Free The Last Full Measure by Michael Stephenson

that could fight effectively, while those behind were rendered either redundant or, worse, disabling. The result was that in one of the smallest killing fields in the history of warfare the Roman legions were surrounded and annihilated. This, the largest army Rome had ever sent into the field, died where it stood. Sources differ, but somewhere in the region of 60,000 legionaries were cut down. 94 The Romans, themselves traditionally so merciless to their wounded enemies, were shown little compassion: “Many wounded had been hamstrung by marauding small bands, their writhing bodies left to be finished off by looters, the August sun, and the Carthaginian cleanup crews the next day. Two centuries later Livy wrote that thousands of Romans were still alive on the morning of August 3, awakened from their sleep and agony by the morning cold, only to be ‘quickly finished off’ by Hannibal’s plunderers.” 95 In the two years or so of his invasion of Italy, Hannibal would kill, wound, or capture more than a third of the Roman military manpower pool. 96 Rome absorbed these huge body blows and took its revenge. At Zama in 202 BCE the Roman general Scipio killed 20,000–25,000 of Hannibal’s army for the relatively modest investment of 1,500 of his own dead, and Carthage itselfwas so comprehensively destroyed that the city existed only in memory, like a golden ghost.
    The Roman army was designed to engage, and its tactical ideal was to close, kill, and conquer. But on occasion the discipline, cohesion, and determination of the legion were neutralized by an enemy who simply would not agree to fight according to the Roman rule book. By standing off and bleeding their enemy with long-distance archery, they denied him any tactical traction and robbed him of his most valued assets.
    The Roman consul Marcus Crassus was eager to strengthen his political position in Rome by a successful military adventure and to that end invaded Parthia (modern northeastern Iran) with an army of about 40,000. At the battle of Carrhae (53 BCE) his force, deployed in a defensive square, was surrounded by a much smaller Parthian host consisting primarily of horse archers and
cataphracts
(heavy cavalry). The well-supplied horse archers kept up a galling enfilade, and Crassus, desperate to bring on a close-up engagement in which his tactical strengths could be deployed, sent out his son Publius with eight cohorts (about 4,800 men), 500 archers, and 1300 cavalry. 97 It was an instinctive response to tactical frustration, as is seen on many occasions throughout history. It is a particular characteristic of colonial warfare; one thinks, for example, of the US Army in the Indian wars (Fetterman massacre), the British in nineteenth-century Afghanistan (the Kabul expedition), and the French Foreign Legion fighting the Morrocan Rif uprising. The heads tend to come back on pikes, which was precisely the fate of Publius’s and, not long after, Crassus’s. The Romans were stalked and decimated by the archers and then hit hard with Parthian
cataphract
. None of the abandoned Roman wounded were spared, and the eventual death toll for the legions was 20,000–30,000. Ironically, however, one survivor, the officer Gaius Cassius, would later come to be bitterly regretted—by Julius Caesar.

TWO
T E D EUM AND N ON N OBIS
Death on the Medieval Battlefield

    It is not we who have made this slaughter but Almighty God.
    —Henry V, after the battle of Agincourt, 1415
    V ISBY. THE ISLAND of Gotland, Sweden. 1361. The peasant army (
army
is perhaps too grand a word for this motley crew) stood outside the walls of the town. Inside, the worthy burghers, merchants, and assorted tradesfolk were disinclined to take up arms and later, when the bloody work was finished, would pay off the army that threatened them. In the meantime they bolted the gates and left the ragtag defenders to do battle with the invading Danes. The combat was swift, predictable, and merciless. After the