There is this aspect to fighting on the water: a man has no place to run. Somehow the mass of our company succeeded in capturing the galley, if such a term may be applied to the occupation of a pack of blazing tinder fast on its way to the bottom, achieving this triumph primarily because the scow was sinking from the stern and we advancing from the bow had the advantage of fighting downhill. We ploughed the enemy into the sea behind a wall of shields. An ancillary battle, grisly as the main, now commenced in the gutter between the burning hulks, as oarsmen of Pandora and Twin Tits, forced to abandon ship, grappled hand-to-hand, each seeking to drown the other. Ax and boarding pike had supplanted spear and javelin as weapons of favor. The shivered oar served as well. Marines hacked and stabbed and clubbed the foe in the water even as the decks on which they stood subsided beneath them. By this time the Athenian third and fourth waves had reached the enemy's rampart and were attacking it in escalade, like land troops assaulting a fortress. We were taken off the freighter onto Dauntless. In moments we, too, were on the wall.
My cousin narrated for me later how this spectacle had appeared from the vantage of shore. The wounded had pleaded with their physicians to bear them down to the sea. Each man's fate hung on battle's outcome; they could not bear to loiter in ignorance. The soldiers, too, had pressed down to the water's edge, even wading into the sea, as did the Syracusans along their shore, straining across the smoke-obscured main for any index of victory or defeat.
In the offing, my cousin said, the wall of ships could not be made out, only the smoke, black at the base and gray as it rose, ascending in thunderheads so dense it seemed the entire firmament was ablaze. In quarters about the harbor battles were being fought of such scale and savagery that, taken apart from this holocaust, would have been called epochal, yet which, accounted here within the context of such numbers of men and vessels in conflict, appeared as sideshows or afterwords. Of ships fighting in open water, my cousin reported, tactics and maneuver had long since been abandoned. Instead vessels grappled one to another and slugged it out, belly-la-belly. The surface of The harbor seemed sown with islands and archipelagoes of ships, four, six, and even ten fused, while the men on deck fought it out hand-to-hand, do or die.
About the ships in uncountable numbers swarmed the small craft of the Syracusans, dinghies and coracles, catboats and even rafts, manned by every urchin and pensioner who could hurl a firepot or bash a sailor's brains with bat or brick. You could tell which ships were Athenian by the clouds of mosquito boats about them, piking at the steersmen's blades, slinging missiles or driving into the banks, seeking to foul the oars.
As the tide of battle alternated, the consternation produced upon the men witnessing from shore became excruciating. Directly one beheld comrades embracing in elation, my cousin recounted, as the warcraft of their nation drove the foe in flight. Now the men's gaze bent to another quadrant where the opposite state prevailed. Despair at once repossessed their hearts; with dreadful dirges the spectators bewailed their doom, crying to heaven those lamentations as men are wont to make in such hours.
As if this audience may not suffice, a supplemental took station in the summit seats. These were the wives and daughters of the Syracusans, looking on from the city battlements which directly overstood the arena, so proximate that the dames' cries could be heard by their champions below. Whose ship boldly struck at an Athenian was requited with acclamation resounding, while he, beleaguered, who sought to withdraw retreated into cataracts of scorn.
On the wall of ships, our side was winning.
The enemy had strung together above two hundred vessels, merchantmen and barges, scows and galleys as well as men-of-war, the line bound by rope and timber so that their front presented a solid rampart broadside to the attackers. Against this the ships of Athens hurled themselves. The fight differed from all others in my experience in this particular: nowhere upon the field could one discover vessel or man holding back. So possessed was each side by the passion to prevail, the Athenians to escape extinction, the Syracusans and their allies to wreak vengeance upon those who had made war to enslave them and, more so, to wrest the deathless renown of driving them down to ruin, that none gave thought to saving his skin but each sought to outdo the other in skill and valor. Midway through the forenoon I fell, hamstrung by that hyperextension called a “bonebreaker,” plummeting from the deck of a barge into its belly, which was awash chest-deep and into whose depths I sank like a stone.
Chowder hauled me topside, where we discovered a pocket of haven, and he went to work on my leg. “Look there, Pommo”-my mate pointed down the line of strife-“have you ever seen the like of it?”
I stared. As far as sight could carry, the sea stood curtained with smoke and paved with warcraft. Immediately left, a battleship had rammed one of the vessels in the wall; all three of her banks were backing water furiously, to extract and ram again, while across the breach screamed storms of stones, darts, and brands of such density that the air appeared solid with steel and flame. As the Athenian's ram sucked free, rending the foe's guts, a second battleship materialized, hurtling upon the same vessel. Her ram took the enemy's stern, lifting her entire after-section clear. Men topside spilled like pegs. As the struck ship hung impaled, her elevated weight forcing the ramming vessel's prow into the sea, while yet denser fusillades screamed between the antagonists, the first ship, having backed clear to a boat-length, rammed the same ship anew. To the opposite hand, three Athenian galleys had grapneled to vessels in the wall. So intervolved were the marines of both sides that there were more Syracusans on the decks of the Athenian ships and the contrary upon the Syracusan. Out beyond the attackers, three more cruisers of Athens passed with murderous slowness, archers unleashing broadsides of tow and pitch over their own and into the enemy. As one vessel in the wall caught, flame leapt to its consort, borne by the wind or men who pitched or hurled or shot it. By sun's zenith a dozen breaches had been punched in the palisade. At one point, Lion told me later, he saw three battleships of Athens pass abreast through the wall, led by Demosthenes' Implacable, making signal “Follow me.”
We had won. And yet…
The enemy still held both jaws of the vise, the city promontory of Ortygia and Plemmyrium, the Rock, the southern mandible of the harbor mouth, between which the wall of ships extended. He had fifty thousand at one end, twenty at the other, and they kept pouring out onto the wall. Where the line of ships had been breached, the foe's small craft flooded in and sealed the rupture.
Flea boats ferried replacements across the breaks, while others hauled themselves over the timber and chain bindings which yet anchored the embattled wall. Morning had gone; we were slaughtering the enemy in such numbers that he could not, it was certain, hold out much longer.
There is an error in densely packed fighting committed by those lacking experience of war, even brave men, as the Syracusans and their allies were, and this is called in Sparta “downstreaming” or
“rat-holing.” A man dueling in this fashion will stand against the individual facing him, receive or deliver a blow or several, and then, he and his antagonist unhurt, roll or shift laterally to the next of the enemy, to commence a second bashing match and in turn sideslip again. Fear makes him do this. He seeks a closet of refuge, a “rat hole” amid the slaughter. In Sparta boys are beaten who evince this habit. They are schooled instead to fight “upfield,” to seize one man and battle him alone until one or the other falls. This the Lacedaemonians call monopale, “singling up.” The Syracusans had not learned this art, for all Gylippus' direction. Now on the wall of ships the superior experience of the Athenians began to tell.
It came to this: fighting topside, twenty against twenty, forty on forty, a parataxis, pitched battle, in miniature. Or brawling belowdecks man upon man, in water thigh- and hip-deep, the walls, often afire, pinning friend and foe in the cylinder of slaughter. The Athenians had the hang of it. And they possessed a further advantage. Defenders on the sea must of necessity kill men, never an easy business. But attackers need only destroy things. The marines of Athens went after the wall with fire and the ax. Ship after ship had its belly gutted, hull torched; along the rampart hulks settled, sizzling, to the waterline.
I had found Lion and Telamon. Reunited, we were hacking through a jacket of timbers, eight logs bound with belts of iron, that yoked one section of enemy line to another. Too exhausted to stand, Lion and I straddled the timber, bashing with blades blunt as butter knives. Here came the foe. Flea boats bearing slingers hauled upon us from another smoking hulk. There were ten in our party. Telamon, Lion, and Chowder were the only ones I knew; the others had collected by ones and twos; I never learned their names. One with a red beard trumpeted to a cruiser, calling for fire. As he shouted, a bullet tore his throat out; he dropped like a gunny of rocks. The shooter vaunted, already reloaded with his sling whistling overhead. I heard an alarm from behind. Somehow another score of enemy had got onto the hulk we had just crossed from. Two more slinger boats closed from seaward. We had no helmets; all shields had been ditched. We were sitting ducks. Lead bullets screamed past. Telamon yelled go; we hit the drink. An hour later we were on another hulk, hacking through another sheaf of timbers, each man with only a pilos cap and whatever rags still clung to his body.
