Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power (18 page)

Naïve Hannibal—who led thousands of tough warriors into Italy in the belief that his genius was to be matched against other generals and warriors similar to his own, rather than pitted against the faceless and anonymous institutions of republicanism and civic militarism itself. Naïve Hannibal—who believed that this war could be decided by his men’s ephemeral heroism and cunning at Cannae rather than by the lasting power of an idea. Citizens, it turns out, are history’s deadliest killers.

Contemporary scholars and general students often display a natural empathy toward Hannibal. It is easy to champion an underdog as courageous as Hannibal, and easier still for us moderns to find Roman aggression and imperialism of the third through first centuries B.C. loathsome—their tally of slaughtered Spaniards, Gauls, Greeks, Africans, and Asians finally overwhelms the moral sense. But if we ask what are the military wages of constitutional government and the resulting battle dividends of citizenship, the answer is not found with a Juvenal’s “one-eyed commander perched on his monstrous beast,” but with the nameless and silent men who were gutted and left to rot under the August sun of Cannae.

Polybius, who witnessed firsthand the later barbaric destruction of Carthage in 146 B.C. and wrote of Cannae seventy years after the Roman defeat, rightly attributed Rome’s resurgence after the catastrophe to its constitution and the rare harmony between civilian and military affairs under consensual government. The aftermath of the slaughter on August 2, 216 B.C., affected the Greek historian as no other event in Roman history. He used the occasion to present a long analysis of the Roman constitution and the legions—nearly all of book 6 in his history—which remains the clearest and most concise account of those institutions to this day. Polybius ended his excursus about Rome’s remarkable constitutional and military system with a final thought on the aftermath of Cannae:

For although the Romans had clearly been defeated in the field, and their reputation in arms ruined, yet because of the singularity of their constitution, and by wisdom of their deliberative counsel, they not only reclaimed the sovereignty of Italy, and went on to conquer the Carthaginians, but in just a few years themselves became rulers of the entire world. (3.118.7–9)

HORSE VERSUS FOOT

THE BATTLEFIELD CONFRONTATION between foot soldier and horseman is universal, age-old, and brutal. Cavalrymen have always mercilessly ridden down, trampled, and slain with impunity fleeing infantrymen or unfortunate pockets of poor disorganized skirmishers. Cowardly, in a sense, is this mounted knight’s slaughter of the isolated or terrified foot soldier, whether Pedro de Alvarado’s shameless lancing of unarmed Aztecs, the British 17th Lancers’ butchery of terrified Zulus at Ulundi, or sweeps of Mongol slashers in the villages of Asia Minor. At Omdurman (1898) a young Winston Churchill wrote glowingly about the last charge of the British lancers, but his story is mostly about the systematic spearing of the already defeated and fleeing.

There is also a class bias in war between horse and foot soldier, in which the aristocratic disdain of the peacetime noble is instantaneously realized in the murderous downward stroke of his lance or saber. Or perhaps the natural insolence of the knight derives not entirely from the past cargo of his birth and wealth, but is created at the moment he mounts, and therein realizes a freedom of movement, relative impunity, and the need for a coterie of retainers unlike his brethren below. The same is true of the modern fighter pilot, whose command of the air, speed, and possession of a complex machine make his rocketing and strafing of soldiers seem almost effortless and in a macabre sense therefore nearly deserved— a different task from shooting face-to-face men who are charging into his foxhole.

In defeat, the swift horseman can beat death through flight—those few British who survived the Zulu slaughter at Islandhlwana were almost all mounted. In victory, fresh and clean knights (the war world of the horseman is not the muddy universe of the infantrymen) often appear from nowhere to kill—but only after the tough hand-to-hand of their inferiors on the ground is over. The Locrian cavalry who nearly ran down a fleeing Socrates at the battle of Delium (424 B.C.) did so only after their tough Theban hoplite allies had shattered the Athenian phalanx. More often, horsemen at the onset of battle fear lines of grim infantrymen. Mounted warriors the world over, whether they are born or invited into the cosmos of the horse, have always hated crossbow bolts, a wall of spears, a line of shields, or a spray of bullets—anything that allowed the man without a mount to destroy in seconds the capital, training, equipment, and pride of his mounted superior.

Just as in peace the middling and poor are always more plentiful than the elite, so in Western battle horsemen are rarely as numerous as foot soldiers. Whereas away from the chaotic killing of the battlefield, the wealthy man has the predictable structures of society on his side, in the melee such protocols of class and tradition mean nothing. War, as the antebellum failures Grant and Sherman both learned, is democratic in a way: the carnage of battle is one of the few arenas in which ingenuity, muscle, and courage can still trump privilege, protocols, and prejudices.

No horse will charge a wall of serried pikes. Even the most heavily mailed mounted warrior will be thrown or pulled down from his mount and killed on his back should he try. In a crowded throng of swords and bobbing spear points, where the horseman cannot use his speed to attack or to retreat, even the advantage of his height and the power of the downward angle of his blows are no guarantees of success. Consequently, armies value disciplined heavy infantrymen because when properly organized and deployed they can kill horsemen. Foot soldiers are more nimble. They can dart easily behind the rider, who turns to his rear only with difficulty. The infantryman’s sharp pike or sword blows to the animal’s flanks, rear, legs, and eyes can send the poor horse rearing in milliseconds, throwing his master several feet up into the air, often with a lethal landing for a man in heavy armor. Horses are large targets and, when wounded, can become the enemies, not the servants, of their riders. Foot soldiers have two hands free for fighting, not one on the reins.

Riding a horse is also a dangerous thing in itself and has killed thousands in peacetime. Xenophon reminded his horseless Ten Thousand that they enjoyed intrinsic advantages over mounted Persians: “We are on much surer footing than horsemen; they hang on their horses’ backs, afraid not only of us, but also of falling off” (
Anabasis
3.2.19). The masterful equestrian George S. Patton was nearly crippled while galloping at his leisure and at home, only to come through unscathed amid German bullets and shells. Throughout the worst of the fighting in the Civil War, Grant was also immobilized not by enemy guns, but by the bucking of his own mount. Whereas horsemen attack far more quickly, kill with a flick of the lance or saber, and vanish in minutes, infantrymen have the advantage when the killing zone is at last clogged and the fighting face-to-face. It has been unwise, whether at Gaugamela, Agincourt, or Waterloo, for even the best cavalry to charge formations of tough foot soldiers—and Europeans, more than any other culture in the history of civilization, produced infantrymen who wished to meet the enemy shoulder-to-shoulder at close quarters, mounted or not.

THE WALL

At Poitiers the Islamic throng of mounted Berbers and Arabs, generally known by Europeans as Saracens, from the original homeland of Syrian tribesmen in the Middle East, swept against the line of Frankish infantrymen. Charles Martel and his assorted army—spearmen, light infantry, and aristocratic nobles who had ridden to battle—formed up on foot to hold firm for hours until nightfall. The Arabs shot arrows from their mounts and flayed the Franks with sword blows and spear thrusts while wheeling at their flanks and sides; but they neither killed nor dislodged the Europeans.

The meager accounts of the battle of Poitiers that survive are in agreement on one key point: the Islamic invaders rushed repeatedly against the Franks, who were static and arrayed in a protective square of foot soldiers. The defending infantrymen who were blocking the road to Tours methodically beat back the assaults until the attackers withdrew to their camp. The chronicle of the continuator of Isidore relates that the Franks (or rather “the men of Europe”) were “an immovable sea” (104–5). They “stood one close to another” and stiffened like a “wall.” “As a mass of ice, they stood firm together.” Then “with great blows of their swords,” they beat down the Arabs. The image from the contemporary chronicle is clearly one of near motionless foot soldiers, standing shoulder-to-shoulder using their spears and swords to repel repeated charges of horsemen. The Franks’ surprising strength lay in the collective weight of their bodies and their skill in hand-to-hand fighting. In the fourth book of the continuum of the
Chronicle of Fredegar,
we learn further that Charles Martel “boldly drew his battle line” before the Arabs. Then he “came down upon them like a great man of battle.” Charles routed them, overran their camp, killed their general, Abd ar-Rahman, and “scattered them like stubble.” Clearly, a “wall” of some sort had saved France. Abd ar-Rahman had been stopped by the “many spears” of the Franks.

What was it like in the confused fighting at Poitiers? The Franks were large and physically formidable, well protected with chain-mail shirts or leather jerkins covered with metal scales. Their round shields, like those of the old Greek hoplite, were nearly three feet in diameter, curved, made of heavy hardwood, stoutly constructed with iron fittings, and covered with leather. If a man was strong and skilled enough to handle such a monstrosity, there was little chance that either an arrow or a javelin could penetrate its nearly one-inch thickness. A small conical iron helmet protected the head, ideal for warding off downward strokes from horsemen. Each Frankish infantryman lumbered into battle with nearly seventy pounds of arms and armor, making him as helpless in open skirmishing as he was invulnerable in dense formation.

In past battles with the Romans, lightly clad Germanic tribesmen had either thrown their feared axes from fifteen yards distant or cast their light spears before closing with large double-edged broadswords—weapons that required plenty of room to slash and hack. Battle on the frontier had quickly evolved into a confused affair of individual duels and weapon prowess before successive attacks of Roman cohorts broke barbarian resistance. By the eighth century, however, Frankish infantrymen were less inclined to use their traditional javelins or axes and shunning individual combat for the more classical Roman technique of fighting in unison. At Poitiers the heavily protected Franks were more likely to have used stouter spears for thrusting and short swords that could be stabbed upward while maintaining shields chest-high along a continuous line.

When the sources speak of “a wall,” “a mass of ice,” and “immovable lines” of infantrymen, we should imagine a literal human rampart, nearly invulnerable with locked shields in front of armored bodies, weapons extended to catch the underbellies of any Islamic horsemen foolish enough to hit the Franks at a gallop. Unable to penetrate the Frankish lines, most Arabs would wheel around in confusion to shoot arrows, cast javelins, or slash with their long swords. There was no attempt of Islamic cavalrymen to hit the European lines head-on in efforts to blast through the phalanx. Penetration through shock alone was impossible. Instead, the Muslims would ride up in large bodies, slash at the clumsier Franks, shoot arrows, and then ride away as the enemy line advanced, hoping that their own attacks and the irregular movement of the enemy would result in gaps for successive horsemen to exploit.

In response, each Frankish soldier, with shield upraised, would lodge his spear into either the horsemen’s legs or the face and flanks of his mount, then slash and stab with his sword to cut the rider down, all the while smashing his shield—the heavy iron boss in the center was a formidable weapon in itself—against exposed flesh. Gradually advancing en masse, the Franks would then continue to trample and stab fallen riders at their feet—careful to keep close contact with each other at all times. In the dust and confusion of battle, it was not so critical for lines of foot soldiers to see their enemy as to stay in rank while slowly walking and striking out at anything ahead. In contrast, men on horses and fighting as individuals needed clear sight to search for gaps in the enemy line or to target those wounded and disoriented soldiers that might provide a rare inroad to the enemy mass.

It was exhausting for heavy-armed foot soldiers to pound their shields and stab spears against mobile mounted targets. There were also other critical factors in the battle beyond mere questions of endurance. A foot soldier presented a far less inviting target than a mounted warrior at close range: his conical helmet, armored limbs and shoulders, and upraised shield made him nearly invulnerable. Not so the mounted Arabs. Once their horses were wounded or their shins sliced, they might easily fall, and then find themselves on the ground and helpless. The chroniclers leave the impression that Abd ar-Rahman never anticipated that his fast-moving pack of raiders would find themselves opposed by a large mass of heavily armed foot soldiers in a confined valley. Under such conditions the ingredients that made his army a thing of terror in the streets of Poitiers—isolated, galloping horsemen riding down unprotected groups of twos and threes—ensured their slaughter by a waiting line of armored spearmen.

Charles’s men were the first generation of such heavy-armored foot soldiers of western Europe to face Islamic armies. Poitiers would thus inaugurate a near thousand-year struggle between the discipline, strength, and heavy armament of western Europeans and the mobility, numbers, and individual skill of their Islamic enemies. As long as the Franks stayed in rank—and miraculously they seem to have maintained order even in the aftermath of battle rather than pursue the withdrawing Arabs—it was impossible for them to be broken or ridden down. Although contemporary accounts wrongly suggest that little more than a thousand Frankish fell, while killing hundreds of thousands of Arabs, it may well be true that Charles lost only a fraction of his men in repelling an enemy unusually large for the times. Poitiers was, as all cavalry battles, a gory mess, strewn with thousands of wounded and dying horses, abandoned plunder, and dead and wounded Arabs. Few of the wounded were taken prisoner— given their previous record of murder and pillage in Poitiers.

The word
Europenses,
used by the continuator of Isidore, makes one of its first appearances in historical narrative as a generic noun for Westerners. While the chronicler perhaps meant that Charles’s army was an amalgam of a number of Germanic tribes and Gauls, he may have also intended “Europeans” to emphasize an emerging cultural fault line: men above the Pyrenees still fought in the Roman tradition of heavy infantry, and, for all their internecine killing, were more alike than disparate when facing Islamic armies.

After the day’s fighting, the respective armies, who had already eyed each other for a week before the battle, returned to their camps. The Franks made ready to renew battle at dawn, hoping for more reinforcements and expecting another wave of Arab horsemen to attack their positions. Instead, when they returned to the battlefield at daylight, the entire Arab army had vanished, leaving behind empty tents and booty— and their dead on the battlefield. Dead also was their emir and leader of the invasion, Abd ar-Rahman himself. Plans for the Islamic sack and occupation of nearby Tours—they had looted the Church of St. Hilary at Poitiers in the days before the battle—were abandoned.

Poitiers was only the beginning of a gradual expulsion of Muslims from southern France. Frankish lords in the decade to follow would beat back other raids from Islamic Spain, Charles himself soon defeating Saracen armies at Avignon (737) and Corbière (738). Yet Poitiers signaled the high-water mark of Islamic advance into Europe: Muslim armies never again reached so far north. With the near simultaneous repulse of the Arabs from the harbors of Constantinople in 717, the Islamic wave of the prior century was at last checked on the periphery of Europe.