The Last Full Measure (8 page)

This combined-force approach has been described as “an entirely new development in the history of Western warfare,” and it took a man of extraordinary ambition (perhaps even to a psychotic degree) to harness its lethality.
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Alexander of Macedon had inherited the military machine from his father, Philip II, and he drove it with a ferocious intensity through the ranks of his enemies. He was not just the commander of killers but a frontline killer himself. He was an inheritor of a heroic tradition of combat leadership. Greek generals and kings fought in the phalanx, and “there is not a single major Greek battle—Thermopylae, Delium, Mantinea, Leuctra—in which Hellenic generals survived the rout of their troops.”
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The Spartan king Cleombrotus was killed in the phalanx at Leuctra, for example, the usual fate of a defeated Spartan king. This exposure of commanders to the risks of the battlefield lasted until the nineteenth century (one thinks, for example, of the high mortality rate among general officers of the American Civil War), when it was replaced by the bureaucratization of leadership: the commander-as-manager. Plutarch has Alexander recite the cost of his hands-on involvement: “First, among the Illyrians my head was wounded by a stone and my neck by a cudgel. Then at Granicus my head was cut open by an enemy’s dagger, at Issus my thigh was pierced by the sword. Next,
at Gaza my ankle was wounded by an arrow, my shoulder was dislocated.… Then at Macaranda the bone of my leg was split open by an arrow.… Among the Mallians the shaft of an arrow sank deep into my breast and buried its steel.”
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It was a risk shared by his subordinate officers; some 120 were killed in the phalanx at Issus in 333 BCE—and this in a battle he won. At the battle of the Granicus River in 334 BCE, Alexander was the center of attention for the Persian high command. If he could be killed quickly, despondency might break the will of his army. Alexander personally killed Mithridates, the son-in-law of the Persian king, Darius (who was not present), with a spear thrust through the face and, having survived a blow to the head from Rhoesaces,
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a Lydian nobleman, killed Rhoesaces with a spear thrust to the chest.
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The death toll among the Persian high command at the Granicus was staggering—perhaps ten of the thirteen major commanders were killed or, as in the case of Arsites, later committed suicide. As for the Macedonian high command, one of the greatest risks of being killed came from Alexander himself. Two of his greatest and most valiant generals, Parmenio and his son, the cavalry commander Philotas, were killed on Alexander’s order, as was Cleitus, who had saved Alexander’s life at the Granicus; Cleander and Sitacles, Agathon and Heracon were also executed on flimsy pretexts.
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Alexander brought a ruthlessness to battle that was reflected in hitherto unprecedented mortality rates. At the Granicus, having destroyed and driven off the main Persian army, he reserved his particular ire for the Greek mercenaries fighting on the Persian side, who had stood their ground and were surrounded. All were put to the sword except 2,000 who were sent back to Macedonia as slaves. About 5,000 Persians were killed plus 2,000–3,000 Greek mercenaries, while some historians have put the figure for the killed Greek mercenaries alone at 15,000–18,000.
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At the battle
of Issus the following year Alexander’s army inflicted something in the region of 20,000 deaths on the Greek mercenaries fighting for Darius III, plus “anywhere from 50,000 to 100,000 Persian recruits … a formidable challenge of time and space to butcher more than 300 men every minute for eight hours. This was extermination taken to new heights.… The Macedonian phalanx did not push men off the battlefield as much as slaughter them from the rear for hours on end after the battle was already decided.”
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(It should also be noted that all the Macedonian wounded whom Alexander left behind in the town of Issus were slaughtered by the returning Persians.) This uninhibited killing of the wounded and defeated set a pattern seen in other Alexandrian battles such as Gaugamela (331 BCE) and the Hydaspes (326 BCE), and served to emphasize that possibly the greatest risk of death for a warrior comes when cohesion breaks and retreat begins, reflected by the disparity between the death count of the victorious and the slaughter of the defeated. (At the Granicus, Macedonian losses were perhaps as few as 150, and at Issus, 450.)

AT THE BATTLES
of Cynoscephalae in 197 BCE and at Pydna almost thirty years later, the mighty Macedonian phalanxes met their own nemesis in the form of the Roman legions. In defeat, the Macedonian pikemen stood quite still with their
sarissae
upright. It was a signal that they wished to surrender, but the problem was that their opponents could not or would not recognize this convention of the battlefield. The Macedonians, so stalwart in action and so stoical in defeat, were unceremoniously and savagely cut down where they stood. The phalanx died because it had become too good at what they had been good at. Fixed in place, they would be destroyed for it. The legions, for their part, did what
they had been rigorously trained to do: They attacked with formidable energy and killed with ferocious single-mindedness. For them, a dead enemy was a peaceful enemy.

Where the old phalanx was deep and solid and unwieldy, the legion was made up of units—maniples and cohorts—that afforded it more tactical flexibility. They were deployed in a quincunx formation: a chessboard pattern where all the black squares are troops and the white squares the spaces between, with the black squares covering the white squares in front of them and able to move up as reinforcement when necessary. And what was writ large was also writ small: The legionaries’ armor reflected this highly mobile segmented pattern. The upper-body cuirass, the
lorica segmentata
, was made up of metal bands stitched onto a linen or leather undergarment, thus combining protection with flexibility. The legionary was primarily a swordsman rather than a spear pusher, and he required more maneuverability than the heavy bell cuirass of the old phalanx could have afforded. His weaponry, too, was light and wieldy, quick to the thrust and fast in the slash. Even his shield could be used as an offensive weapon. The heavy central boss gave it the added heft to bang down an opponent, exposing his torso for a
gladius
or
pilum
(a type of javelin) thrust, while the rim of the shield was handy for hooking and smashing. A strong legionary could inflict considerable damage on his opposite number with shield alone.

The first tactical objective (as true whether fighting a Macedonian phalanx or a Gaulish or Germanic host) was to get into the enemy ranks where the wicked short sword, the 2-foot-long double-edged
gladius hispaniensis
(“Spanish sword”), could do its business. First, the carapace of enemy shields had to be cracked in order to expose the flesh. At about twenty paces the first two rows of legionaries would hurl the
pilum
—more harpoon than spear—where its solid weight might penetrate an opponent’s shield and wound him. Fighting in Gaul, Caesar writes of
pila
driving through “several of their overlapping shields … the iron head would bend and they could neither get it out nor fight properly with their left arms. Many of them, after a number of vain efforts at disentangling themselves, preferred to drop their shields and fight with no protection for their bodies.”
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Once they were through the outer shell of enemy shields, the legionaries went to work with the
gladius
. To those who had never seen Roman swordsmen in close combat, the results were shocking. Livy writes, “When they had seen bodies chopped to pieces by the Spanish sword, arms torn away, shoulders and all, or heads separated from bodies … or vitals laid open … they realized in a general panic with what weapons, and what men they had to fight.”
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Caesar described close combat against the Germans: “When the signal was given, our men rushed forward so fiercely and the enemy came on so swiftly and furiously that there was no time for hurling our javelins. They were thrown aside, and the fighting was with swords at close quarters. The Germans quickly adopted their usual close formation to defend themselves from the sword thrusts, but many of our men were brave enough to leap right on top of the wall of shields, tear the shields from the hands that held them, and stab down at the enemy from above.”
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Caesar, for obvious reasons, wants us to see his soldiers as dashing heroes, and there’s no doubt that this sort of fighting occurred on a regular basis.
Virtus
, the combination of courage, daring, and determination to close with the enemy, was highly prized in the Roman military, but the general truth of close-quarter combat is that it tends to be much more tentative, messy, and confusing at the contact face: “Hand-to-hand fighting was physically very fatiguing and emotionally stressful. Actual hand-to-hand fighting can only have lasted for very short periods and the relatively light casualties suffered at this stage seem to support this.”
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If no immediate and viable bridgehead was established within the enemy ranks, the opponents tended to stand off. The reluctant
had to deal with pressure from officers, the press of men behind making it difficult for the front-rank fighters to escape (
optiones
, the centurions’ NCOs, literally pushed men forward from the rear ranks), and the knowledge of severe punishment if they tried it. The practice of decimation, the execution of one man in ten in a unit that had performed particularly poorly, was not a Roman invention. Alexander had used it, and had himself borrowed the practice from earlier Near Eastern armies. All of this, as well as the men’s soaring adrenaline, bore down to create the pressure that might lead to reengagement. But:

And what got the legionary killed? As with the Macedonian phalangites the legionary was wedded to specific tactical forms and attitudes and was superb in their execution. But this dedication to a specialized tactical model brought its own potentially fatal weaknesses, which two catastrophic defeats illustrate.

The legion, like the phalanx, was a war machine designed to go forward. And like the phalanx, it was vulnerable to attack on its flanks. Also like the phalanx it needed to strike a balance between
compaction (which gave it solidity and heft) and yet allowing enough space between warriors for the effective manipulation of their weapons. At Cannae in 216 BCE, Hannibal lured the legions into a frontal assault that was then compressed by attacks on its flanks and, eventually, its rear, so that legionaries, whose armor was designed primarily to protect the front, were exposed to blows coming in on their sides and backs. Committed to their traditional attack pattern, they would have found it extremely difficult to defend against flank incursions, and as the legionary mass became increasingly compacted, the rear ranks relentlessly and blindly pressed their more forward comrades into an ever more deadly cul-de-sac.

It was only the leading edge of the force that could fight effectively, while those behind were rendered either redundant or, worse, disabling. The result was that in one of the smallest killing fields in the history of warfare the Roman legions were surrounded and annihilated. This, the largest army Rome had ever sent into the field, died where it stood. Sources differ, but somewhere in the region of 60,000 legionaries were cut down.
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The Romans, themselves traditionally so merciless to their wounded enemies, were shown little compassion: “Many wounded had been hamstrung by marauding small bands, their writhing bodies left to be finished off by looters, the August sun, and the Carthaginian cleanup crews the next day. Two centuries later Livy wrote that thousands of Romans were still alive on the morning of August 3, awakened from their sleep and agony by the morning cold, only to be ‘quickly finished off’ by Hannibal’s plunderers.”
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In the two years or so of his invasion of Italy, Hannibal would kill, wound, or capture more than a third of the Roman military manpower pool.
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Rome absorbed these huge body blows and took its revenge. At Zama in 202 BCE the Roman general Scipio killed 20,000–25,000 of Hannibal’s army for the relatively modest investment of 1,500 of his own dead, and Carthage itself
was so comprehensively destroyed that the city existed only in memory, like a golden ghost.