The Walled Orchard (36 page)

Just one more thing. A few hours after the battle I went down to the shore to pick up some driftwood for a fire, and I saw the body of a man floating peacefully in the water a few yards out. The shape of the body looked familiar, and my curiosity was aroused, so I waded out and had a look. It was the lucky-and-unlucky blacksmith. There was an arrow wound in his forehead and the fish had already started on him, but it was unmistakably him; and it might just have been the relaxation of the muscles in death, but I would swear he was smiling. As I walked back to the camp with my driftwood I tried to remember the speech I had been composing just before the battle started, but it had completely slipped my mind.

CHAPTER FIVE

A
week or so ago, just before I started scratching this narrative down on wax — wax isn’t what it was, by the way; in my young days, it never used to crumble or flake the way it seems to now, and you could melt it down and use it over and over again — I found I couldn’t remember some detail or other and decided that I had better check it; so I walked up into the Market Square to Dexitheus’ stall, to see if he had any copies of a book I had heard about which dealt with the matters I was concerned with. I found the book I was after and persuaded Dexitheus to let me have a look at it for nothing — you will remember that Dexitheus is the lucky entrepreneur who has secured the right to copy this great work of mine; and I persuaded him that it was in his own interests that all the facts in it should be accurate — and then partly since I had nothing else to do that morning and partly to irritate Dexitheus, I stood for a while browsing through some of the other books he had there, including one about this Sicilian expedition I am currently describing. As I stood there reading it to myself, a little old man (I would say he was about my age, or maybe a year or so younger, but bent up with arthritis) obviously overheard the words I was saying from the book and came up to me.

‘What was that you said?’ he asked me.

‘It wasn’t me,’ I replied, ‘it was this book. It’s by…’ I turned back to the head of the roll ‘… Pheidon of Lepcis, whoever he is.’

‘What was it you just read, then?’

I looked back over the page. ‘He says that in the great battle in the harbour between the Athenians and the Syracusans, the Athenians lost fifty ships, either sunk in the fighting or rendered useless, and the Syracusans forty. And he says that his authority for this is Sicanus, the Syracusan commander, who counted the wrecks himself and was regarded by both friend and foe as a truthful man.’

‘Well I’m buggered,’ said the old man. ‘Did we really sink forty of the bastards’ ships? It didn’t seem like it at the time.’

‘Were you there too, then?’ I asked. And then, quite suddenly, I recognised him and was able to call him by his name: Jason son of Alexides of Cholleidae. Then I introduced myself.

‘You owe me seven drachmas,’ he replied.

The first and last time I had seen him was on the evening after that battle. He was sitting in front of an evil-smelling fire fuelled mostly by discarded helmet-plumes (which seemed to be rather significant in the circumstances) playing knuckle-bones against himself. To cheer myself up I asked if he wanted a game. He asked if I had any money and I said yes, some, so he proposed stakes of two obols a point. Those were quite high stakes in those days, but since I could see little point in dying rich I accepted and we started to play. Of course he won every point and took off me every last obol that I had, plus the seven drachmas alluded to above. When he found that I couldn’t pay the whole amount he was most upset and called me all sorts of uncouth names, and started demanding that I put down my sword and armour as security for the debt. At this point I left rather hurriedly. But he followed me all round the camp, whining on about his seven miserable drachmas, until Callicrates and some of his friends came up and chased him away.

I mention this incident for three reasons: first, because it makes a moderately light-hearted opening for a rather miserable part of my story; second, in the hope that one day Jason son of Alexides will hear this being read and feel thoroughly ashamed of himself; thirdly as a comment on the profound bad taste of the Fates, who allowed men like me and this poisonous Jason to get out of Sicily alive but struck down so many good men there.

To return to my story. After the battle in the harbour the only question that remained was how, if at all, we would be able to get away. Although honest general Sicanus may have been aware that the Syracusans had lost forty of their ninety ships, no one on our side knew that, and when Demosthenes suggested to the crews of our ships that they might like to consider having another go at a break-out the following morning he barely escaped with his life. So it was decided that we should burn our remaining ships and march off over land to Catana, which at the moment represented a sort of earthly paradise to every man in our army. In fact our ships never did get burnt; the man whose job it was thought it was someone else’s job, and they were left neatly lined up on the sand for the Syracusans, who thus ended the war, as they had started it, with exactly ninety warships.

The next problem was when we should leave. Demosthenes was for setting off straight away. Defeat had not addled Demosthenes’ brains to the same extent as it had those of his colleagues, and he could see that if we set off immediately, not only would the enemy not have time to send out units to cut the roads, but our soldiers would not have an opportunity to burden themselves with all the useless junk that any army, given the chance, insists on taking with it, to the great detriment of its average marching speed. But Nicias flatly refused to budge without first taking full inventories of our supplies and making detailed calculations as to what we would need to get us to Catana without having to rely on finding food by the way. Demosthenes realised that, in his present near-hysterical state, the only thing that would calm Nicias down was a good five-hour burst of heavy book-keeping, and let him have his way. This was a disastrous mistake, of course; but I believe that Demosthenes had a genuine though misguided affection for Nicias, who was suffering the torments of the damned immediately after the battle, and could not bear to overrule him in anything.

So it wasn’t until three days after the battle that we finally left that horrible, fever-stricken slaughterhouse of a camp, and there wasn’t a single man in the army (except me) who wasn’t heartbroken to leave it. For a start, most men were leaving wounded friends there —there was no possibility of taking our wounded with us —and those few who weren’t were leaving friends and relatives unburied. Then there was the natural and instinctive fear of leaving a place that was apparently safe and going out into a world that was quite definitely hostile, which was made infinitely worse by the fact that we were. leaving our ships behind. An Athenian soldier regards his ships as a small child regards his mother; so long as they are there he cannot truly lose hope, but once he loses sight of them he starts to panic and lose his wits.

Now I come to think of it, there was one particular ship in that fleet which had assumed an almost divine aura; it was obviously quite old, to judge by its design and the way it had been built, and the legend quickly grew up in the camp that it was one of the ships that the celebrated Themistocles had built all those years ago, just before the Great Persian War, and that it had seen service at the immortal victory of Salamis, when it had sunk the ship of one of the Persian admirals. Although this was obviously ludicrous most of us believed it, and by some strange chance it was virtually the only one of our ships not to suffer damage or casualties in either of the sea-battles; in fact, it had sunk a Syracusan ship by ramming in the second battle, and was one of the last of our vessels to retire from the fighting. As a result, we believed in this ship as if it was our patron God, and the thought of leaving it was the last straw for some of our people. In the end, we put the most seriously wounded men into it before we left; and oddly enough most of them survived and got back to Athens, since both the ship and its contents were bought by a rich Syracusan slave-trader who was secretly pro-Athenian. He sent doctors to look after the men, and when the war was over and the State had no further use for the ship, he had it dragged inland to his estate and set up on a platform outside his house, with a carved pillar next to it setting out its remarkable history. There it stayed for a good ten years, until a slave accidentally set light to it and damaged it beyond repair; whereupon it was broken up and the serviceable timbers used to build a cheese warehouse.

The army (I use the term loosely) that trailed away from the camp was over forty thousand strong; larger than the Greek army that defeated a million Persians at Plataea during the Great War. A large part of our force was made up of allies, of course, but it seemed to me that the entire male population of Athens, or all that was left of it, was present in that army, and I was reminded of nothing so much as the end of the final day of the Festival when all the plays have been dreadfully bad.

I marched with Callicrates and his two closest friends, Myronides (who was a distant cousin of ours) and Cyon, who had been in a Chorus of mine. For an hour or so we marched on in silence. Now I come to think of it, nobody had said anything much for days; there had been none of those busy conversations or animated discussions that are a sure sign of the presence of more than one Athenian, ever since the night-battle on Epipolae. The whole camp had been quite unnaturally quiet. But Cyon, Callicrates’ friend, was one of those almost irritatingly cheerful people who cannot be miserable for long, and after a while he started humming one of the chorus-songs from the play of mine he had been in, and after a while I joined in too, since the song was one of which I was particularly proud. It was all about Demosthenes, as it happens, and a rather sordid business deal he had got mixed up in many years ago — something about a shipload of seasoned timber from somewhere in the north that he had an interest in — and parts of it now seemed strangely topical; something about Demosthenes being reluctant to abandon his beautiful ship riding on the wine-dark water of the harbour. Anyway, the men around us took up the tune, as marching men will do, and when we came to the end we started at the beginning again. As we sang, we quickened our step to keep in time with the music, and soon we were striding purposefully along roaring out this song of mine about the petty dishonesty of our great general, who was marching boldly at the head of the column, as he always did. I guess the Syracusan outriders who had been following us ever since we left the camp must have thought we had all finally gone quite mad.

But this euphoria didn’t last long, and when the song died away we were soon trudging along in silence once more. It wasn’t a cheerful sight, that column, and matters were not helped by Nicias son of Niceratus. Noting the despondency of his soldiers, he took it upon himself to hobble up and down the line cheering us along and saying a few words of hope and encouragement in his inimitably grave and pompous style. This was, of course, profoundly embarrassing to every man in the army. For a start, his illness had got much worse since the battle and he now moved very painfully (which many men found quite remarkably funny); furthermore, I don’t imagine there were that many men there who would willingly have given an obol to save Nicias’ life, after the mess he had got us all into. But he was still our general; and so not many men yelled at him or threw stones as he passed. They simply looked the other way, and spoke loudly to their neighbours to drown out what he was saying, until Demosthenes came rushing down from the head of the column to protect his friend from self-induced humiliation. As soon as they saw Demosthenes, the soldiers started cheering, which only made matters worse for poor old Nicias. For my part I was sorry for him; he was an idiot, and would probably prove the death of all of us, but he had been my producer for
The General
(another disaster, I remembered) and so I felt a degree of loyalty to him. Unfortunately, I couldn’t help bursting out laughing when he shambled up to our part of the line and launched into one of his tirades, since he repeated, almost word for word, that celebrated rigmarole of his about men, not walls and ships, making up a city with which he had reduced our rehearsals to a state closely resembling death. My laughter set off the men around me (who didn’t know the joke but who desperately wanted to laugh at something) and poor Nicias shot me such a look of pure hatred that I wished the ground would swallow me up. Then he gave up trying to encourage the troops and was helped back to the head of the column. Every man has his evil spirit — some person who always seems to be involved, actively or passively, in his worst misfortunes. Aristophanes has always been mine, and I think that I may have played the same role for Nicias.

I can’t remember when we first saw the enemy. As I think I said earlier, there had been Syracusan horsemen watching us ever since we left the camp, and the number seemed to grow all the time, though nobody could say that he had seen them come. But I remember looking up and thinking, There’s a lot of them now, where did they all come from? and I think Demosthenes must have had the same idea, because he reorganised our line of march with the baggage-train and the more inadequate parts of our army in the middle and the rest of us forming a sort of hollow square around them. It was a highly intelligent arrangement, now I come to reflect on it, except that we should never have taken so much stuff with us in the first place. It wasn’t food we were carrying with us; for all Nicias’ fussing over wax tablets, there simply wasn’t very much food in our possession. What was slowing us up was such things as supplies of arrows and sling bolts for the archers and slingers (we had no significant force of either), shovels, trowels, adzes and similar tools necessary for building walls and other operations connected with siegecraft, chains for binding prisoners-of-war, and  other essentials such as plunder (not a large item) and the personal possessions of the dead (a very large item).