Part 8

Hannibal crossed the Pyrenees with fifty thousand infantry and nine thousand horse, numbers which Polybius has likewise evidently taken from the monumental tablet of Hannibal. The passage was effected near Figueras and Rosas towards Roussillon, where it is easiest. He had previously sent envoys to the Gallic tribes from the Pyrenees to the Rhone, to ask them for a free passage through their countries, and had tried to move them to peace by presents of money; so that he reached the Rhone without meeting with any hostility worth mentioning. After the passage over the Pyrenees, signs of a dangerous mutiny began to show themselves; three thousand Carpetanians returned home, and Hannibal also of his own accord sent back other Spaniards whom he suspected. His army seems to have suffered from desertion besides: otherwise it could not have lessened so much as Polybius states. He advanced with the utmost speed. From Carthagena to the Po, Polybius reckons two hundred German miles, which is indeed somewhat exaggerated; but, even then, what difficulties were to be overcome! Until Hannibal came to Cisalpine Gaul, he had to pass through nothing but tribes to whom his march was as a curse. Having gone through the beautiful province of Lower Languedoc, he came to the Rhone in the neighbourhood of Pont St. Esprit. As for the inhabitants of Languedoc, they had been obliged to send their women and children into the Cevennes; but things were now quite different. The Gauls of the Dauphiné, Provence, and those parts, had the rapid river in front of them, and could therefore more readily venture upon resistance; perhaps they had heard moreover that a Roman army was already in Catalonia, nay, even, on the Gallic coast. However much they at other times had scorned the Romans, they now looked to them with eager confidence. P. Scipio had on his voyage to Spain put in at Marseilles, as he had learned that Hannibal, whom he supposed still at the Ebro, was already near the Rhone. He could not but have found it hazardous to take the field against an army of such superior numbers; but in conjunction with the Gauls on the left bank of the Rhone, he could have hindered the enemy’s passage over the river. Hannibal, even without this, had already immense difficulties in his way: the building of a bridge of boats was no easy task. He therefore bought from the people who lived along the bank on which he was, every kind of boat that he could get, and he had canoes made of trees; then he ordered a division to make a night-march higher up the river, so as to cross over on rafts at a spot which was some way off, and threaten the Gauls in the rear. This plan succeeded; yet one cannot understand how the Gauls were not up to it. When the detachment had made its appearance, Hannibal embarked all his forces in the boats, and crossed the stream whilst this division attacked the Gauls. Thus, after inflicting great loss upon the Gauls, he landed on the other side: he got the elephants over with a great deal of trouble. His victory over Nature, which seemed here herself to have set bounds to his advance, made a decisive impression on the neighbouring tribes. Had he delayed eight days longer, Scipio would have barred his way, and hindered him from crossing. He had only thirty-eight thousand infantry, and eight thousand cavalry left; the latter were most of them Numidians, and on the whole were only good for foraging and skirmishing, but not for regular fighting: he had still nearly all his elephants. He now sent some Numidians on to the road to Marseilles, and these fell in with some of the Roman horse: on both sides they were astonished at the meeting. Scipio, who had but just heard of Hannibal’s passing over the Pyrenees, could not have thought that he had already crossed the Rhone. An insignificant skirmish took place, in which the Romans had the advantage. Hannibal, however, did not mind the Roman general, but continued his march.

Here we begin to have most discrepant accounts of Hannibal’s expedition. Had he gone in the direction which Livy makes him take,--up the valley of the Durance by Briançon, Mont Genèvre, and Susa, and coming out near Turin,--he could not have done a better service to the Romans; Scipio would have fallen upon his rear, and on the other side, from the mountains, the Gauls would have laid wait for him, with barricades of felled trees, and the like. There was even among the ancients already some uncertainty as to the road by which Hannibal crossed the Alps; Polybius says nothing about it, because in his time it may have been a thing generally known. Some thought that he had gone over the Little, others, over the Great St. Bernard; others again were even for the Simplon: in times of old, there was no road over Mont Cenis. In these days, opinions are also divided. And yet, after General Melville’s masterly researches, edited by the younger De Luc,[19] which are based on a more accurate survey of the places themselves, there can be no more doubt on the subject: that Letronne, who truly deserves to be spoken of with respect, does not see this, is passing strange. No other road can be meant, but that over the little St. Bernard. In the beginning of October, Hannibal was on the last mountains. The little St. Bernard has no glaciers at all, nor is it much higher than the Brenner; in summer it is even a green Alp, and though indeed for a pretty long time it is covered with snow, this always melts away; at the very top, the soil is still so fertile that rye grows there: on the great St. Bernard, on the contrary, there is everlasting snow. On the mountain over which Hannibal went, was a frequented road, and there he found new-fallen snow. Particularly decisive, however, is the following circumstance: before Hannibal reached the top of the mountain, he had a sharp fight with the Alpine tribes, on which, as Polybius says, he stationed himself with his reserve near a white rock. Now, there is in the whole of that part of the country only one rock of gypsum, which lies near the old road in the Tarantaise; the inhabitants still call it _la roche blanche_: De Luc remarks that whoever has once passed that way, must needs remember the cliff for ever. The Alps in Polybius mean the whole mountain range from Savoy and Aosta; there are several ridges of them, running one behind the other, to be crossed.

Hannibal had to go higher up the Rhone, that he might get further away from Scipio. Had Scipio dared to follow him, he would have been just as well pleased; for he was sure to have beaten him, and Scipio would have been lost, if defeated. He marched as far as Vienne, a place which was the capital of the Allobroges, which Livy does not mention; that it is Vienne, has also been shown by Melville. Here a civil war was going on. Hannibal took the part of one of the pretenders to the throne, led him on to victory, and got great supplies from him. The Allobroges had at that time the country between the Rhone, the Saone, the Isère, and the west of Savoy. Near Vienne, he left the Rhone, and turned towards Yenne and Chambéry, where Melville has discovered an old Roman road from Chambéry by the great Carthusian monastery: it was used during the whole of the middle ages, and was abandoned only as late as in the seventeenth century. From Chambéry, he came into the Tarantaise, and followed the Isère up to its source. To the Alpine tribes which dwelt in the small valleys, Hannibal’s expedition was a real calamity; it was like a swarm of locusts which eat up all that they had. Hannibal did everything he could to make them friends; yet they all of them withstood him. They did not indeed venture upon open resistance; but they had recourse to cunning, which is the characteristic of weak nations. They brought provisions, and even hostages; and then fell upon the Carthaginians as they were marching through the defiles. But Hannibal had never trusted them, as on the whole he never let himself be deceived: his plan had been to send his baggage in advance, to follow cautiously, and strongly to cover his rear; and thus he managed to beat them off. Yet the Carthaginians suffered a dreadful loss. Melville has shown, that the onward march, although very toilsome, and through unfriendly tribes, was by no means over fields of ice and snow, but across a thickly-peopled, beautiful country: the road winds between the hills through rich and well cultivated mountain valleys, through woods of walnut trees, and corn fields. But when from thence it mounts up higher into the Alps, it becomes exceedingly narrow and difficult, being in most places nothing but a path for beasts of burthen, by which not more than two can barely pass each other; and it runs along the brink of deep mountain steeps, over most of which torrents rush: it is only within the present century that a carriage road has been made. Fifteen days were spent by Hannibal on his march through these mountains; yet for the greater part of that time, his way led through those fine valleys, full of cultivation and wealth, the inhabitants of which one must not deem to have been more savage than the Tyrolese were in the fifteenth century.[20] Thus he came as far as the Little St. Bernard. Had he reached it a month sooner, in August or the beginning of September, no snow would yet have fallen, and he might every where have found fodder for his cattle. The chief difficulty was the carrying of provisions for thirty or forty thousand men, eight thousand horses, and certainly as many as four thousand mules and pack-horses, which were laden with the bread; for, if the snow fell, it was impossible to get fresh grass for the beasts. A great part of the baggage had been taken by the mountaineers. Until he came to the heights of the Little St. Bernard, Hannibal had not much suffered from the cold; want of food and the enmity of the neighbouring tribes were his worst hardships: but now, when he reached the top of the mountain, he was overtaken by a fall of snow, which made the roads quite impassable. Only think, what a dead stop this must have been for Africans! The greatness of the snowdrifts, by which many deep clefts in the rocks were covered over, soon gave rise to accidents; the feet of the horses slipped, and the animals tumbled down the steeps; fodder was scarce, and many elephants died of cold. The army also suffered from hunger, like the French on their retreat from Russia; in those few days, thousands met with their death. The story of Livy, that Hannibal softened the rocks by fire, and split them by means of vinegar, and thus made a way for himself, is a fable. This is only sometimes possible, when there are cliffs of limestone; but to imagine it in the case of a whole army, and with a mountain like the Alps, is one of those things of which one cannot understand how a man of sense can write them down. Particularly dangerous was the descent: with a great deal of trouble they reached a spot, of which Livy speaks just as incomprehensibly as Polybius does clearly. The roads, in fact, were in some places carried round the mountains, so that on one side there was often an abrupt precipice; now it not unseldom happens that torrents undermine a way like this from beneath, and it falls in; or that avalanches bury it. This had happened here. A bit of the road had fallen in a year before, and it had not yet been mended, as Polybius tells us in the most natural manner. Livy, who takes it for granted that Hannibal had altogether made the road for the first time, says that he had now been stopped all at once by a precipice; and that on this he had ordered trees to be felled, and had had them piled up below against the steep, so as to go down by them as on ladders. But according to Polybius, the landslip went down a stadium and a half, that is to say, a thousand feet in depth, to the bed of the river Dora at the mouth of the valley of Aosta. Hannibal tried to go by a new way, having heard perhaps that some huntsmen of the Alps had already struck out several other tracks. It did not answer; and so he had to encamp for three days and three nights in the midst of the snow, that at the spot where the road was broken down, he might make with timber a new one broad enough for the beasts of burthen to pass. This is the place where indeed the distress of the army was overpowering, and it suffered such immense loss, especially in beasts. This difficulty being overcome, they came by and by to the valley of Aosta, where the Salassians dwelt, a cultivated and rather civilized country. The story of Hannibal’s having shown to his army, from the top of the mountain, the blooming land of Italy, is likewise an impossible one, and a rhetorical flourish: from the summit of St. Bernard, one sees nothing but mountains.

Hannibal was now in the valley of Aosta. A great part of his elephants were dead, and his army now consisted of no more than twenty thousand foot (twelve thousand Africans, and eight thousand Spaniards), and six thousand horse, most of them Numidians. It is wonderful how strong the horses here showed themselves to have been; the Numidians must have treated them with great care.

The whole management of the war on the side of the Romans, is a remarkable counterpart of that want of design, and that sluggishness, which in the wars of the revolution so often let the victory fall into the hands of the French. When the Romans heard that Hannibal was going to cross the Alps, they most certainly must have thought him a madman: this supposition alone can account for the slackness of their movements. Scipio, who had advanced as far as Avignon, ought, as he had a fleet, to have been in Lombardy, long before Hannibal reached the St. Bernard. He very likely thought, that there would still be always plenty of time whenever he came; and thus, when he arrived at the Po, Hannibal was already descending the Alps. The reports also of the losses of the Carthaginians, one may fancy to oneself from that logic of absurdity of which we have heard so many examples during the revolution. His condition was now indeed a very bad one for an ordinary general; yet Hannibal, without stopping, hastened on with his army in which typhus fever must necessarily have raged, and which must have looked like a horde of gipsies. Scipio had only two legions, a corresponding number of allies, and a few horse. The Romans were in many respects the slaves of established usage, from which they frequently did not know how to free themselves in an emergency. Thus from ancient times downward, such an army was looked upon as quite large enough, and therefore they did not send more. Part of the Gauls were already in open rebellion; the Boians, the summer before, had beaten a Roman legion, and kept the survivors shut up in Modena,--they dwelt from Parma and Placentia to the frontier of the Romagna,--and by treachery they seized three Romans of rank who had been sent as triumvirs to found Placentia, that they might exchange them for their own hostages. They sent ambassadors to meet Hannibal at the Rhone, and invited him to their country. The Insubrian Gauls beyond the Po were likewise ripe for rebellion; but they did not yet venture upon any open movement. Hannibal marched against the Taurinians, and conquered Turin; and whilst he was engaged there, Scipio had arrived at Genoa, and had crossed the Apennines and the Po, to take up his position in the country of the Insubrians. Here Hannibal turned round to face him. They encountered, for the first time, at the Ticinus, probably in the neighbourhood of Pavia, and to the dismay of the Romans, Hannibal had still a very large army. A cavalry skirmish took place: the Romans were defeated by the Spaniards and the Numidians; Scipio himself was wounded, and only with great difficulty got out of the affray, as some have it, by his son, who was afterwards so famous as P. Cornelius Scipio Africanus. This result of a fight which in itself was insignificant, convinced the Romans how much they had been mistaken as to the condition of Hannibal’s army, and that they should have to keep on the defensive. Scipio abandoned the northern bank of the Po. He had thrown a bridge of rafts over the river, and in the consternation it was broken up too soon: part of the troops, which were to cover the bridge on the left bank, were taken prisoners by the Carthaginians.