Caesar (83 page)

“Then,” said Caesar to Antony, “let's make him warm his troops up a little.” He broke camp with his usual startling rapidity and disappeared. At first Pompey thought he had retreated south due to lack of food; then his scouts informed him that Caesar had crossed the Genusus a few miles inland and headed up a mountain pass toward Dyrrachium. Horrified, Pompey realized that he was about to be cut off from his base and huge accumulation of supplies. Still, he was marching the Via Egnatia, while Caesar was stuck getting his army over what the scouts described as a track. Yes, he'd beat Caesar easily!Caesar was in the lead along that track, surrounded by the hoary young veterans of the Tenth.“ Oh, this is more like it, Caesar!” said one of these hoary young veterans as the Tenth struggled around boulders and over rocks. “A decent march for once!”

“Thirty-five miles of it, lad, so I've been told,” Caesar said, grinning broadly, “and it's got to be done by sunset. When Pompeius strolls up the Via Egnatia, I want the bastard to be pointing his snub nose at our arses. He thinks he's got some Roman soldiers. I know he hasn't. The real Roman soldiers belong to me.”

“That's because,” said Cassius Scaeva, one of the Tenth's centurions, “real Roman soldiers belong to real Roman generals, and there's no Roman general realer than Caesar.”

“That remains to be seen, Scaeva, but thanks for the kind words. From now on, boys, save your breath. You're going to need it before sunset.” By the end of the day Caesar's army occupied some heights about two miles from Dyrrachium just east of the Via Egnatia; orders were to dig in for the duration, which meant a big camp bristling with fortifications.“ Why not the higher heights over there, the ones the locals call Petra?” asked Antony, pointing south.“ Oh, I think we'll leave that for Pompeius to occupy.”

“But it's better ground, surely!”

“Too close to the sea, Antonius. We'd spend most of our time fending off Pompeius's fleets. No, he's welcome to Petra.” Coming up the Via Egnatia the next morning to find Caesar between himself and Dyrrachium, Pompey seized the heights of Petra and established himself there impregnably.“ Caesar would have done better to keep me out of here,” said Pompey to Labienus. “It's far better ground, and I'm not cut off from Dyrrachium because I'm on the sea.” He turned to one of his more satisfactory legates, his son-in-law, Faustus Sulla. “Faustus, get messages to my fleet commanders that all my supplies are to be landed here in future. And have them start ferrying what's in Dyrrachium.” He lifted his lip. “We can't have Lentulus Crus complaining that there's no quail or garum sauce for his chefs to conjure their marvels.”

“It's an impasse,” said Labienus, scowling. “All Caesar is intent on doing is demonstrating that he can run rings around us.” A curiously prophetic statement. Within the next days the Pompeian high command in Petra noticed that Caesar was fortifying a line of hills about a mile and a half inland from the Via Egnatia, starting at his own camp's walls and moving inexorably south. Then entrenchments and earthworks were flung up between the forts, linking them together. Labienus spat in disgust. “The cunnus! He's going to circumvallate. He's going to wall us in against the sea and make it impossible for us to get enough grazing for our mules and horses.”

Caesar had called his army to an assembly.“ Here we are, a thousand and more miles from our old battleground in Gallia Comata, boys!” he shouted, looking cheerful and—well, didn't he always?—confident. “This last year must have seemed strange to you. More marching than digging! Not too many days going hungry! Not too many nights freezing! A romp in the hay from time to time! Plenty of money going into the legion banks! A nice, brisk sea voyage to clear the nostrils!”

Dear, dear,“ he went on mildly, ”you'll be getting soft at this rate! But we can't have that, can we, boys?"

“NO!” roared the soldiers, thoroughly enjoying themselves.“ That's what I thought. Time, I said to myself, that those cunni in my legions went back to what they do best! What do you do best, boys?”

“DIG!” roared the soldiers, beginning to laugh.“ Go to the top of Caesar's class! Dig it is! It looks like Pompeius might nerve himself to fight one of these years, and we can't have you going into battle without having first shifted a few million basketloads of earth, can we?”

“NO!” roared the soldiers, hysterical with mirth.“ That's what I thought too. So we're going to do what we do best, boys! We're going to dig, and dig, and dig! Then we'll dig some more. I've a fancy to make Alesia look like a holiday. I've a fancy to shut Pompeius up against the sea. Are you with me, boys? Will you dig alongside Caesar?”

“YES!” they roared, flapping their kerchiefs in the air.“ Circumvallation,” said Antony thoughtfully afterward.“ Antonius! You remembered the word!”

“How could anyone forget Alesia? But why, Caesar?”

“To make Pompeius respect me a little more,” said Caesar, his manner making it impossible to tell whether he was joking. “He's got over seven thousand horses and nine thousand mules to feed. Not terribly difficult around here, where there's winter rain rather than winter snow. The grass doesn't wither, it keeps on growing. Unless, that is, he can't send his animals out to pasture. If I wall him in, he's in trouble. A circumvallation also renders his cavalry ineffectual. No room to maneuver.”

“You've convinced me.”

“Oh, but there's more,” said Caesar. “I want to humiliate Pompeius in the eyes of his client kings and allies. I want men like Deiotarus and Ariobarzanes to chew their nails down wondering and worrying whether Pompeius will ever get up the courage to fight. He's outnumbered me two to one since I landed. Yet he will not fight. If it goes on long enough, Antonius, some of his foreign kings and allies might decide to withdraw their support, bring their levies home. After all, they're paying, and the men who pay are entitled to see results.”

“I'm convinced, I'm convinced!” cried Antony, palms up in surrender.“ It's also necessary to demonstrate to Pompeius what five and a half legions like mine can do,” said Caesar as if no one had interrupted. “He's well aware that these are my Gallic veterans, and that they've marched two thousand miles over the course of the last year. Now I'm going to ask them to work their arses off doing however many miles of digging are necessary. Probably, knowing I'm strapped, short of food. Pompeius will have his fleets patrolling endlessly, and I don't see any deterioration in their efficiency since Bibulus died.”

“Odd, that.”

“Bibulus never did know when enough was enough, Antonius.” Caesar sighed. “Though, candidly, I'll miss him. He's the first of my old enemies to go. The Senate won't be the same.”

“It'll improve considerably!”

“In terms of ease, yes. But not when it comes to the kind of opposition every man should have to contend with. If there's one thing I fear, Antonius, it's that this wretched war will end in my having no opponents left. Which won't be good for me.”

“Sometimes,” said Antony, pursing his lips and touching the tip of his nose with them, “I don't understand you, Caesar. Surely you don't hanker for the kind of anguish Bibulus gave you! These days you can do what has to be done. Your solutions are the right ones. Men like Bibulus and Cato made it impossible for you to improve the way Rome works. You're better off without the sort of opposition that watches the skies rather than governs—that has a dual standard—one set of rules for their own conduct, a different set for your conduct. Sorry, I think losing Bibulus is almost as good as losing Cato would be. One down, one to go!”

“Then you have more faith in my integrity than I do at times. Autocracy is insidious. Perhaps there's no man ever born, even me, with the strength to resist it unless opposed,” said Caesar soberly. He shrugged. “Still, none of this will bring Bibulus back.”

“Pompeius's son might end in being more dangerous with those terrific Egyptian quinqueremes. He's knocked out your naval station at Oricum and burned thirty of my transports in Lissus.”

“Pah!” said Caesar contemptuously. “They're nothings. When I return my army to Brundisium, Antonius, it will be in Pompeius's transports. And what's Oricum? I'll live without those warships. What Pompeius doesn't yet understand is that he will never be free of me. Wherever he goes, I'll be there to make his life a misery.”

During the relentless rains of May a bizarre race began, both sides digging frantically. Caesar raced to get ahead of Pompey and squeeze his available territory in; Pompey raced to get ahead of Caesar and expand his available territory. Caesar's task was made harder by a constant bombardment of arrows, sling stones and ballista boulders, but Pompey's task was made harder from within: his men detested digging, were reluctant to dig, and did so only out of fear of Labienus, who understood Caesar and the capacity of Caesar's men for hard work under grueling conditions. With more than twice Caesar's manpower, Pompey did manage to keep that precious lead, but never by enough to strike well eastward. Occasional skirmishes occurred, not usually to Pompey's advantage; his terror of exposing his men to Caesar in sufficient numbers to permit a spontaneous outbreak of hostilities hampered him badly. Nor at first did Pompey fully understand the handicap of being westward in a land where the many little rivers all flowed westward. Caesar occupied their sources, therefore Caesar came to control Pompey's water supply. One of Pompey's greatest comforts was the knowledge that Caesar lacked a patent supply line. Everything had to come up from western Greece overland; the roads were earthen and mud-bound, the terrain rugged, the easier coastal routes cut off because of those Pompeian fleets. But then Labienus brought him several slimy grey bricks of a fibrous, gluey substance.“ What are these?” asked Pompey, completely at a loss.“ These are Caesar's staple rations, Pompeius. These are what Caesar and his men are subsisting on. The roots of a local plant, crushed, mixed with milk and baked. They call it 'bread.' ”Eyes wide, Pompey took one of the bricks and worked at a recalcitrant corner until he managed to tear a small piece off. He put it in his mouth, choked, spat it out.“ They don't eat this, Labienus! They couldn't eat this!”

“They can and they do.”

“Take it away, take it away!” squealed Pompey, shuddering. “Take it away and burn it! And don't you dare breathe a word about it to any of the men—or my legates! If they knew what Caesar's soldiers are willing to eat in order to fence me in—oh, they'd give up in despair!”

“Don't worry, I'll burn the stuff and say nothing. And if you're wondering how I got them, Caesar sent them to me with his compliments. No matter what the odds, he's always cocky.”

By the end of May the grazing situation within Pompey's territory was becoming critical; he summoned transports and shipped several thousand of his animals to good pasture north of Dyrrachium. The little city lay on the tip of a small peninsula which almost kissed the mainland half a mile east of the port; a bridge carried the Via Egnatia across the narrow gap. The inhabitants of Dyrrachium saw the arrival of these animals with dismay. Precious grazing land, needed for themselves, was no longer theirs. Only fear of Labienus stilled their tongues and prevented retaliation. Through the month of June the race continued unabated, while Pompey's horses and mules still penned within his lines grew ever thinner, weaker, more prone to succumb to the diseases a wet and muddy land made inevitable. By the end of June they were dying in such numbers that Pompey, still digging frantically, had not the manpower to dispose of the carcasses properly. The stench of rotting flesh permeated everywhere. Lentulus Crus was the first to complain. “Pompeius, you cannot expect us to live in this—this disgusting miasma!”

“I can't keep anything down for the smell,” said Lentulus Spinther, handkerchief to his nose. Pompey smiled seraphically. “Then I suggest that you pack your trunks and go back to Rome,” he said. Unfortunately for Pompey, the two Lentuli preferred to go on complaining. For Pompey, a minor matter; Caesar was busy damming all the little rivers and cutting off his water supply. When Pompey's lines attained a length of fifteen miles—and Caesar's seventeen miles—he was fenced in, could go no further. Pompey's predicament was desperate. With Labienus's assistance, he persuaded a group of the inhabitants of Dyrrachium to go to Caesar and offer to let him take the city. The weather was not much improved by the arrival of spring; Caesar's men were flagging on that diet of “bread.” Yes, Caesar thought, it's worth a try to get at Pompeius's supplies. On the eighth day of Quinctilis he attacked Dyrrachium. While he was so engaged, Pompey struck, launching a three-pronged assault against the forts in the center of Caesar's line. The two forts which took the brunt of the attack were manned by four cohorts belonging to the Tenth Legion, under the command of Lucius Minucius Basilus and Gaius Volcatius Tullus; so well engineered were the defenses that they held off five of Pompey's legions until Publius Sulla managed to relieve them from Caesar's main camp. Publius Sulla then proceeded to prevent the five Pompeian legions from returning behind their own lines. Stranded in the No Man's Land between the two sets of circumvallations, they huddled and took what was thrown at them for five days. By the time Pompey managed to retrieve them, they had lost two thousand men. A minor victory for Caesar, smarting at being tricked. He paraded the four cohorts of the Tenth before his army and loaded their standards with yet more decorations. When shown the shield of the centurion Cassius Scaeva, bristling like a sea urchin with one hundred and twenty arrows, Caesar gave Scaeva two hundred thousand sesterces and promoted him to primipilus. Dyrrachium did not fare so well. Caesar sent sufficient troops to build a wall around it—then drove Pompey's grazing horses and mules within the narrow corridor between the city and the fields its people could no longer reach. Having no other alternative, Dyrrachium was forced to commence eating Pompey's supplies. The city also sent the mules and horses back to Pompey.

On the thirteenth day of Quinctilis, Caesar turned fifty-two. Two days after that, Pompey finally admitted to himself that he had to break out or perish from a combination of no water and rotting carcasses. But how to do it, how? Cudgel his brain as he might, Pompey couldn't devise a scheme to break out that did not also entail giving battle. Chance offered him the answer in the persons of two officers from Caesar's squadron of Aeduan cavalry, whom Caesar used mainly to gallop from one end of his circumvallation to the other with notes, messages, dispatches. The two officers had been embezzling their squadron's funds. Though not Roman, the Aedui followed Roman methods of military accounting, and had a savings fund, a burial fund and a pay fund. The difference lay in the fact that they managed these financial affairs themselves through two officers elected for the purpose; Roman legions had proper clerical staffs to do the same sort of thing, and audited as regularly as ruthlessly. Thus the two managers of the squadron's finances had been peculating since their departure from Gaul. Chance found them out. And chance brought them fleeing for refuge to Pompey. They told him exactly how Caesar's forces were disposed—then told him exactly where Caesar's great weakness was situated. Pompey attacked at dawn on the seventeenth day of Quinctilis. Caesar's great weakness was situated at the far southern end of his lines, where they turned west and ran to the sea. Here he was still in the process of finishing a second wall outside his main wall; this outer wall was undefended, and from the seaward side neither wall could be held securely. The Ninth garrisoned the area for Caesar; all six of Pompey's Roman legions began a frontal assault while Pompey's slingers, archers and some light Cappadocian infantry sneaked around behind the undefended wall, entered and surprised the Ninth from the rear. A small force Lentulus Marcellinus brought up from the nearest fort couldn't help; the Ninth was routed. Things changed when Caesar and Antony arrived with enough reinforcements, but Pompey had used his time well. He pulled five of the six legions into a new camp on the far side of Caesar's walls and sent the sixth to occupy a disused little camp nearby. Caesar retaliated by sending thirty-three cohorts to dislodge the single legion, but was unable to follow through because of an entangling fortification in his path. Sensing victory, Pompey sent all the cavalry he was able to mount against Caesar himself. Who withdrew with such incredible speed that Pompey ended in grasping at air rather than at opportunity. He sat back, pleased, to recover his wind instead of ordering his cavalry to pursue the vanished Caesar.“ What a fool the man is!” growled Caesar to Antony when he had his whole army safely within the ramparts of his main camp. “If he'd kept his cavalry on our tails, he'd have won this war here and now. But he didn't, Antonius. Caesar's luck consists in fighting a fool.”