and to the new forces that had come into being during the liberation struggle. They hastily tried to re-create the famous regiments of Arsaphes, Basil the Great, and Gandolphus. The irony of history led Alexis to lavish favors on the crack battalions who had once fought for Gandolphus against Balkh, and the auxiliaries from the forests who had once threatened to support Simeon rather than Helen. The first thing to be done was to secure the allegiance of old enemies against the new. Alexis integrated these former adversaries into the army raised in the north against Arrhideus and in the south against the triple alliance of Kanishka, Astakia, and Mardoch. On these groups, once the license of rebellion was over, he imposed the strictest discipline. The Cohort of Death, ten thousand strong, was the kernel of the new army and the heart of Alexis’s system of defense. But all these, together with the Syrian archers, the slingers from the Balearics, the Scythian mercenaries, and the troops from the northeast devoted body and soul to Helen, scarcely amounted to half or even a third of the barbarian hordes. Alexis sent ambassadors to Famagusta, Palermo, Syracuse, Alexandria, and Pomposa. Their mission was to explain that the struggle against Balamir did not concern the Empire alone. What the forests of the northeast and the deserts of the south were to the Empire, the Empire itself was to the Mediterranean and the common civilization that had slowly matured around its shores. The Empire had become the march land of all that western region now threatened by the unbridled ambitions of the Kha-Khan of the Oïghurs and his ally Simeon. Sicily and Pomposa were probably not sorry to see the Empire in trouble. The misfortune of a near rival is often even more agreeable than the defeat of a distant enemy. But the echo of the barbarians’ hoofs was audible in Cyprus and Palermo, and even at the banquets in Pomposa; and Alexis obtained arms, ships, big supplies of corn, and a small amount of gold. Between thirty and forty thousand men from the countries he had appealed to landed at Onessa, in the harbor of the City, and at Cape Gildor, to be assimilated, alongside the mercenaries and foreign detachments, into the army of three hundred or three hundred fifty thousand men mustered by the Empire—in all, still less than four hundred thousand. The barbarians advancing against them were nearly one million, perhaps more.
It was at the end of autumn, under a still dazzling sky, some 300 miles southeast of Amphibolus, by a little, usually dried-up river that disappeared into the sand and that was called Illyssos by the Greek geographers, that the two armies first sighted each other and threw their advance guards into one of the bloodiest engagements in history. The barbarians, as was their wont, formed a shapeless mass spreading out to the horizon. At their head, bold, sumptuously accoutered, covered in furs, and surrounded by their guard, were Balamir and Simeon. In the middle, as far as the eye could see, stretched an endless column of carts drawn by oxen and buffaloes. Some were laden with women, victuals, weapons, tools, and felt tents; the rest were empty, menacingly awaiting their burden of booty. All around, in a whirl of seething movement and of colors lurid in the sun, companies of nomad horsemen wheeled and wove to and fro in all directions. They galloped in tight formations, maneuvering as one man. But each of these marvelously unified groups seemed to do as it pleased. It was like some wonderful and terrifying merry-go-round, where thousands upon thousands of horses and riders, divided up into threes or fours, dozens or scores, followed, overtook, intersected, and crisscrossed with one another. But this chaotic mass, scattering off in all directions, advanced inexorably. From it arose a tumult of cries, a cloud of dust raised by the horses’ hoofs, and a gray shimmer that merged into the landscape, broken only by the red or yellow patches of standards.
The imperial army was terror-stricken by the barbarians’ appearance and their vast, incalculable mass. Silent, ranged in perfect squares behind their colors and their officers, Alexis’s men tensely watched the incoming flood from Asia. In a tent in the middle of the camp, the Emperor, Helen, Bruince, Jester, and a dozen generals consulted maps and plans and hastily prepared their orders. Blind Isidore was also there, listening and giving advice. In this extreme of danger, two men were at the heart of everything—Alexis and Bruince.
Bruince, whom we have already seen at the Emperor’s side on the day of his coronation, was the successor of men like Thaumas, Gandolphus, Fabrician, and Isidore. Unlike them, he had not emerged from the class of the poor or the priests. He was the son of a southern nobleman, a wealthy proprietor of herds and vineyards who sent out ships laden with wool, cheese, and wine to Cyprus, Rhodes, and even Tyre and Pylos.[2] Bruince’s father had frequented the court of Basil the Great, but though not a member of the priests’ party he more than once found himself in opposition to the emperor, and he very wisely decided to retire to his estate rather than be entangled in the intrigues and power struggles that arose from the rivalry between Thaumas and Gandolphus at the end of Basil’s reign. Bruince was an only son, and his father spared no effort to give him an education that for centuries was regarded as a model. Rabelais, Montaigne, Rousseau, Goethe, all the pedagogical treatises and Bildungsromane of the countries beyond the Rhine openly take their inspiration from it; many traits in both Pantagruel and Émile come in direct line from Bruince. His father arranged for him to awake in the morning to the sound of sweet music; a Greek tutor was engaged to teach him mathematics and philosophy; a Parthian horseman was his riding master; from the time he was five until he was thirteen his day was divided almost equally between training of the body and training of the mind. Bruince excelled at both. He was a champion swimmer, could recite Homer by heart, run faster than professional athletes, and calculate, by observing shadows, the position of the sun in the sky and the exact time in places as far away as Egypt, where it was scarcely dawn, and India or China, where it was already broad daylight. His father was very proud of him, and had great hopes of his winning success and distinction in trade, the army, or at the court of the emperor.
What strange process is it that takes place in the hearts of the young? When Bruince was just thirteen he told his father he loathed all his successes and saw no future for himself except in the rejection of the triumphs foretold for him. There is something astonishingly modern and at the same time comic in the descriptions that have come down to us of the father’s despair at this catastrophe. “All that effort for nothing! All that money! If your poor mother were alive to see this! . . . Think of the future you’re throwing away. Think what Glaucon and Philomena will say. Think of your Uncle Callicles who was so fond of you. Think of the old age you’re storing up for yourself.” But Bruince was not to be moved. He left behind riding masters and tutors, the fine house with its vineyards and its one hundred fifty servants, the horses from Syria, the robes of linen and silk, and the beds inlaid with ivory and tortoise shell, and set out as an ordinary sailor, beyond the Pillars of Hercules, along the coast of Africa, where life was at its toughest, whence many never returned. His father died of grief. He had thought to prolong his own life in the honors to be won by his beloved son, and now that life no longer had any meaning. Bruince was not there to hear the last words from lips that spoke only of him, nor was he present at the burial. He was already on some distant island—historians debate whether it was the Canaries, the Cape Verde Islands, or Madeira. But it is even more difficult for the fortunate of this world to escape their fate than it is for the unfortunate. Bruince’s father had devoted what remained of his life to recovering his situation and influence at the emperor’s court, so that, in spite of all that had happened, his son’s future would be assured. The elderly nobleman, once so haughty, so scornful of intrigue, so contemptuous of compromise and accommodation, was now to be seen suing on behalf of his lost son for help the latter did not want and interference that had no effect. The old man seemed to have forgotten all family pride. The fops and
climbers at court came to regard him as a rather ridiculous nobody, and openly made fun of him. But right at the end of his own career, one man was touched by the comedy behind which he divined the tragedy of a whole life, of two lives, and of a young man’s ambition outsoaring tradition and aiming perhaps at the impossible. The man who took pity on the old noble was Thaumas. A few months later Thaumas was murdered. But he had had time to recommend to his friends a fifteen-year-old sailor of unknown whereabouts whose name was Bruince.
Many years later, after countless adventures, Bruince, still young, divested of all his worldly goods and entirely devoted to study, already well known for his learning and wisdom, was one of the priests of Aquileus. By a miracle he survived proscriptions, the fury of the barbarian tyrants, and all the other dangers. He hid, then followed Isidore, becoming his disciple and one of his most loyal soldiers. He met Philocrates, who recognized him as the boy Thaumas had told him of twenty or twenty-five years before, and introduced him into Alexis’s personal entourage. There were plenty of things in common between the Fool of God and this Prodigal Son: in both, refusal and rebellion had been only the expression of an inflexible personality and a passionate expectation, the sign of a singular destiny. Alexis soon saw that Bruince possessed the rigor and magnanimity that marked him out as the successor of the former great servants of the State and of Philocrates himself. No sooner had Alexis come to the throne than he made Bruince procurator-general of the Empire, the highest official in the new hierarchy. On the Emperor’s personal authority and that of Helen, with Isidore, followed by Jester, and helped by three or four officers directly responsible for troops, equipment, finance, and supplies, Bruince, the young man of good position, the ex-sailor, priest of Aquileus, heir to Thaumas and Philocrates, procurator-general of the Empire, was in charge of everything.
They were all there in the tent, confronting Balamir and the barbarian horde, and once again the fate of the Empire was in the balance. Work in the fields, peace in the craftsmen’s shops, the learning of the priests, the singing and dancing of the children, the evening calm in the squares or in the valleys, all depended on the thousands of men whose tread, whose breath nearly, could be heard all around on the plain, and whose blood was about to be spilled. The numerical inferiority of the imperial army was obvious to all, and the old terror of the barbarians stirred in every heart. But even more than fear, they inspired hatred; and instead of fighting against each other, the two emotions combined and grew stronger—better to die than be subjected anew to caprice and injustice, cruelty and tyranny. Each man knew he was fighting for his home, the future of his sons, the resumption of feasts too long suspended, for his happiness, and for his gods. The barbarians dreamed of fertile lands, fields of wheat and rye, of treasure, and fine buildings in shining cities. Town and country had alike been ravaged by years of internal strife, but the nomads did not know this, and for them the Empire was still a beckoning vision. Lenin was right when he said:[3] “The class struggle is foreshadowed in the conflict between the Empire of those who had everything and the barbarians, who had nothing.” The battle was on between those who stood only to lose and those who stood only to gain. So both sides had excellent reasons to conquer or die in the attempt.
The battle lasted six days and six nights—one of the longest, bloodiest, and most indecisive encounters in the whole of military history. “As rarely happens in war,” writes Thiers, “the two opposing masses marched resolutely at one another, without flinching, until they came into contact.” There was horrible slaughter. The barbarian squadrons broke against the imperial squares. But fresh waves of horsemen still came on from all quarters, and gradually began to penetrate the wall of pikes and spears that their arrows had already breached. The Balearic slingers wreaked havoc among the nomad horsemen. And against the barbarians’ wild onslaughts Bruince, remembering perhaps the maddened horses used in the siege of Balkh, launched chariots armed with long scythes, or linked together by chains stuck with sharp blades, which mowed down whole ranks of the enemy like skittles, shattering the centaurs into their component parts and leaving them lying in their own blood. Puységur,[4] Guibert,[5] Clausewitz,[6] Hans Delbrück,[7] Shaposhnikov,[8] and Liddell Hart[9] have all made skilled, penetrating, sometimes inspired analyses of the maneuvers of both sides. But many as are the accounts of the battle, it is impossible to arrive at a very accurate idea of the tactics employed. According to some, Balamir’s plan was to attempt a strong frontal breakthrough; according to others, it was a classic example of an encircling movement. As well as the authoritative works mentioned above, there have been numerous commentaries on and attempts to explain the action. There is something rather disturbing about the multiplicity of explanations offered for so many things nowadays, and this in every field, in literature and sociology as much as in strategy. In military as in all other matters, to comment is easy but not much to the purpose. Explanation is one of the curses of our age. Anybody is prepared to voice theories on books he didn’t write and on victories he didn’t win. In countless essays the maneuvers of Alexis and Balamir have been compared to the battles of Cannae, Austerlitz, the Marne, and Stalingrad, but the military historians, strategists, and polemologists have not been able to agree on any conclusions. Because of the inflation of theories and interpretations, anecdote is out of favor these days. Yet the only image popular tradition preserves of the six-day battle is of Balamir succeeding in galloping right up to the Emperor, who owed his life to Jester’s intervention. Just as the barbarian prince was raising his sword against Alexis, the boy slipped under the Kha-Khan’s white stallion and killed it with a dagger thrust. Balamir, unhorsed, managed with great difficulty to rejoin his men. By the evening of the sixth day, the barbarians had lost between two and three hundred thousand men, Alexis about fifty thousand. The two severely tried armies encamped on their positions.
It was during that night, in the very midst of the fray, that secret talks were held between Simeon and Bruince. They ended quite quickly in an agreement that both the Emperor and Balamir accepted, solemnly promising to observe its conditions under the supervision of a commission of priests and shamans chosen equally from both sides. At dawn on the seventh day, riders and trumpeters of both camps galloped through the lines and separated the combatants.[10] Fighting was suspended, and before each army heralds proclaimed the terms of the agreement. The war was ended, the dead were to be exchanged, and the quarrel between the barbarians and the Empire was to be settled by a double single combat between two barbarians and two warriors of the Empire.
The announcement created a huge sensation. Despite the general exhaustion, small groups gathered all over the battlefield, sometimes bringing together those who had fought against one another the previous day. A tense silence succeeded the tumult of battle. Excitement was greatest in the barbarian camp, for to them the agreement was a godsend. Single combat was held in honor among these rough and brutal people, and they all assumed victory was as good as theirs. Once the matter was settled, Alexis would have to submit to Balamir and the Empire would be open to the nomads. Those around Alexis were anxious, it is true, but everyone commended their cause to the gods, and all supported the Emperor’s decision. Despite the unequal losses that had probably brought Balamir to agree to the settlement, the barbarians were still so numerous that another day’s fighting might have seen the rout of the imperial army and the victory of the nomads. It was better to put oneself in the hands of fate.
On both sides a crowd of warriors pressed round their leaders asking to be nominated to take part in the combat. Balamir’s choice was soon made. “I choose force and hatred,” he said, “because it is those that bring victory.” Force was represented by Dingizik, a man from the Urals whose size made him stand out among the rest of the nomad horsemen. He was a redheaded giant over 6 feet tall and broad to match, with a shaven head and two short braids. His massive, brutal body and cruel, scar-seamed face were so savage-looking they were enough in themselves to paralyze any adversar
y with terror. He boasted of having slain one hundred thirty-two men already with his own hand, raped more than one hundred women, left a trail of fire behind him everywhere he went, and of being the strongest of all the children of the steppe and the high plateaus. His name was known in every peasant’s hut in the Empire, even as far away as Onessa and Gildor. By nominating him Balamir was not only choosing the best, most agile, and bravest of his warriors, he was also foreshadowing, as far as the means at his disposal allowed, psychological warfare, and the devastating effect of propaganda on a fear-stricken enemy. When the name of Dingizik began to pass from mouth to mouth among the imperial troops, a shudder ran through the camp. Dingizik! Who could possibly rival his skill and violence? The shadow of murder, extortion, and rape seemed to fall over the Empire again at the very sound of his name. So much for force. The barbarians’ second champion—hatred—was to be Simeon.
The Glory of the Empire Page 27