"Gods! what is Terrentius Varro doing!" cried Decius suddenly, and the three turned at his voice. A nodding forest of crests, red and black, rising a cubit above the uncovered helmets of the legionaries, seemed to fill the eastern plain and extend almost to where the Adriatic beat upon the shingle. "Look at his front! Look at how closely the maniples are crushed together! Gods! they are almost 'within the rails' already."
Sergius looked, and the frown upon his brow deepened.
"Eighty thousand men," he muttered; "and we shall scarce outflank their forty thousand. Does Varro wish to cast aside every advantage! Gods! what gain is there in such depth? and he might—"
"Evidently you do not understand the strategy of great commanders who have studied war."
The voice that interrupted was cynical and scornful, to a degree that men hated the speaker even before they saw him; and, when the three wheeled quickly, his face gave nothing to dispel the bad impression. A tall, gaunt man, in plain and somewhat battered armour; a face sharp-featured, very dark, and deeply lined wherever the wrinkles lay that expressed pride and contempt and violent passions; lowering brows from beneath which shone little beady, cunning eyes that opponents feared and distrusted: this was Lucius Aemilius Paullus, the conqueror of Illyria, the man who had barely escaped conviction for his peculations, the colleague of Varro the butcher, a patrician of the bluest blood in Rome, a knave in pecuniary matters, selfish and ungoverned, but a brave and wary soldier from cothurni to crest.
"You seem to be criticising a Roman consul: even my brother, Varro;" he said again, for the three had only bowed in reply to his former speech. "Are you not presumptuous?—you, Lucius Sergius; and you, Caius Manlius—boys in war—and you, Decius, or whoever you may be—a man of Varro's order, if I mistake not?"
"Yes, my father, I criticise," replied Sergius, at last, for the others said nothing.
"Perhaps you were thinking that he has extended his front too far?" said the consul, and there was infinite sarcasm in his tones.
Sergius grew crimson under the taunting voice and the little, shifty eyes.
"I have ventured to say," he replied haughtily, "that the consul, Varro, is not using our numbers as he might. As you have noted, the front is contracted, where we might easily lash around their flank like the thongs of a scourge. Nevertheless had I known that the noble colleague of the general was near me, I would have restrained my words."