Flea boats ferried replacements across the breaks, while others hauled themselves over the timber and chain bindings which yet anchored the embattled wall. Morning had gone; we were slaughtering the enemy in such numbers that he could not, it was certain, hold out much longer.
There is an error in densely packed fighting committed by those lacking experience of war, even brave men, as the Syracusans and their allies were, and this is called in Sparta “downstreaming” or
“rat-holing.” A man dueling in this fashion will stand against the individual facing him, receive or deliver a blow or several, and then, he and his antagonist unhurt, roll or shift laterally to the next of the enemy, to commence a second bashing match and in turn sideslip again. Fear makes him do this. He seeks a closet of refuge, a “rat hole” amid the slaughter. In Sparta boys are beaten who evince this habit. They are schooled instead to fight “upfield,” to seize one man and battle him alone until one or the other falls. This the Lacedaemonians call monopale, “singling up.” The Syracusans had not learned this art, for all Gylippus' direction. Now on the wall of ships the superior experience of the Athenians began to tell.
It came to this: fighting topside, twenty against twenty, forty on forty, a parataxis, pitched battle, in miniature. Or brawling belowdecks man upon man, in water thigh- and hip-deep, the walls, often afire, pinning friend and foe in the cylinder of slaughter. The Athenians had the hang of it. And they possessed a further advantage. Defenders on the sea must of necessity kill men, never an easy business. But attackers need only destroy things. The marines of Athens went after the wall with fire and the ax. Ship after ship had its belly gutted, hull torched; along the rampart hulks settled, sizzling, to the waterline.
I had found Lion and Telamon. Reunited, we were hacking through a jacket of timbers, eight logs bound with belts of iron, that yoked one section of enemy line to another. Too exhausted to stand, Lion and I straddled the timber, bashing with blades blunt as butter knives. Here came the foe. Flea boats bearing slingers hauled upon us from another smoking hulk. There were ten in our party. Telamon, Lion, and Chowder were the only ones I knew; the others had collected by ones and twos; I never learned their names. One with a red beard trumpeted to a cruiser, calling for fire. As he shouted, a bullet tore his throat out; he dropped like a gunny of rocks. The shooter vaunted, already reloaded with his sling whistling overhead. I heard an alarm from behind. Somehow another score of enemy had got onto the hulk we had just crossed from. Two more slinger boats closed from seaward. We had no helmets; all shields had been ditched. We were sitting ducks. Lead bullets screamed past. Telamon yelled go; we hit the drink. An hour later we were on another hulk, hacking through another sheaf of timbers, each man with only a pilos cap and whatever rags still clung to his body.
The enemy kept coming. They flooded in hundreds from Ortygia and the Rock. There was no end to them. They were strong and rested, they had food in their bellies and fresh legs beneath them.
They were not slashed or beaten or concussed. The shafts of their weapons had not been shivered by blows daylong struck and fended. They did not bear bone-weary, as we did, the third and fourth shield of the hour, snatched from the discards of comrades dead and dying. They breathed with lungs unchoked by smoke and unseared by fire; their guts held fresh water; they could still sweat.
Yet with all this, our men would still have prevailed if not for wind and tide. The sun had transited now, dropping hard toward shore; now the breeze got up. The tide turned in evil conjunction.
There is a channel called the Race, abutting the isle of Ortygia, through which the current, compressed by the configuration of shoreline and sea bottom, streams at tide's turn with unwonted velocity. Now the foe opened a break in his ships' wall. The race shot through, driving our vessels back. Worse, twenty warships of the Corinthians now appeared, rounding the point from the north.
Driven by the stiffening breeze and emboldened by this impetus of heaven, they fell upon the vessels of Athens engaged at sea, including Implacable, putting them to flight.
Our oarsmen could not drive into this rising gale. Broken with exhaustion, rowers “caught crabs,” fouling their mates' oars. The wind struck their slewed surfaces and began to head them. The tidal race heightened their way. Those vessels which managed to come bows-on to the gust, which they must merely to hold position, discovered themselves vulnerable to attack from the flank, by the inrushing Corinthians with their fresh crews and by those others of the Syracusans now rallying behind the cry that the gods had answered their prayers, by sending this gale to rout the foe. I was on the cruiser Aristeia now, the fifth or sixth ship of the day, when her commander turned to ram one of the oncoming Corinthians. Our ship was literally moving backward, so stout was the gale. The Corinthian slipped her with ease, put her helm over, and wheeled, outboard banks pulling while inboard backed, to ram us amidships. The cruiser fled stern-first, backing water amid fresh broadsides of missiles. The Corinthian, hampered herself by the wind as it struck her now from abeam, managed only a glancing blow upon Aristeia's prow, but this was sufficient to open a tear broad enough for a man and boy to pass through abreast. The sea flooded in. A mile still remained to shore.
The oarsmen pulled with the desperation of men who know they have been vanquished and that their conquerors, falling on them, will grant no quarter. They could hear Gylippus' men along the foreshore, ravening for blood. Men groaned in despair; limbs quaked as if palsied. The ship fled into the shadows thrown by Epipolae, across the dark water which now extended hundreds of yards out from the shore. It was cold, like the morning.
Aristeia ran afoul at the Athenian palisade. Earlier vessels, jamming up in flight, had beaten the stakes from alignment, or ripped out their own bellies rushing upon them. Marines and sailors now ganged the surface by hundreds, laboring to restore the front. I glimpsed Lion and Chowder, striving in this chore. Why did they have to be so noble? With a cry I plunged in to aid them. I had no weapon, shoes, nothing. My flesh had been wrung to enervation. So had everyone's. We could feel death, not alone in the cold and dark but in our bones.
I could see the battleships of Corinth and Syracuse sweeping down upon our rampart like great winged creatures of prey. They advanced as in a dream. By the gods, they were beautiful! Divers strove in the water beside me, seeking to rig to a float of timbers the chain that yoked two submerged hedgehogs. The weight kept dragging the float under; the men struggled to hurl its monkey fist to the marines astraddle the platform, but the strength of their arms failed; the rope flopped to the surface with a slapping sound, again and again short of the mark. Two ships of the foe had centered on our gap; they were closing so fast the first ironheads flung by their toxotai were already ripping the water at our elbows.
More men thrashed to our aid from shore. After ungodly exertions, the chain was at the last seated in its notch and drawn taut.
With titanic impact the foremost battleship flung herself upon the palisade. I saw Chowder, fouled among the lines. A pike drove through the gristle of his neck. Diving for our lives, Lion and I could hear the rampart's submerged stakes, massive as trees, plunge into the foe's guts and the hedgehog's spikes rend her belly.
Still the Corinthian's oarsmen heaved, seeking to tear a breach through which her sisters would pour, bringing fire to those vessels of Athens battered and broken behind the barricade.