overman the other,” he said. “But there is no place for dueling now. Rome depends on you; be worthy of her. By the gods, find your senses! Our enemy lies outside this tent, not within.”
Publius' fellow tribunes looked between him and the two senior officers, unsure just how his outburst would be received and therefore unsure how they would comment on it. He was the youngest among them and had up until that moment been the quietest. Varro seemed to be deciding just how best to take off Publius' head, but when Paullus withdrew a half-step he did likewise.
“The young tribune is imprudent, but he speaks some truth,” Varro said. “You call me rash, but will you hear my plan?”
“You have a plan?”
“I am not a fool, Paullus.”
“Tell me, then. I'd love to hear sensible words from your mouth.”
Varro glared at him a moment, then motioned that they should all sit again. “We command the largest army Rome has ever fielded,” he said, “perhaps the largest ever mustered by any civilized nation. This is our strength, and Hannibal will know it. We should show him from his first sighting of us that we are a hammer, and he the nail that we will drive into the soil of Cannae. We must use the full overwhelming grandeur of our numbers to best effect. To do this, we reduce the frontage of each maniple by a third and shrink the intervals between them. This will stretch the line so that the enemy will look out at an unending river heading toward him. Hannibal's men will shake at the sight of us, and some will run. Imagine it, Paullus. Remember that this is the first time we will meet them face-to-face and in the full light of day. You and I will command the cavalry on either wing. This is the weak point, but we need not defeat our counterparts. All we have to do is hold them for a time, keep them from flanking long enough to let the body of our infantry drive through. By then it will be too late for their horse to matter. We'll punch right through their center, divide them into two smaller forces, and attack each at will.”
Paullus stared at his fellow consul with an intensity that made the edges of his eyes quiver. “You may be right,” he said, “but I do not know that it is wise to modify our formations like this without first practicing it.”
“Impossible,” Varro said. “We are engaged already. And this plan works precisely because the troops are raw. Just as the enemy will see their uncountable numbers, so the troops in the front will take heart from the lines of men behind them. They will see that they are undefeatable. As a whole, they will become braver than they could be in thin ranks. This formation makes it impossible for cowardice to sway the battle. A man in the middle of this river will have nowhere to flee but forward, over the bodies of the enemy. Paullus, refrain from finding fault and be one with me.”
“I am unsure,” Paullus said, sincerely and without a trace of malice. Though they talked late into the night, he could offer no more than that.
As the day dawned the consuls were not exactly at odds, but neither were they of a single mind. Varro—in control—broke camp and moved even closer to Hannibal, so close, in fact, that it would be impossible for Paullus to retreat even if he wished to. He set up camp on the near side of the river Aufidus and ordered a small deployment to claim a spot on the far bank. He sent out units to harass the Carthaginian foragers, but ended the day more exasperated than vindicated. Numidian raiders ambushed the Roman water carriers instead, launching their spears at them so that the workers had to drop their jugs and run. And yet Varro had accomplished his main objective. He was locked in the preliminary stages of the struggle. The following day Paullus received word that the enemy was moving as if to offer battle, but he did not answer them. He shifted troops from one place to another, hesitating, trying to think of a way to better their position, knowing that on the morrow control went back to Varro. Wriggle as he might, he was pinned to the spot as surely as if his fellow consul had speared him through the foot. There was nothing to be done. The clash would come with the rising sun. Their fate was in Varro's hands.
Mago had already been up for hours by the time he met with Hannibal and a mounted contingent of his generals atop the rise of Cannae. Together they watched the armies assemble upon the wide plain. The sight approaching them was like nothing any of them had ever imagined. Mago had learned from his brother to approximate numbers of men by visual clues, to weigh on internal scales the density of troops and the area of land they covered, and to account for the receding scale of distance. But the number of Romans now before him was beyond his reckoning. Eighty thousand? Ninety? One hundred thousand? He could not possibly count them, and the exact number would have seemed arbitrary. What mattered was that the Romans' front line stretched to fill the entire field, so wide it would have daunted even the best of runners to sprint from one edge to the other. It was completely uniform, no portion lagging behind or preceding the others. This was all formidable enough, but it was the depth of the ranks that truly stunned him: they came row upon row with no end in sight, fading into the dust and distance so that it seemed they were marching out of the haze, an army born of the landscape itself.
“They have the wind in their eyes,” Hannibal said. A simple statement, acknowledged with nods and a few grunts. “And more of the sun's glare than we do. I like this advantage.”
Mago never ceased to be amazed by his brother's calm. Looking at him, he felt buoyed by his confidence. If Hannibal believed they would win this conflict, then who was he to doubt it? The day previous, the commander had presented his multiple strategies with calm, reasoned assurance. Even when he proposed the most improbable of maneuvers they sounded like testimony given after the events and not a plan suggested before. He had traced the bowed line the first ranks were meant to form, a convex front made up entirely of Gauls, headed by Mago and Hannibal himself. With this he intended to meet the first lines of the enemy. “We must keep this crescent from breaking,” he had said. “Let it not snap but instead slowly manage a retreat. So carefully that the Romans are fooled into feeling themselves winning. So gradually that the Gauls are not frightened into fleeing.”
When Mago questioned whether the Gauls would rebel against setting themselves up for slaughter, Hannibal answered, “You do not understand the Celtic mind, brother. These people do not conceive of the world as you and I do. Consider that they believe creation to be a balance between two worlds. Death in this one means rebirth in the other. Thus they mourn at a newborn's birth and celebrate upon that man's eventual demise. They have no fear of dying tomorrow; they run to death, headlong.”
Mago had sworn that he would do everything Hannibal instructed, but after a sleepless night the immensity of the day's challenges left him staring in awe. Even the cloud of dust stirred by the Romans' feet filled him with dread. It was a great brown shadow that rose up into the heavens and stretched so far as to all but obscure the horizon.
“Look at them,” he said. There was a tight quaver in his voice, as that of a man who has been punched in the abdomen but is trying to speak through the pain of the blow. “I never imagined there were so many of them.”
Hannibal straightened in his saddle. He spoke without a hint of irony. “Yes, they are many, but not one among them is my brother. Not one is named Mago.”
The others laughed, but it took a moment for this cool statement to roll over in Mago's mind, revealing its humor.
Monomachus was the first to respond, dry of voice, giving no indication that he spoke in jest. “They have among them few who would eat human flesh.”
“What is more,” Maharbal added, “they are not commanded by a man named Hannibal. I am sure this fact troubles them.”
“And, unless I am mistaken,” Bostar said, “nowhere among them is there a Bomilcar or a Himilco or even a Gisgo, not a single Barca, not one of them who prays to Baal or Melkart, none who were pushed through the thighs of an African mother. Truly, never have I seen so many unfortunate men gathered in a single place.”
Hannibal's stern expression gave way to a grin. “I see your amazement, Mago, and I understand your point: we should have issued the men with two swords each, one for either hand to make the killing faster.”
Mago ducked his head and ran the palm of his hand over his horse's neck and then looked up again. Just listening to them humbled him. Who had ever been as fortunate as he, to learn warfare from men such as these? He searched for a jest of his own to add to theirs, but jesting before battle was not a skill he had learned yet.
Soon the generals parted company, each riding off to lead different contingents of the troops, each with a different purpose in the coming battle. Mago stayed a little longer with Hannibal. They were to command quite near each other and did not need to separate until the battle was well begun. Even with the armies facing each other— paused with a wide gap between them—there were maneuvers to go through before the bulk of them met in earnest. The enemy's forward line glistened in the glare of the sun, armor reflecting the light in thousands of tiny bursts. At first their shields seemed as tightly wedged together as the scales on a snake's belly, but there were gaps enough between them to allow their skirmishers forward. These poured through onto the field. This battle would open in the manner that suited the Roman style, just as Hannibal had predicted.
