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On 2 August 216 BC - over 2,200 years ago almost to the day of writing - a battle was fought near the small village of Cannae. It was a hot summer’s day in Italy during what would become known as the second Punic War. On one side of the battlefield was the flowing River Aufidus and on the other, craggy cliffs. This left a relatively narrow strip of flat plain, about two kilometres wide, in which to maneuver two large armies comprising 100,000 men.
The Carthaginians were led by Hannibal. Launching from his power base in southern Spain and driven by pathological revanchism, Hannibal had marched his army over the Pyrenees, then (rather famously) over the Alps to invade Italy and then (rather less famously) through the swamps around the River Arno. Each one of these passages whittled his African, Hispanic and Gallic soldiers down, and tempered what was left into an elite force. One of the most successful commanders in military history, Hannibal destroyed Roman legions at the battles of the Trebia (20,000 killed) and Lake Trasimene (15,000 killed) in the two years previous. He would continue to haunt the Italian peninsula for over a decade.
On this August day, the Romans were led by two consuls, Varro and Paullus, elected in a panic about Roman masculinity. Their mandate was to put an end to the previous consul’s, Fabius Maximus, promising strategy of delay, avoiding confrontation in favour of scorched earth, harrassment and depriving the Carthaginians of much needed food so as to attrite the invaders. For this, Fabius was nicknamed Cunctator (“delayer”).
Favouring a direct engagement with a numerically superior force to crush the Punic menace once and for all, something no prior commander had even come close to doing, the consuls fielded four legions, or double the force that would normally be under their command. Roughly half of the troops were brand new recruits, raised earlier in the year to fill the gaps created by the slaughters at the Trebia and Lake Trasimene.
Once battle was given, the ever crafty Hannibal lured the Romans into a trap. The centre of the Punic line fell back under assault, drawing the Romans in, leading to them being outflanked and then encircled. What followed was one of the most complete, and butcherous, victories in human history. To quote Robert L. O’Connell’s book, The Ghosts of Cannae:
Dawn of the next day revealed approximately 45,500 legionaries and twenty-seven hundred cavalrymen strewn about a space not much larger than a single square mile. As the Carthaginians set about despoiling the bodies and searching for their own among the dead and half dead, even they were shocked by their handiwork…
By way of approximation we can consider each Roman weighed 130 pounds [about 60 kilos]—they were lighter than modern men. Then there would have been well in excess of six million pounds [about 2,700 tons] of human meat left to rot in the August sun—the true fruits of Hannibal’s tactical masterpiece, at least for an air force of vultures.
If an army that large was corralled into a space that small, the makeshift abattoir that would have been created defies imagination. The Romans almost certainly knew they were going to die where they stood. O’Connell:
Yet such a death stroke—or even more so, multiple death strokes, rapidly delivered—implies a certain acceptance, or at least passivity, on the part of the recipient.
Of those that did not collapse from heatstroke, weren’t crushed or trampled, didn’t commit suicide, some, and perhaps most, gave themselves up to their fate at the slashing blades and honed spears of the Carthaginians.
O’Connell quotes Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman, a military psychologist, to explain how this could happen:
Unable to flee and unable to overcome the dangers through a brief burst of fighting, posturing or submission, the bodies of modern soldiers quickly exhaust their capacity to energize and they slide into a state of profound physical and emotional exhaustion of such a magnitude and dimension that it appears to be almost impossible to communicate it to those who have not experienced it.
I don’t know what made me think of that.
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