A Writer's People (17 page)

Things are going badly for the rebellious mercenaries, and it is put to their Libyan leader that he should steal the veil from the temple of Tanit. Topography and architecture, too carefully described, are always difficult in this book. We have to take the writer on trust; and the journey to the temple, which should have been difficult (with all the slaves and guards), turns out (as in a John Buchan novel) to be not so. We are there; the zaimph is taken; and then the Libyan goes to where Salammbô is sleeping. She is in white. He tells her he has the zaimph. She leans on both hands and trembles; she puts out her foot onto her ebony stool. There follows an ambiguous half-page. Was there a sexual moment between the Libyan rebel and iconoclast and the daughter of Hamilcar? Flaubert, normally so full of words, is now so discreet that we don't know.

The Libyan says, “Let us go away!… Or if you do not want to, I will stay … Drown my soul by breathing over me …” She says, “Let me see. Nearer! Nearer!” She might be speaking only of the zaimph; or she might be seeking to entrap him; or she might be speaking love to him. And then it is the
dawn—leaving you to your own conclusions—and she is swooning on the bed cushions. The daylight restores her to herself. She calls for her servants and slaves and guards, and the Libyan makes himself scarce, wrapping himself in the veil, which no one of Carthage will want to touch, even with an arrow. Salammbô sends him on his way with religious rage. “Curses on you who robbed Tanit … May Gurzi, god of battles, tear you to pieces! May Matisman, god of the dead, choke you! And may the Other—who must not be named—burn you!” Protected by the veil, which is taking away the fortune of Carthage, the Libyan walks through the aroused town, and gets back safely to the mercenary camp.

The war goes on, its prospects constantly changing (Flaubert juggles a bit with Polybius's straight narrative). And then Hamilcar and Carthage are truly in trouble. The day comes when Salammbô's eunuch-protector tells her that she must go to the mercenaries' camp and recover the veil. She collapses on her ebony stool; her arms hang between her knees; and she trembles all over, like an animal about to be sacrificed. She tells the eunuch she wouldn't know what to do when she gets to the mercenary camp. He gives a strange smile and says, “You will be alone with him.” She says, “Well?” He doesn't know how to be more explicit. He tells her it is the will of heaven that she should yield to the Libyan, do everything he wants; above all, she must not cry out. He makes her swear; he speaks the words, and she repeats them.

She does the fasts and the purification. On the appointed evening she is specially dressed; she touches herself with the blood of a black dog slaughtered on a winter's night in a
ruined tomb (Flaubert can't resist the gothic); she is finally ready. The eunuch has arranged for a guide and horses. There are some paragraphs of description and then, quite simply, she is at the mercenary camp. She tells the sentry she wants to speak to the Libyan; she is a deserter from Carthage. The Libyan comes; they go to his tent; she sees the veil, the zaimph, resting on a bed of palm branches.

The Libyan recognises her; he speaks love to her and then (though Flaubert again isn't clear) he makes love to her. She, as though obeying the gods, yields to him; and at the same time she has the lucidity to think, “So this is the man who makes Carthage tremble.” He falls asleep. She sees a dagger on a table. She has visions of blood and revenge. She takes the dagger and moves towards him. He awakens, takes his lips to her hand, and she drops the dagger. There is a commotion outside. Hamilcar's men have set part of the camp on fire. The Libyan goes to deal with this crisis, and Salammbô is alone. She takes up the veil and starts on her return. This should be difficult, but isn't: she soon finds her guide and the horses.

Carthage has the veil again; and the full tactical genius of Hamilcar (humiliated though he has been by his daughter's escapade) now comes into play. The mercenaries are horribly destroyed, imprisoned in a natural defile, starved, and then—all but ten—left to the lions and jackals (another meal for Flaubert).

The day of Carthaginian celebration coincides with the festivities for Salammbô's marriage with the Numidian chieftain. From her temple she can see what goes on in the street. She sees particularly, with increasing horror and a dawn of
love, the slow death that is being dealt out to her Libyan—naked and bleeding, stripped of his armour—by the populace along the triumphal way. Just before he dies their eyes meet. She rises from her wedding feast, drains her glass, and falls dead.

This is where the novel ends. Flaubert's tone here is self-congratulatory. He is pleased with the operatic story he has added to Polybius, and pleased especially with the way he has made it end. But his story, shallow, never convincing, always a fabrication, seemingly derivative, undermines the greater labour of the book: the historical superstructure, the too-careful attempt to reconstruct the topography and architecture and religion of Carthage. It is a dreadful misjudgement.

To compare
Salammbô
with the second chapter of
Madame Bovary
, to look at the narrative style and the texture of the language, is to wonder about the misjudgement. The details cannot be compared: one set of details—living, easy—comes from the writer's mind and memory; the other set comes from books or—their equivalent—from travel undertaken (after he had begun to write his book) to look at landscape and get atmosphere. The books are dissimilar; the techniques are dissimilar.

Salammbô
, the fruit of much research, is the more considered. The second chapter of
Madame Bovary
is more instinctive, so instinctive that one can wonder whether the writer planned all his effects. But of course he did; and it is possible, though it is hard, to see this writer in the second book. If you read the difficult descriptive passages slowly, and more than once, if you read them until you get to know them almost as
well as the writer knew them (in isolation from the rest of the book, which slightly falls away), you begin to feel something of the writer's labour and something of his care. But this time you can also, disquietingly, feel something of his triumph.

Ambition makes a writer reach beyond what he has already achieved. And this is when, out of his security, he can make misjudgements. This misjudgement might have to do with something small, such as a matter of style, a way of writing that has crept up on a writer. Sometimes it is more serious, the very conception of a book. The more the writer feels ill at ease, the harder he tries, using all the resources of his talent, to prove his point; and then, seeing him suffer to do so, one is more than half in sympathy with him.

T
HE MISTAKE IN
Salammbô
is in taking an ancient text like Polybius's, which is good and brisk on its own terms, and thinking that if the gaps can be filled in it will make a whole. Polybius is a man of the ancient world and he is writing for people like himself who possess the whole apparatus of ancient civilisation: the art of war and the tools of war, ideas of human association, of obedience, slavery and punishment, the pleasures of the arena. To “fill in” Polybius, to spell out all the things he leaves unsaid, would be to destroy his narrative art and to distort his moral ideas, to lose his essence. To do a modern account of the mercenary war would call for another kind of narrative. In that narrative Polybius might be an important
witness, but we will need another kind of morality, where our contemporary ways of feeling are acknowledged.

Caesar is famous for his brevity. But he leaves so much out in his year-by-year report on the conquest of Gaul we are not always sure what he is saying. He was writing for people like himself who would have known about ancient warfare (so much of it hand to hand) and wouldn't want everything spelled out (unlike modern schoolboys who in their first year of Latin have to learn the compressed vocabulary of war without fully understanding what the words can open out to mean).

In the beginning Caesar is formal. He takes his time, writing with something like fascination about the religion, manners, and social organisation of the Gallic tribes; he is like a man settling down to writing history for literary glory. But then the war develops; he becomes rougher; and we begin to learn more. In the second year, when the fortress town of the Atuatici is stormed, he decides to sell all the inhabitants by auction. One man or one group buys the lot, and Caesar hears later that the number of people sold was fifty-three thousand. That one man or group bought so many is to Caesar an oddity, and he reports it as such in his dry way, in one sentence.

We don't know where the Atuatici auction took place. Was it in the conquered town? Were the prospective buyers summoned to Caesar's camp? (They couldn't have been very far away.) Was there, after the others had dropped out, some deal with the powerful buyer, man or syndicate (clearly known to Caesar), who had then within a limited time (as in modern auctions) to take away the goods, rendering an account to
Caesar? We don't know. Caesar tells us no more about the commercial arrangements of his campaigning. But they would have been complicated. Caesar made a fortune out of Gaul; and his commercial arrangements would alter the picture we have of Caesar on the march.

The merchants, so quickly and powerfully present among the defeated Atuatici, would have been
equites
, Roman knights, not aristocrats, not senators, but money people, almost a caste, making a killing here as in other places out of the spread of Roman power. They would have had facilities for taking control of those many thousands of prisoners, taking them from camping place to camping place in hostile territory, guarding them, feeding and watering them, and then walking them back to Rome or wherever they were to be sold off. They would have been like a separate army. It would have been nice to have a glimpse of this side of things from Caesar; it would have completed the picture; our modern sensibility requires it. But we are told nothing. We have only Caesar's bare line about the numbers.

In later chapters, about other campaigns, the picture fills out. We hear of traders camping at the foot of the Roman rampart during a hard engagement; we also hear of an
eques
, a knight, who has been appointed head of the commissariat by Caesar; and then we are told about
equites
settled in Gallic towns. They would have known when they were needed in Caesar's camp.

Roman readers, many of whom would at one time have been in the army, would have had no trouble with Caesar's austere narrative; they would have found it complete as it is.
They would have known how to read the shorthand. In 53
BC
, after he had put down yet another dangerous rebellion, Caesar ordered that Acco, the “instigator” of the trouble, should be executed “in the ancient Roman manner.” He says no more; and if you don't know what he means his polite way with words leaves you imagining horrors.

In the eighth and last chapter of
The Gallic War
the ancient Roman manner of execution is made clear. Interestingly, this chapter was not written by Caesar (events at Rome had grown too tense), but by his colleague Hirtius; and it is left to Hirtius to describe plainly the execution Caesar had decreed for Gutuater, yet another “warmonger” and instigator of rebellion. The man was already out of his mind with fear; he was in hiding and no one among his tribe knew where he was. Caesar asked for him to be found and delivered up. The man was found. When he was brought to Caesar the soldiers pressed around. They thought Gutuater was responsible for their recent sufferings and losses and though they knew that Caesar didn't like harsh punishments, they wanted Gutuater executed, clearly in the ancient Roman way. “Accordingly,” Hirtius writes, in one sentence, “he was flogged to death and his head cut off.” That was the ancient Roman way. It was all in the day's work for the legionaries.

Ancient warfare was dreadful. “They killed,” Caesar writes of his men at the end of a successful engagement in Gaul, “until their right arms were tired”—and the precision about the right arms gives a picture and tells the full, awful story. Perhaps because of the general dreadfulness the Latin vocabulary of war, created by an especially militarist people, seems
strangely abstract. Words are counters, perhaps, for military men too; and, in their compression, their containing much more than we know or wish to say, the words of war seem separate from their meanings.

Even an idea like “foraging”—which the schoolboy encounters pretty soon—has to be taken on trust; we don't quite know what is meant. The Roman readers of
The Gallic War
would have known more. They would have known what was being foraged for, and they would have known about the rituals or regulations for storage. They would have known that the legions travelled with their servants, and that it was often these servants (in at least one case mistaken by the enemy for legionaries) who were sent out of the camp to forage and were no great loss when they were killed or, as once in Gaul, captured, tortured, chained, and starved.

Roman readers would have had a clear picture in their head of the procedures in camp when on Caesar's orders the six thousand men of the Verbigeni clan, associated with the Helvetii, were hunted down by the tribes through whose territory they were fleeing to the Rhine, brought back to Caesar, and killed. Six thousand men killed at the same time in a small space, and not in the heat of battle: there would have been cries and groans for a long time, and the ground would have steamed with blood. But there is no blood in Caesar's abstract half-line statement: “they were put to death”—one of the Latin constructions the schoolboy learns early. The Roman reader would have supplied the blood for himself.

There are signs that Caesar grew more brutal in his methods and in his writing as matters in Rome grew more complicated
for him, as alliances there became less reliable, and as Gaul showed itself rebellious when it should have been pacified, as he had been writing to the senate. The money side of the war becomes clearer. More prisoners are taken (and would have been disposed of); and the soldiers begin to get their share, one prisoner to each man after the siege of Alesia. After the siege of Avaricum, though, the legionaries are so incensed at what they have endured they prefer to kill the prisoners. This means a loss of money for everybody, but Caesar is admiring. “None of our soldiers,” he writes, “thought about making money by taking prisoners.” And at the end of the day out of the population of forty thousand people only about eight hundred manage to run away. More work there for the short swords and the strong right arms of the legionaries.