Hannibal (12 page)

Looking for a pretext for action, Sempronius was not slow to find one. Hannibal was concerned that a number of the Gauls in the area between the Trebia and the Po were negotiating with the Romans as well as with the Carthaginians—endeavouring to hedge their bets in the impending conflict.

He despatched 2,000 infantry and 1,000 horse to raid their land, hoping to frighten them into the Carthaginian camp and also to provoke a Roman response. This was not slow in coming, for when the Gauls approached the Romans and asked for help, Sempronius at once sent out most of his cavalry and a thousand foot soldiers. Once he had crossed the Trebia and engaged Hannibal’s raiding party, there ensued a confused minor engagement in which the Romans gained the upper hand. This had the desired effect and, as Polybius tells the story, ‘Tiberius [Sempronius], elated and overjoyed by his success, was all eagerness to bring on a decisive battle as soon as possible.’ Scipio’s counsel that they would do better to wait, improve the quality of their legions by a winter’s drilling, and count upon the fact that the unreliable Celts would soon desert Hannibal was ignored. Sempronius ‘was eager to deliver the decisive blow himself and did not wish Publius [Scipio] to be present at the battle, or that the consuls designate should enter upon office before all was over—it being now nearly the time for this.’

Everything was playing into Hannibal’s hands, and his view of the situation was similar to Scipio’s. The Romans would, indeed, be better to wait but, as for him, he wanted action swiftly—while Sempronius was in effective command, while his own Gauls were still eager for battle, and before the Romans had had more time to train up their raw levies, as yet untested in battle. Of the morale of Hannibal’s own men, Polybius sagely comments that, ‘when a general has brought his army into a foreign country and is engaged in such a risky enterprise, his only hope of safety lies in constantly keeping alive the hopes of his allies.’

Like all great generals Hannibal was a man who knew how to make the land work for him. Trained since a boy in camp, and since a youth in war, he had assimilated that knowledge of space, of density, and of the configuration of the earth around, which distinguishes his rare kind from other military men. He had noticed, during his inspection of the territory between his own camp on the western side of the Trebia and the river itself, a small watercourse with steep banks that were dense with scrub and thicket. At first glance it would pass unremarked, especially in the grey light and rain of winter. It lay to the south of his camp, south of the plain across which any army would have to pass to attack him. If Hannibal could only lure the Romans across the Trebia, drawing up his own troops to the north of this place ‘well adapted for an ambuscade’, then he could conceal troops in the area who had but to wait until the enemy was past before attacking in their rear. Polybius with his military expertise comments: ‘Any water-course with a slight bank and reeds or bracken…can be made use of to conceal not only infantry, but even the dismounted horsemen at times, if a little care be taken to lay shields, with conspicuous devices inside, uppermost of the ground and hide the helmets under them.’

Hannibal now held a council of war. He knew that Sempronius, especially since his small success over the Carthaginian raiding party, was ready and eager to engage. He only needed a little encouragement—a further raid, perhaps, but this time on his own camp? In his mood of aggressive confidence the Roman consul would never be able to tolerate an impudent gesture like an attack on the Roman camp itself. All depended on the success of the ambush. Hannibal selected his younger brother Mago—eager to win his spurs—and put him in command of a picked force of 1,000 foot and 1,000 horse. Mago’s orders were to leave the camp after dark and take up his position in the scrub around the small gulley and to lie there concealed until he judged the moment ripe. Hannibal now explained exactly what his plan was for the major action itself.

At dawn the next day all the light-armed Numidian horsemen would cross the Trebia and then, in the grey early light, make an attack on the Roman camp. Their part in the day’s work was all-important, and Hannibal promised them suitable rewards if they achieved the result he expected. As soon as the Romans roused themselves and began to react to the darts and javelins of the marauding horsemen they were to withdraw, but not so fast that they did not give the enemy time to mount their own horses and follow in pursuit. The aim was to lure not only the Roman cavalry but the whole army across the Trebia and into the flat land where Hannibal’s troops would be drawn up for battle.

Sempronius, as the Numidians came thundering down towards his camp, immediately sent out his own cavalry to engage them. The whole matter might possibly have ended in no more than a skirmish, with the Numidians withdrawing as the heavy cavalry began to drive them back, but the consul had risen to the bait. Determined to give the Carthaginians a severe mauling—if no more—he sent out 6,000 infantry armed with javelins, and then began to move the whole army. It was, as Livy tells us, ‘a day of-terrible weather…the time of the year when the days are shortest, and it was snowing in the area between the Alps and the Apennines, and the proximity of rivers and marshes intensified the bitter cold.’ By sending in his Numidians at first light Hannibal had ensured that the Romans, caught without having had a morning meal, were compelled to hasten out unprepared and still half-asleep. His own army, however, forewarned and well advised, had breakfasted at leisure and had then settled down in front of roaring fires to warm themselves and to oil their bodies against the cold, wind and sleet. The horses had been fed and watered, groomed and readied; the elephants were similarly looked after, for they would be used in advance of the cavalry on each wing of the army to give protection to their own horsemen. For Hannibal it was to be a setpiece battle, a model of care and preparation over which he would reminisce in the years to come.

The Romans, with their characteristic dour bravery, formed up and made their way towards the river. It was here that Hannibal made the forces of nature work for him: ‘At first their enthusiasm and eagerness sustained them, but when they had to cross the Trebia, swollen as it was owing to the rain that had fallen during the night higher up the valley…the infantry had great difficulty in crossing, as the water was breast-high.’ Polybius continues: ‘The consequence was that the whole force suffered much from cold and also from hunger, as the day was now advancing.’

Hannibal waited, making no attempt to attack until the Romans were across the river, and then sent forward about 8,000 pikemen and slingers to harass the enemy as they were reforming. The Balearic slingers, with their deadly accuracy, were able to pick off soldiers like sitting birds as, streaming with water, they staggered into line; the lightly-clad pikemen darted in and selected individual targets, skewering them to the ground while themselves remaining outside the cut and thrust of the Roman
gladius,
(This fine short sword had its merits when used by soldiers in a disciplined line, but was at a disadvantage in single combat.)

Moving at ease while the advance forces disrupted the Romans as they formed rank, Hannibal’s troops had time to draw themselves up almost as if for a ceremonial parade. For the operation this day, Hannibal favoured a long line for the infantry; the heavily-armed Africans and Spaniards reinforcing the Gauls; the cavalry on each wing, with the elephants and their drivers looming ahead of the horse—ominous in the cold and heavy overcast skies of winter. Sempronius, we read, ‘advanced on the enemy in imposing style marching in order at slow step’. The light-armed troops began the battle, but even here the Carthaginians were at an advantage, for the Romans had spent most of their missiles against the first wild Numidian attack. As the light forces withdrew between the gaps left in the lines for them, the first clash of the heavy infantry occurred. When the centres were engaged the Carthaginian cavalry pressed home their attacks on both flanks of the enemy, coming fresh to the assault and having superiority in numbers. The Roman wings began to yield and, as they did so, the Numidian light horse and the Carthaginian pikemen, following up their own heavy cavalry, took advantage of the weakness left on each flank of the Roman infantry.

While both centres held in hand-to-hand combat, the Roman cavalry fell back and their infantry on each flank began to collapse, Hannibal’s trap was sprung. Rising from their hiding-place in the rain-enshrouded gulley to the rear of the Romans, Mago and his special force charged out with a great cry to take the enemy’s centre from the rear. Trumpeting through the driving sleet the elephants helped to roll up the wing which, tormented by the Numidians and other light troops, began to fall back upon the rushing cold river behind them.

The Roman legionaries in the van, each flank exposed and their rear attacked, fought their way courageously ahead and broke through the thin Carthaginian line. Ten thousand of them managed to maintain a disciplined formation and to retire upon Placentia. Theirs must have been a notably organised withdrawal, with an efficient rearguard fighting off the pursuing Carthaginians, for they still had to cross the Trebia again to reach the garrison-town (something that Livy fails to observe). The rest of the Roman army, cavalry and infantry alike, were scattered into ragged groups by the Carthaginian advance and by the sudden onslaught of Mago and his men in their rear. Most of those who did not die in the field were hacked down as they made to cross the swollen river; those who did escape joined the general retreat towards Placentia. The Carthaginians were wise and—no doubt on Hannibal’s orders—did not attempt to pursue the enemy beyond the river-line.

The day was a triumph of strategy and of tactical planning. The Romans had been outgeneralled, and their armies cut to pieces or dispersed in flight. Thousands of Romans and their allies had been killed and thousands taken prisoner. The path south through the Apennines lay open to the invader. Something in the way in which the battle had evolved—the failure of his own centre before the heavy Roman thrust—may have suggested to Hannibal a stratagem that he would employ one day in the future on the distant field of Cannae. Most of his own casualties had occurred among the Gauls, possibly because of their wild and undisciplined charges, possibly because they were not so well protected by body armour as the Carthaginians. (This was something that Hannibal would rectify by carefully training his new troops and by the distribution among them of captured Roman shields, helmets and armour.) Heavy losses had been incurred by the elephants—Polybius says that all but one were killed, and Livy says ‘nearly all’—but this did little save demonstrate their unsuitability for the terrain and climate of Italy.

An attempt was made by the Romans, and particularly by Sempronius, to disguise the nature of their defeat, and it was put about that they had only been deprived of a victory by the violence of the weather. The true state of affairs could not long be concealed, for the Carthaginians were still encamped as before; the Gauls who had been hesitating as to their future allegiance came over to Hannibal without any further reservation; and the remnants of the two consular armies had withdrawn into Placentia and Cremona. The news that Hannibal was across the Alps had sounded the alarm in Rome; the cavalry encounter at the Ticinus had been the first peremptory tap on an ominous drum; but the rout of two consular armies on the Trebia was no murmur of thunder in the distant hills. It was the deep rumble of an advancing avalanche that would shake Rome to its foundations.

XII

TRASIMENE

Eager to press home his advantage, Hannibal would have liked to attempt the passage of the Apennines immediately, but the increasing severity of the weather and the poor health of his own troops were against him. Furthermore, he now had to contend with the Gallic temperament—and the Gauls did not reckon that a victory was followed by further action, but by plunder and enjoyment. It was a factor that Hannibal would have to bear in mind for the future. For the moment he gave them, as well as his own troops, free rein to ransack the lands around, and ‘the Romans were given no peace even in their winter quarters’. Livy tells us that the garrison towns of Placentia and Cremona, housing the survivors of the legions, were completely cut off from local supplies and could only be maintained by ferrying all their requirements up the Po in barges. In Rome itself, now that the real situation was evident, there was ‘such consternation that people looked for the immediate appearance of the hostile army before their very City, and knew not which way to turn for any hope or help in defending their gates and walls against its onset.’

The arrival in Rome of Sempronius, who had made his way back with great hazard through a countryside that was dominated by Hannibal’s cavalry, facilitated the election of the new consuls for the year 217 B.C. Gaius Flaminius and Gnaeus Servilius were the consuls chosen, the former for the second time. He was a man who had won great popularity with the people for his hostile attitude towards the senate and the aristocratic party; he had also a high opinion of his military prowess from a previous campaign against the Gauls. While Servilius was to command the legions which would be based on Ariminum, to Flaminius fell the welcome task of taking over the troops at Arretium (Arezzo), where he would be seen to be barring the passage of the invader towards Rome. Since both existing consular armies had been decimated at Trebia, four new legions were immediately levied—an early sign that the manpower of Italy would prove its greatest asset.

Before all the operations for that year ceased, Hannibal, despite a wound incurred in a cavalry action, had captured the large trading post of Victumulae. Here he had been met by a hostile Gallic population who had tried to oppose his attack on their township. They were routed and then exterminated for their faithfulness to Rome. It was vital, in this early stage in the war, that the Gauls of northern Italy should realise from the start that fortune and freedom lay in joining the Carthaginian, but that he was more merciless than the Romans if opposed.