The troops are spent, sir, one captain reported. The third wave is still behind us, mounting from Euryalus; should he hold here and let them take the advance?
Demosthenes stared as if the man had gone mad.
“The moon is up. We take this shithole now.”
A colonel said he didn't know if his men could do it.
“The men don't tell you what can be done,” Demosthenes roared.
“You tell them!”
The commander could see his officers were reeling. They had all drunk too much wine, and though fear and exertion had sweated most out, yet the grape's fire had taken a toll on the blood, like a two-day drunk, bringing on that state of bone-weariness that no measure of will may overcome.
“Gather, cousins.” Demosthenes mustered the officers like a father his sons. “I know the men are exhausted. Can you think I don't feel it too? But we must seize the Chalk Fort. No other outcome is acceptable.
“If we fail tonight, Gylippus will drive us off the Heights tomorrow. Then we're back where we started, and worse because the enemy will believe nothing beyond his power. But the Chalk Fort taken this night turns all in our favor. The counterwall will fall; the city will be invested. Brace up, men. We can't give the foe time. Finish him now and get this trick over!”
But Gylippus did not wait for our attack. Putting the counterwall at his back, he led his troops straight for the marshaling Athenians. We heard their paean and raced back to our places. Lion already had our marines moving. I fell in and swam forward.
The enemy was massed in uncountable numbers. Our ranks closed; the armies crashed together. A melee ensued that could be given the name of battle by its scale only. No one could swing a sword, such was the press of bodies. The nine-foot spear was useless. One dropped it where he stood, fighting instead with the shield as a weapon, struggling simply to take your man's feet out or stick him Spartan-style with the short thrust and draw. Any part of the body that bore armor became a weapon. One fought with his knees, driving them into his man's testicles, with elbows fired at the throat and temple, and heels against those fallen on the earth.
In the melee a man seized the rim of the enemy's shield and pulled it down with all his weight. You clawed at a man's eyes, spit in his face if you could summon spit, and bit at him with your teeth.
We could feel the foe falling back. Our reinforcements poured from behind, driving by their weight the mass of contention forward. The moon rose behind. The enemy broke and ran.
For what happened then, blame must be laid upon our officers, myself included. We could not restrain the men; they bolted in a mass, ravening upon the foe like beasts. The spring of their fury lay no doubt in two years' woe and frustration under Nicias. I believe the men feared as well that their endurance was at its end; they had been fighting five hours without food or water; they must finish the enemy now, before strength failed.
You have witnessed the rout, Jason. Performed properly, the cavalry run down the fleeing foe, disabling him with the saber or slaying him outright with the lance. Allied with the horse troopers, the swiftest of the infantry overhaul the enemy in his flight, bringing him down from behind with the thrust of the nine-foot spear. The wounded he spikes where they lie. Here on the Heights, however, we had no cavalry and by this stage no nine-footers; all had long since been slung or shivered. Instead our troops fell in disorder upon the stampeding foe, hacking at him with the sword.
This is no way to kill a man. The edge-on wound is not reliably fatal or even disabling, and, more ruinous, it rouses its object to such desperation as to goad even the coward to turn and fight, when, taken down as he ought, with a penetration wound or missile weapon, this same fellow would continue to present his back and be slain with ease. The second axiom of the broken field, drummed into the rookie's skull, is never to take the foe one-an-one, but always by pairs, and from opposing quarters.
Both precepts went by the board in the fatigue-spawned extremity. Out front our infantry could be seen slashing at the foes' hamstrings and necks, then, as these rearmost fell, rampaging onto the next lot, leaving the outstripped foe wounded but still able to fight or, if he was clever, faking it entire, and now, as the next rank overran him, alive and unharmed among our own troops. The line broke down across the entire field. Topography enlarged the dislocation. Chalk Hill, to which the enemy now fled, was a good half mile away, over ragged and broken ground. Our men, spent, broke apart while the foe in flight was able to use the fells and declines to make his escape.
Nonetheless the Athenian advance encountered scant opposition; cries of triumph rose as our troops, disordered as they were, rolled on toward the redoubts that ringed the chalky rise commanding the counterwall. The moon was over our shoulders as we advanced; ahead you could see the enemy debouching in masses from half a dozen portals, shields, and helmets gleaming in the light. They were smart. Gylippus was smart. He had chosen not to hold his men behind the battlements, upon which our disarrayed troops would press, regaining order simply by their own compaction. Instead the Spartan elected to meet us in the open, throwing his massed, rested troops against our disordered, exhausted ones.
The world knows how spectacularly this succeeded. Lion and I had caught up with Chowder and Splinter and the orphans of other units who had attached themselves to us. Our side continued to overrun the foe; the Argive Thousand on our left was mowing down the Syracusan division arrayed against them. We could see the Chalk Fort, a hundred yards ahead. “It is fallen!” I heard an Argive officer cry.
At that instant the man on my right toppled into me. I caught him and held him up, for a man in armor on the ground is as good as dead. I turned right and there was the enemy, rolling us up from the flank.
We learned later that this was the Cadmus division, Boeotian volunteers, and the Thermopylae regiment of Thespiae, two thousand in all, whom Hegesander had stationed before that redoubt called the Ravelin. Where all others broke, these held.
Like a great rock upon which the ocean wave crashes and bursts, these stood and turned all.
I was on the earth, toppled before their rush. It was impossible to rise in fifty pounds of armor. A man, one of ours, was trying to burrow under me, so my flesh and not his would take an enemy spear. The Boeotians passed over, plunging the butt spikes of their nine-footers. I heard the burrower take it; the sound of his skull pierced, cranial foreships staving and the soup gushing from within. I took one blade outside my hip and another two whiskers from my globes. The foe passed over. I rolled free. Lion hauled me clear.
In routs escape is rarely demanding if one keeps his head. You simply dump what weight you must, bucking your nerve with the certainty that you're willing to run harder and longer to preserve your life than the foe is to take it. Here on the Heights all such usage was overturned. It was dark. There were no roads.
Moonshadow cast all into chaos. You couldn't hold where you were; you had been overrun. To advance was suicide, while to flee only hurled you among the very troops by whom you had just been routed.
We had to get round. But now a fresh hazard confounded us: the enemy our troops had outstripped in the advance. These were on their feet now, rallying into bands of butchers. They ranged the killing ground, slitting the throat of every downed Athenian. I was with Lion, Chowder, Splinter, and about a dozen others. We had migrated somehow to the extreme right of the field. The bluffs dropped sheer, two hundred feet. Chowder peered down with Lion.
“Shall we try it?”
“After you.”
We tracked the brink, seeking a descent. From a rise Lion and I squinted. In the distance: a battle.