Antony and Cleopatra (44 page)

“Warning we won’t need, Titius,” Ahenobarbus said. “We march
agmen quadratum
, and when we can’t do that, we march in square.”

The meeting calmed into a discussion on logistics—which of the fourteen legions should go first, which last, how frequently the men on the outside of each square should be rested by being pulled in and replaced, how big the squares should be, how many pack mules could be contained within each square at its smallest size—a thousand and one decisions that had to be made before the first foot in its socked
caliga
started the march.

Finally Fonteius asked what no one else would. “Antonius, the auxiliaries. Thirty thousand infantrymen. What happens to them?”

“If they can keep up, they can form our rearguard—in square. But they won’t keep up, Fonteius, we all know that.” Antony’s eyes grew moist. “I am very sorry for it, and as Triumvir of the East I am responsible for them, but the legions must be preserved at all costs. Funny, I keep thinking we have sixteen, but we don’t, of course. Statianus’s two are long gone.”

“Including noncombatants, eighty-four thousand men. Enough to make a formidable front while ever they can march
agmen
. We have four thousand Gallic troopers and four thousand more Galatians to protect our flanks, but if there’s not much grass, they’ll be in trouble before we’ve gone half the distance,” said Canidius.

“Send them ahead, Antonius,” said Fonteius.

“And cut up the ground even more? No, they travel with us, and on our flanks. If they can’t deal with the number of archers and cataphracts Monaeses throws at them, they can at least come inside the squares. My Gallic horse especially are precious to me, Fonteius. They volunteered for this campaign, and it’s half a world away from home,” Antony said, and lifted his hands. “All right, dismissed. We march at first light, and I want everyone moving by sunrise.”

“The men aren’t going to like retreating,” Titius said.

“I am well aware of that!” Antony said sharply. “For which reason, I intend to do a Caesar. I’m going to be in every column talking to the men in person, even if it takes me a
nundinum
.”

Agmen quadratum
was a formation that saw an army of sufficient strength spread in columns across a wide front, ready in an instant to wheel and take up battle stations. It also permitted the formation of squares very quickly. Now was the time when the densest soldier understood the days, months, even years of remorseless drilling; his maneuvers had to be automatic responses, no thought involved.

With the auxiliary infantry tacked on behind this mile-wide front of legionaries, the retreat began in good order, though into the teeth of a biting north wind that froze the mud and turned it into a jagged field of knifelike edges—slippery, punishing, lacerating.

The best the legions could do was twenty miles a day, but even that was too fast for the auxiliaries. On the third day, with Antony still visiting his soldiers full of jokes and predictions of victory next year now that they knew what they were up against, Monaeses and the Parthians attacked the rear, the archers picking off dozens of men in one sortie. Few died, but those too wounded to keep up had to be left behind; as the enormous expanse of Lake Matiane loomed like a sea, all but a handful of the auxiliaries had vanished, whether to execution at Parthian hands or to a life of slavery, no one knew.

Morale was surprisingly high until the country became so steep that the columns had to be abandoned in favor of squares. While ever he could, Antony kept his squares a cohort in size, which meant six centuries of men marching four deep around the four sides of a square, the shields of the outermost file slung protectively, as when forming a tortoise. Inside the hollow middle were the noncombatants, the mules, and what tiny part of the artillery had always traveled with the centuries—scorpions firing wooden darts and very small catapults. If attacked, a square turned with all four sides out to fight, the rear rank of soldiers holding long siege spears to go for the bellies of horses persuaded to jump inside—not something Monaeses was prepared to do, it seemed. If cataphracts were becoming scarce in Parthian lands thanks to old Ventidius, big horses took even longer to breed.

The days went on at a dismal pace of between seventeen and nineteen miles up and down, up and down, everyone now aware of the Parthians shadowing them. Skirmishes developed between Galatian and Gallic cavalry and the cataphracts, but the army pushed on in good order and reasonable spirits.

Until, climbing into ever higher peaks to hazard the eleven-thousand-foot pass, they encountered a blizzard the like of which Italia never saw. Blinding snow like a featureless white wall, howling gales, the kind of surface that dropped away underfoot leaving men stranded thigh deep in powdery crystals.

The worse conditions became, the more cheerful Antony and his legates became, rationing out sections of the army between them, jollying the men, telling them how brave they were, how hardy and uncomplaining. Squares were down now to maniples, and only three men deep. Over the pass, it would have to be century squares, but neither Antony nor anyone else thought the pass a likely site for attack—no room.

The worst of it was that though each legionary’s pack held warm breeches, socks, the wonderful waterproof circular
sagum
, and neck scarves, still he froze, unable to warm himself by a fire. With two-thirds of the march completed, the army had finally run out of its most precious commodity—charcoal. No one could bake bread, cook pease pottage; the men trudged now chewing raw grains of wheat, their only sustenance. Hunger, frostbite, and sickness began to be so severe that even Antony couldn’t cheer the most sanguine among his soldiers, who muttered about dying in the snow, of never seeing civilization again.

“Just let us get over the pass!” Antony cried to his Armenian guide, Cyrus. “You’ve led us true for two
nundinae
—don’t let me down, Cyrus, I beg you!”

“I won’t, Marcus Antonius,” the man said in atrocious Greek. “Tomorrow will see the front squares start to cross, and after that I know where we can get charcoal.” His dark face grew darker. “Though I should warn you, Marcus Antonius, not to trust the King of Armenia. He has always been in contact with his brother of Media, and both of them are the creatures of King Phraates. Your baggage train was too tempting, I am afraid.”

This time Antony listened; but there were still a hundred miles to go to Artaxata, and the mood of the legions was growing steadily bleaker, creeping toward insurrection.

“Mutiny, even,” Antony said to Fonteius with half his troops on one side of the ranges and the other half still crossing or waiting to cross. “I daren’t let my face be seen.”

“That’s true for all of us,” Fonteius answered cheerlessly. “They’ve been on raw wheat for seven days, their toes are black and dropping off, their noses too. Terrible! And they’re blaming you, Marcus—you, and only you. The malcontents are saying that you should never have let the baggage train out of your sight.”

“It isn’t really me,” Antony said drearily, “it’s the nightmare of a fruitless campaign that didn’t give them a chance to show their stuff in battle. As they see it, all they did was sit in a camp for a hundred days looking at a city giving them the
medicus
—up your arse, Romans! Think you’re great? Well, you’re not. I understand—” He broke off when Titius hurried up, looking afraid.

“Marcus Antonius, there’s mutiny in the air!”

“Tell me something I don’t know, Titius.”

“No, but this is
serious
! Tonight or tomorrow or both. At least six legions are involved.”

“Thank you, Titius. Now go and balance the books, or count up how much the soldiers are owed, or something—anything!”

Off went Titius, for once unable to come up with a solution.

“It will be tonight,” Antony said.

“Yes, I agree,” said Fonteius.

“Will you help me fall on my sword, Gaius? One of the most vexing things about such heavy chest and arm muscles is that they curtail my reach. I can’t get a decent hold on my sword hilt to make the thrust deep and sure.”

Fonteius didn’t argue. “Yes,” he said.

The pair huddled inside a small leather tent all that night, waiting for the mutiny to begin. To Antony, already devastated, this was a fitting end to the worst campaign a Roman general had waged since Carbo was chopped to pieces by the German Cimbri, or Caepio’s army died at Arausio, or—most horrible of all—Paullus and Varro were annihilated by Hannibal at Cannae. Not a single shining fact to illuminate the abyss of total defeat! At least the armies of Carbo, Caepio, Paullus and Varro had perished fighting! Whereas his grand army was never offered one tiny opportunity to show its mettle—no battles, just impotence.

I cannot blame my soldiers for mutinying, Antony thought as he sat with his unsheathed sword in his lap, ready. Impotence. That’s what they feel, just as badly as I do. How can they tell their grandsons about Marcus Antonius’s expedition into Median Parthia without spitting at the memory? It’s shabby, decomposed, utterly beggared of pride or distinction.
Miles gloriosus
, that’s Antonius. The vainglorious soldier. Perfect material for a farce. Strutting, posturing, full of himself and his own importance. But his success is as hollow as he is. A caricature as a man, a joke as a soldier, a failure as a general. Antonius the Great. Hah.

And then the mutiny vanished into the thin air of that high pass as if no legionaries had ever talked of it. Morning saw the men keep on crossing, and by midafternoon the pass was way behind. From somewhere Antony found the strength to go among the men, pretending that he for one had never even heard a whisper of mutiny.

Twenty-seven days after breaking camp before Phraaspa, the fourteen legions and handful of cavalry reached Artaxata, their bellies filled by a little bread and as much horsemeat as they could force down. Cyrus the guide had told Antony where to plunder enough charcoal for cooking.

The first thing Antony did in Artaxata was to give Cyrus the guide a bag of coins and two good horses, and push him off at the gallop by the quickest route south. Cyrus’s mission was urgent—and secret, especially from Artavasdes. His destination was Egypt, where he was to seek an audience with Queen Cleopatra; the coins Antony had given him, struck in Antioch the previous winter, were his passport to the Queen. He was instructed to beg her to come to Leuke Kome bearing aid for Antony’s troops. Leuke Kome was a small port near Berytus in Syria, a less public place by far than ports like Berytus, Sidon, Joppa. Cyrus went with gratitude and speed; to have stayed in Armenia once the Romans departed would have been a death sentence, for he had led the Romans well, and that was not what Armenian Artavasdes had wanted. The Romans were supposed to wander, lost, without food or fuel, until every last one of them was dead.

But, with fourteen under-strength legions warmly camped on the outskirts of Artaxata, King Artavasdes had no choice other than to fawn and beseech Antony to winter there. Not trusting a word that Artavasdes said, Antony refused to linger. He forced the King to open his granaries, then, adequately provisioned, he marched on for Carana in the face of storms and snow. The legionaries, it seemed inured now, trudged over those last two hundred miles immensely cheered because they had fires at night. Wood was scarce in Armenia too, but the Armenians of Artaxata hadn’t dared to argue when Roman soldiers descended on their woodpiles and confiscated them. The thought of Armenians perishing from the cold did not move the Romans in the slightest.
They
hadn’t marched chewing raw wheat thanks to eastern treachery!

Antony reached Carana, from whence the expedition had set out the previous Kalends of May, halfway through November. All of his legates had seen the flat mood, the confusion, but only Fonteius knew how close Antony had come to suicide. Knowing this, but very reluctant to confide it to Canidius, Fonteius took it upon himself to persuade Antony to continue south to Leuke Kome. Once there, he could, if necessary, send another message to Cleopatra.

But first, Antony was made to know the worst by an inflexible Canidius. Theirs had not been an always amicable relationship, for Canidius had seen the shape of the future early in the campaign, and been all for retreat immediately. Nor had he approved of the way the baggage train had been assembled and conducted. However, all of that was in the past, and he had come to terms with himself, his own ambitions. His future lay with Mark Antony, no matter what.

“The census is in and complete, Antonius,” he said dourly. “Of the auxiliary foot, some thirty thousand, none has survived. Of the Gallic cavalry, six out of ten thousand, but their horses are gone. Of the Galatian cavalry, four out of ten thousand, but their horses are gone. All slaughtered for food over the last hundred miles. Out of sixteen legions, two—Statianus’s—have vanished, their fate unknown. The other fourteen have sustained heavy but not mortal casualties, mostly frostbite. Men missing toes will have to be retired and sent home by wagon. They can’t march without toes. However, the
sagum
saved most fingers. Each legion save for Statianus’s two was up to strength—nearly five thousand soldiers, more than a thousand noncombatants. Now, each legion is down to fewer than four thousand, and perhaps five hundred noncombatants.” Canidius drew a breath and looked anywhere but at Antony’s face. “Here are the figures. Auxiliary foot, thirty thousand. Auxiliary cavalry, ten thousand, but twenty thousand horses. Legionaries, fourteen thousand will never fight again, plus another eight thousand from Statianus. And noncombatants, nine thousand. A total of seventy thousand men, twenty thousand horses. Twenty-two thousand of them are legionaries. Half the army, though not the best half. By no means all dead, yet they may as well be.”