The Roman army turned around and headed back to the coast, where they re-embarked. Scipio then made a critical decision which was to have a major impact on the outcome of the war, far more so than any of his other deeds. Giving command to his elder brother Cnaeus, the former consul who was now serving as Publius' deputy or
legatus,
Scipio sent the main body of his army on to Spain to attack the Barcids' bases. Publius himself hastened by sea back to northern Italy, planning to take charge of the forces there and confront Hannibal if he was foolhardy enough to try and cross the Alps. In this way he combined an adherence to the Senate's original instructions with a reaction to cope with a changing situation. He was aware that two legions were in Cisalpine Gaul under the command of the praetors to face what appeared to be the main enemy threat. These troops would now be commanded by one of the State's most senior magistrates, who would then gain the massive glory derived from the anticipated victory.
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We shall discuss the activities of Cnaeus Scipio and their great importance in a later chapter. The whole encounter on the Rhone, the surprise both armies felt when they realized each other's proximity, the ease with which they broke contact and lost all awareness of each other's current position or movements, emphasizes the poor strategic intelligence available to commanders in this period. This factor must always be borne in mind by modern historians attempting to analyse their decisions.
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Livy tells us that Hannibal considered fighting Scipio on the Rhone. This is possible, since he had a clear numerical advantage, especially in cavalry, and was likely to have been confident of his ability to win any encounter. On the other hand, Polybius tells us that he moved straight on and, whether or not he considered other alternatives, he seems to have led his army further north along the line of the river to ensure that he was not interfered with by the Romans he had encountered operating from Mas-silia. The first march was covered by a screen of cavalry deployed to the south. A victory won in southern Gaul would have less impact than one fought in Italy and any delay would mean that he arrived later at the Alps and would have to cross the passes in worse weather. It is also important to remember that Hannibal too had left the bulk of his baggage train behind and was relying to a great extent on foraging to feed his men and horses. He simply could not afford to keep his army in any one place for more than a few days.
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Hannibal followed the Rhone for four days until he reached an area known as 'The Island', whose location is again fiercely contested, where he allowed his soldiers a short rest. Here he encountered a Gallic tribe in which two brothers were engaged in a struggle for power. Hannibal aided the elder brother, Braneus, who gratefully provided his army with supplies of food, particularly grain, as well as replacement weaponry and boots and warm clothing suitable for their passage across the mountains. The army was about to move through the territory of another Gallic tribe, the Allobroges, who had so far not responded to any attempts to negotiate safe passage. As far as the approach to the pass over the Alps, Hannibal's column was shadowed by Braneus' warriors, who protected its rear from any attack.
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It was probably around the beginning of November 218 when the Carthaginians began the ascent of the pass, although which pass is perhaps more fiercely debated than any other aspect of his route. In the flat country the Punic cavalry and Braneus' men had deterred any hostile moves, but as the long column began to snake its way up the pass, Allobrogian chieftains began to muster their forces along the route. Hannibal discovered that a large group had massed on high ground overlooking the path. Moving his army ostentatiously to the foot of the pass, he camped there, sending some of his Gallic guides to observe the enemy. Like many other tribesmen throughout history, the Ailobroges clearly despised enemies unfamiliar with their rugged homeland and trusted too much to the protection of their high position. Hannibal's scouts discovered that at night the tribesmen, for whom predatory attacks on travellers or soldiers passing through their land were a normal supplement to the meagre livelihood of agriculture, did not bother to keep watch, but returned to their nearby set-dement to sleep, mustering again the next morning. Hannibal moved his army a little nearer the next day, but camped a little short of the ambush point, making a great play of lighting many campfires. That night he led out a picked body of men carrying only their weapons and, following the narrow path, took them up to occupy the ambush position. The next day the Gauls were amazed to see their plan foiled, and for a while allowed the main column to move unhindered through the pass. In time, the temptation of seeing so many vulnerable men and animals stretched out beneath them proved too much and Allobrogian tribesmen, at first as individuals or small groups, began to make sudden attacks on the Carthaginians. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
AD
it was usually enough to 'crown the heights' on the North-west Frontier of India to ensure passage for a column moving through the valley bottom, but Hannibal's picked force were not armed with any missile weapons with sufficient range to allow them to dominate all the ground below them. At first he was forced to watch as short raids were made on vulnerable parts of the column, creating local havoc, especially amongst the animals who panicked and added to the disorder or stumbled and fell off the steep slope beside the road. Hannibal led the picked force dowrihill, charging against the enemy who were trying to block the head of the column, driving them off with heavy loss. Following up on this success he stormed the Gallic setdement which was largely deserted. This success showed the neighbouring tribesmen that their homes were not secure from enemy reprisals and, more practically, the setdement was found to contain many men and animals captured during the day of attacks. In addition to this, the town's grain stores provided enough food to last the whole army two or three days. Wearily the rest of the column followed on and reached this sanctuary by the end of the day.
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Hannibal gave his soldiers a day's rest before pushing on, encountering few problems for the next diree days. At this point he was met by a group of Gallic chieftains offering peace, claiming that his capture of the Allobrogian setdement had convinced them of his might. Hannibal did not fully trust these approaches, but considered that it was better to appear to accept them and receive the guides and livestock offered by the tribesmen. His suspicion appeared to have been proved right when two days later a force of warriors made a strong attack on the rear of his column as it was travelling through a difficult and narrow pass. Fortunately he had prepared for just such an eventuality, sending his baggage train with the cavalry, who were exceedingly vulnerable in this terrain, near the front of the column and forming a strong rearguard of heavy infantry - Polybius calls them 'hoplites'. These men, probably Libyan foot, bore the brunt of the Gallic assault, defeating it with heavy loss. Even so, small groups of tribesmen, knowing the ground, made darting attacks up and down the column, going chiefly for the baggage train. In some places they rolled boulders down onto the narrow path, crushing man and beast and spreading confusion. The advance guard pushed on to the main pass, Hannibal leading them in person. They seized it, but spent an uneasy night waiting for the baggage and cavalry to catch up. The Gauls, perhaps deterred by the fierceness of the Punic reaction, or maybe because they had already acquired satisfactory amounts of booty, withdrew in the night and returned to their homes.
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This was the end of the major fighting during the passage over Alps, only the occasional small raid on the column occurring in the remainder of the journey. The Carthaginian war elephants proved very useful in defending against these forays, since the unfamiliar appearance of the creatures ensured that the Gauls avoided whichever parts of the column included them. Hannibal's soldiers now found that their main enemies were the elements and the terrain itself. It took nine days to reach the summit of the pass and the army stopped there for two more days, allowing many stragglers to catch up. We are even told that many of the animals who had bolted in panic during the fighting wandered into the Punic camp during this time. Morale was not good amongst the men, most of them unfamiliar with both mountains and cold, for snow, already on the heights, was now beginning to build up on the path itself. Hannibal is supposed to have made a rousing speech to the assembled troops, pointing towards the Lombard plain, assuring them of the great opportunities for loot and glory awaiting them on arrival. The ability to view the northern Italian plain is one of the many criteria used by scholars to decide which Alpine pass Hannibal actually used, although we cannot be sure whether such a view was literally visible, or conjured in the men's minds by their general's words.
The path down was difficult, slippery from snow and ice and proved especially hard for the animals with the army - horses, mules and most of all, the elephants. At one point a landslide had completely blocked the path for several hundred yards, and the deep snow made it impossible for the animals to go round. Under the direction of his engineers, Hannibal set his
Numidian horsemen to building a new path through the obstacle. It took a day to make a path suitable for the pack animals, another three to make it viable for the elephants. Livy tells the story of how Hannibal's ingenuity found a way to break up the larger boulders blocking the path. His men piled faggots of wood around the rocks, setting them on fire and keeping the pyres going until a great temperature was reached. Then they poured onto them the sour wine, which was certainly the standard ration in the later Roman army and may also have been normal with the Carthaginians, causing the rocks to crack and allowing them to be broken into pieces. This is typical of the stories told of many ancient commanders, celebrating their intelligence and adaptability as well as reinforcing the belief that a good commander needed to be a highly educated man, as knowledgeable about weather, engineering and the natural sciences as he was about the technical aspects of warfare. Polybius does not mention the incident, and it may be a later invention, although it certainly became firmly embedded in the Hannibal myth, but there is nothing inherently impossible about it.
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The army suffered badly from the elements during the delay imposed by this obstacle, forced as they were to camp on the bare mountain sides. All were weary and weak by the time they moved down into the lower valleys, where the snow had not yet settled and there was grass for the animals. Three days after clearing the landslide, the army reached the flatter country. Polybius tells us that the army took fifteen days to cross the Alps, but it is not certain if this includes the entire journey or only the passage of the last, highest pass. It may be that three to four weeks elapsed between the beginning of the ascent in the territory of the Allobroges and the arrival on the plain to the south of the mountains. The entire march from New Carthage had taken five months. It had been an epic journey, leading in ancient minds to an obvious comparison with the hero and demigod Her-akles, who had also crossed the Alps in the mythical past. Not for the first or last time, Hannibal had done what the Romans had not expected or believed impossible. He had ensured that this war would be fought on Italian soil. It now remained to seen what his invading army could achieve now that it had reached its destination.
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CHAPTER
7
Invasion
H
ANNIBAL WAS ACROSS
the Alps, but all the effort up to this point had done no more than to place him in a position to begin the assault on his real enemy. The cost of getting this far had been enormous. For the moment his soldiers were exhausted by their privations, incapable of effective operations until they had been rested and fed. Very few of them were left: only 6,000 cavalry and 20,000 infantry - 12,000 Libyans and 8,000 Spanish - were still with the colours when the army came down from the mountains. Hannibal had been followed into Gaul by 9,000 horse and 50,000 foot; 8,000 and 38,000 respectively had crossed the Rhone, so in the course of a few months he had lost more than half of his army. Only a small minority of these losses were battle casualties. It has sometimes been claimed that large detachments were left behind to control the Gallic tribes and ensure the safe passage of future reinforcements and supplies from Punic Spain, but there is no good evidence for this and our sources never mention such garrisons in later narratives of the war. Nothing in Hannibal's later behaviour suggests that he expected to remain in constant communication with his base in Spain. When his brother Hasdrubal attempted to bring a reinforcing army into Italy in 215 and 207, he marched it in an expedition reminiscent of Hannibal's original invasion. It is possible that the large numbers for the earlier phases of the campaign are exaggerated, and certainly Polybius does not seem to attribute them to the same impeccable authority of the Lacinian inscription, but all our sources were convinced that Hannibal's losses before he arrived in Italy were substantial, especially during the crossing of the Alps, so it is probably best to accept them. Once again, the vast majority were probably deserters or young recruits unable to keep up on the long marches. (During Napoleon's invasion of Russia in
AD
1812, it was the young conscripts who were first to give way under the strain of the rapid advance, quickly thinning the ranks of his massive army.) We should note that only 40 per cent of the infantry to reach Italy were Spanish, when these had probably formed the vast majority of the force which mustered in New Carthage earlier that spring. It is also interesting that the army's cavalry did not suffer as high a rate of attrition as the infantry, since as a rule horses break down before men. Hannibal's victories were to owe much to his numerically superior and well-disciplined cavalry and it is clear that they formed something of an elite. Perhaps they were more highly paid than the foot, and probably they were better motivated, but it is certain that Hannibal had taken great care to cosset his cavalry on the march. However, their horses must have been in a poor state and needed to be rested and properly fed. Hannibal may have lost the bulk of his soldiers in reaching Italy, but the ones he had left were the pick of the army, doubdess mainly the veterans of his family's Spanish campaigns.
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