Great captains

by Theodore Ayrault Dodge

Each general made a stirring address to his army. Polybius gives both. Hannibal’s has the true ring of the great captain. “Let us hasten into action. I promise you victory, and, the gods willing, I will make my promise good.” Two days later Hannibal offered Æmilius battle. But Æmilius declined it, and Hannibal sent his Numidians to the other side to annoy the Roman foragers. The succeeding day, knowing Varro to be in command, Hannibal again offered battle, aware that the hot-tempered Roman would be burning to avenge the yesterday’s taunt. He left eight thousand men to guard his camp.

There has been much discussion as to which bank of the Aufidus was the scene of the battle. It seems to me that the plan in the diagram comes nearest to fitting all the statements, however conflicting, of the several authorities. Near Hannibal’s camp the Aufidus makes a bold, southerly sweep. Here Hannibal forded the stream in two columns, drew up his army, and leaned his flanks on the river-banks so as to prevent the Romans, with their numerical superiority, from overlapping them. His front he covered with archers and slingers, so as to hide his formation from the Roman generals. Varro, as Hannibal anticipated, thought the Carthaginians were crossing to attack the lesser camp, and leaving eleven thousand men to guard the larger one, with orders to attack Hannibal’s camp during the battle, he also crossed and drew up in the plain opposite the Carthaginians, he and every Roman in the ranks craving to come to blows with the hated invaders.

Varro also threw out his light troops in advance. He had sixty-five thousand foot and seven thousand horse, to Hannibal’s thirty-two thousand foot and ten thousand horse. He could not overlap Hannibal’s flanks, so he determined to make his line heavier, and seek to crush him at the first impact. He changed the formation of the maniples so as to make them sixteen men deep and ten men front, instead of sixteen men front by ten deep, as usual. This was a grievous error. His men were unapt to manœuvre or fight well in this unwonted form. He should have employed his surplus, say twenty-five thousand men, as a reserve for emergencies. His army was in the usual three lines, fifteen legions in all, the Roman on the right, the allied on the left. The intervals between the maniples always equalled their front, and the distance between the lines the depth of the maniples. The Roman cavalry, twenty-four hundred strong, was on the right. The allied, forty-eight hundred strong, on the left. It would have been better massed in one body. But such was the only formation then known. Æmilius commanded the right, Varro the left wing.

Hannibal placed on his left, opposite the Roman cavalry, his heavy Spanish and Gallic horse, eight thousand strong, two-thirds in a first, and one-third in a second line. This body was strong enough to crush the Roman horse, and thus cut off the retreat of the legions to their camps and towards Rome. In other words, Hannibal’s fighting was to be forced on the Romans’ strategic flank. He had a perfectly lucid idea of the value of a blow from this direction. On his right, facing the allied cavalry, were his Numidians, two thousand strong. Of the infantry, the Spaniards and Gauls were in the centre in alternate bodies. His best troops, the African foot, he placed on their either flank. He expected these veterans to leaven the whole lump. The foot was all in phalanxes of one thousand and twenty-four men each, the African foot in sixteen ranks, as usual, the Spaniards and Gauls in ten. Hannibal had been obliged thus to make his centre thin, from lack of men, but he had seething in his brain a manœuvre by which he proposed to make this very weakness a factor of success. He had been on the ground and had seen Varro strengthen the Roman centre. This confirmed him in his plan.

Hannibal commanded the centre in person, Hanno the right, Hasdrubal the left, Maharbal the cavalry of the left. Hannibal relied on Maharbal to beat the Roman cavalry, and then, riding by the rear of the Roman army, to join the Numidians on the Carthaginian right, like Coenus at the Hydaspes. His cavalry was superior in numbers, and vastly outranked in effectiveness the Roman horse.

Hannibal was, no doubt, familiar with Marathon. He proposed to better the tactics of that day. Remember that Miltiades had opposed to him Orientals; Hannibal faced Roman legions. His general plan was to withdraw his centre before the heavy Roman line,—to allow them to push it in,—and then to enclose them in his wings and fall on their flanks. This was a highly dangerous manœuvre, unless the withdrawal of the centre could be checked at the proper time; but his men had the greatest confidence in him; the river in his rear would be an aid, if he could but keep his men steady; and in war no decisive result can be compassed without corresponding risk. Hannibal had fully prepared his army for this tactical evolution, and rehearsed its details with all his subordinates. He not only had the knack of making his lieutenants comprehend him, but proposed to see to the execution of the work himself.

The Carthaginians faced north, the Romans south. The rising sun was on the flank of either. The wind was southerly, and blew the dust into the faces of the Romans. The light troops on either side opened the action, and fiercely contested the ground for some time. During the preliminary fighting, Hannibal advanced his centre, the Spanish and Gallic foot, in a salient or convex order from the main line, the phalanxes on the right and left of the central one being, it is presumed, in echelon to it. The wings, of African foot, kept their place.

While this was being done, Hannibal ordered the heavy horse on his left to charge down on the Roman horse in their front. This they did with their accustomed spirit, but met a gallant resistance. The Roman knights fought for every inch with the greatest obstinacy, when dismounted, continuing the contest on foot. The fighting was not by shocks, it was rather hand to hand. But the weight and superior training of the Carthaginian horse soon told. They rode down the Romans and crushed them out of existence. Æmilius was badly wounded, but escaped the ensuing massacre and made his way to the help of the Roman centre, hoping there to retrieve the day. On the Carthaginian right the Numidians had received orders to skirmish with the allied horse and not come to a decisive combat till they should be joined by the heavy horse from the Carthaginian left. This they did in their own peculiar style, by riding around their opponents, squadron by squadron, and by making numberless feigned attacks. The battle in the centre had not yet developed results, when Maharbal, having destroyed the Roman cavalry, and ridden around the Roman army, appeared in the rear of the allied horse. The Numidians now attacked seriously, and between them, in a few minutes, there was not a Roman horseman left upon the field alive. The Numidians were then sent in pursuit, Maharbal remaining upon the field.

While this was going on, the light troops of both sides had been withdrawn through the intervals, and had formed in the rear and on the flanks of legion and phalanx, ready to fill gaps and supply the heavy foot with weapons. This had uncovered Hannibal’s salient. Varro had committed still another blunder. In the effort to make his line so strong as to be irresistible, he had ordered his maniples of principes from the second line forward into the intervals of the maniples of hastati in first line, thus making one solid wall and robbing the legionaries of their accustomed mobility, as well as lending them a feeling of uncertainty in their novel formation. Still, with its wonted spirit, the heavy Roman line advanced on Hannibal’s salient. The Carthaginian wings could not yet be reached, being so much refused. Striking the apex, the fighting became furious. Hannibal’s salient, as proposed, began to withdraw, holding its own in good style. Varro, far too eager, and seeing, as he thought, speedy victory before him, was again guilty of the folly of ordering the third line, the triarii, and even the light troops, up to the support of the already overcrowded first and second lines. The Carthaginian centre, supported by its skirmishers, held the ground with just enough tenacity to whet the determination of the Romans to crush it. Varro now insanely ordered still more forces in from his wings to reënforce his centre, already a mass so crowded as to be unable to retain its organization, but pressing back the Carthaginians by mere weight of mass. He could not better have played into Hannibal’s hands. The Romans—three men in the place of one—struggled onward, but became every moment a more and more jumbled body. Its maniple formation, and consequent ease of movement, was quite lost. Still, it pushed forward, as if to certain victory, and still the Carthaginian salient fell back, till from a salient it became a line, from a line a reëntering angle or crescent. Hannibal, by great personal exertions, had in an extraordinary manner preserved the steadiness and formation of his centre, though outnumbered four to one. The Carthaginian wings he now ordered slowly to advance, which all the more edged the Roman centre into the cul-de-sac Hannibal had prepared. The Roman legionaries were already shouting their eager cry of victory; but so herded together had they got that there was no room to use their weapons. Hannibal had kept the Carthaginian centre free from any feeling of demoralization, and ready at his command to turn and face the enemy. The wings, by their advance, had hustled the Roman legions into the form of a wedge without a vestige of maniple formation left. The decisive moment had come. Hannibal seized it with the eye of the born soldier. Arresting the backward movement of the centre, which still had elbow-room to fight, as the Romans had not, he gave the orders to the wings which they were impatiently awaiting. These veteran troops, in perfect order, wheeled inward to right and left, on the flanks of the struggling mass of legionaries. The Roman army was lost beyond a ray of hope, for, at the same instant, Maharbal, having finished the destruction of the cavalry, rode down upon its rear. The cry of victory changed to a cry of terror. Defeat degenerated into mere slaughter. The Carthaginian cavalry divided into small troops and rode into the midst of the Roman soldiers, sabring right and left. Some squadrons galloped around to the flanks and lent a hand to the African phalanx in its butchery. No quarter was given, or indeed asked. The Romans died with their faces to the foe. The bloody work continued till but a handful was left. Livy and Polybius place the killed at from forty to seventy thousand men. Varro had already escaped with a mere squad of horse. Æmilius Paullus died, sword in hand, seeking to stem the tide of disaster. Three proconsuls, two quæstors, twenty-one military tribunes, a number of ex-consuls, prætors, and ædiles, and eighty senators, perished with the army.