THE FIELD OF PISTORIA.
Make all our trumpets speak; give them all breath,
Those clamorous harbingers of blood and death.
MACBETH.
The first faint streaks of day were scarcely visible in the east, when
Catiline, glad to escape the horrors which he had endured through the dark
solitude of the night watches, issued from his tent, armed at all points,
and every inch a captain.
All irresolution, all doubt, all nervousness had passed away. Energy and
the strong excitement of the moment had overpowered conscience; and
looking on his high, haughty port, his cold hard eye, his resolute
impassive face, one would have said that man, at least, never trembled at
realities, far less at shadows.
But who shall say in truth, which are the shadows of this world, which the
realities? Many a one, it may be, will find to his sorrow, when the great
day shall come, that the hard, selfish, narrow fact, the reality after
which his whole life was a chase, a struggle, is but the shadow of a
shade; the unsubstantial good, the scholar’s or the poet’s dream, which he
scorned as an empty nothing, is an immortal truth, an everlasting and
immutable reality.
Catiline shook at shadows, whom not the ’substance of ten thousand
soldiers armed in proof,’ could move, unless it were to emulation and
defiance.
Which were in truth more real, more substantial causes of dismay, those
shadows which appalled him, or those realities which he despised.
Ere that sun set, upon whose rising he gazed with an eye so calm and
steadfast, that question, to him at least, was solved for ever—to us it
is, perhaps, still a question.
But, at that moment, he thought nothing of the past, nothing of the
future. The present claimed his whole undivided mind, and to the present
he surrendered it, abstracted from all speculations, clear and unclouded,
and pervading as an eagle’s vision.
All his arrangements for the day had been made on the previous night so
perfectly, that the troops were already filing out from the Prætorian gate
in orderly array, and taking their ground on the little plain at the mouth
of the gorge, in the order of battle which had been determined by the
chiefs beforehand.
The space which he had selected whereon to receive the attack of Antonius’
army, was indeed admirably chosen. It front it was so narrow, that eight
cohorts, drawn up in a line ten deep, according to the Roman usage, filled
it completely; behind these, the twelve remaining cohorts, which completed
the force of his two legions, were arrayed in reserve in denser and more
solid order, the interval between the mountains on the left, and the
craggy hill on the right, which protected his flanks, being much narrower
as it ascended toward the gorge in which the rebel camp was pitched.
In front of the army, there was a small plain, perfectly level, lying in
an amphitheatre, as it were, of rocks and mountains, with neither thicket,
brake, nor hillock to mar its smooth expanse or hinder the shock of
armies, and extending perhaps half a mile toward the consular army. Below
this, the ground fell off in a long abrupt and rugged declivity, somewhat
exceeding a second half mile in length, with many thickets and clumps of
trees on its slope, and the hillock at its foot, whereon still frowned
Chærea’s cross with the gory and hideous carcase, already blackened by the
frosty night wind, hanging from its rough timbers, an awful omen to that
army of desperate traitors.
Beyond that hillock, the ground swelled again into a lofty ridge, facing
the mouth of the gorge in which Catiline had arrayed his army, with all
advantages of position, sun and wind in his favor.
The sun rose splendid and unclouded, and as his long rays streamed through
the hollows in the mountain top, nothing can be conceived more wildly
romantic than the mountain scene, more gorgeous and exciting than the
living picture, which they illuminated.
The hoary pinnacles of the huge mountains with their crowns of
thunder-splintered rocks, the eyries of innumerable birds of prey,
gleaming all golden in the splendors of the dawn—their long abrupt
declivities, broken with crags, feathered with gray and leafless forests,
and dotted here and there with masses of rich evergreens, all bathed in
soft and misty light—and at the base of them the mouth of the deep gorge,
a gulf of massive purple shadow, through which could be descried
indistinctly the lines of the deserted palisades and ramparts, whence had
marched out that mass of living valor, which now was arrayed in splendid
order, just where the broad rays, sweeping down the hills, dwelt in their
morning glory.
Motionless they stood in their solid formation, as living statues, one
mass, as it appeared, of gold and scarlet; for all their casques and
shields and corslets were of bright burnished bronze, and all the cassocks
of the men, and cloaks of the officers of the vivid hue, named from the
flower of the pomegranate; so that, to borrow a splendid image of Xenophon
describing the array of the ten thousand, the whole army lightened with
brass, and bloomed with crimson.
And now, from the camp in the rear a splendid train came sweeping at full
speed, with waving crests of crimson horse-hair dancing above their
gleaming helmets, and a broad banner fluttering in the air, under the
well-known silver eagle, the tutelar bird of Marius, the God of the
arch-traitor’s sacrilegious worship.
Armed in bright steel, these were the body guard of Catiline, three
hundred chosen veterans, the clients of his own and the Cornelian houses,
men steeped to the lips in infamy and crime, soldiers of fifty victories,
Sylla’s atrocious colonists.
Mounted on splendid Thracian chargers, with Catiline at their head,
enthroned like a conquering king on his superb black Erebus, they came
sweeping at full gallop through the intervals of the foot, and, as they
reached the front of the array, wheeled up at once into a long single
line, facing their infantry, and at a single wafture of their leader’s
hand, halted all like a single man.
Then riding forward at a foot’s pace into the interval between the horse
and foot, Catiline passed along the whole line from end to end, surveying
every man, and taking in with his rapid and instinctive glance, every
minute detail in silence.
At the right wing, which Manlius commanded, he paused a moment or two, and
spoke eagerly but shortly to his subordinate; but when he reached the
extreme left he merely nodded his approbation to the Florentine, crying
aloud in his deep tones the one word, "Remember!"
Then gallopping back at the top of his horse’s speed to the eagle which
stood in front of the centre, he checked black Erebus so suddenly that he
reared bolt upright and stood for a second’s space pawing the vacant air,
uncertain if he could recover that rude impulse. But the rare horsemanship
of Catiline prevailed, and horse and man stood statue-like and immoveable.
Then, pitching his voice so high and clear that every man of that dense
host could hear and follow him, he burst abruptly into the spirited and
stirring speech which has been preserved complete by the most elegant(15)
of Roman writers.
"Soldiers, I hold it an established fact, that words cannot give
valor—that a weak army cannot be made strong, nor a coward army brave, by
any speech of their commander. How much audacity is given to each man’s
spirit, by nature, or by habit, so much will be displayed in battle. Whom
neither glory nor peril can excite, you shall exhort in vain. Terror
deafens the ears of his intellect. I have convoked you, therefore, not to
exhort, but to admonish you in brief, and to inform you of the causes of
my counsel. Soldiers, you all well know how terrible a disaster the
cowardice and sloth of Lentulus brought on himself and us; and how,
expecting reinforcements from the city, I was hindered from marching into
Gaul. Now I would have you understand, all equally with me, in what
condition we are placed. The armies of our enemy, two in number, one from
the city, the other from the side of Gaul, are pressing hard upon us. In
this place, were it our interest to do so, we can hold out no longer, the
scarcity of corn and forage forbid that. Whithersoever we desire to go,
our path must be opened by the sword. Wherefore I warn you that you be of
a bold and ready spirit; and, when the battle have commenced, that ye
remember this, that in your own right hand ye carry wealth, honor, glory,
moreover liberty and your country. Victorious, all things are safe to us,
supplies in abundance shall be ours, the colonies and free boroughs will
open their gates to us. Failing, through cowardice, these self-same things
will become hostile to us. Not any place nor any friend shall protect him,
whom his own arms have not protected. However, soldiers, the same
necessity doth not actuate us and our enemies. We fight for our country,
our liberty, our life! To them it is supererogatory to do battle for the
power of a few nobles. Wherefore, fall on with the greater boldness,
mindful of your own valor. We might all of us, have passed our lives in
utter infamy as exiles; a few of you, stripped of your property, might
still have dwelt in Rome, coveting that of your neighbors. Because these
things appeared too base and foul for men’s endurance, you resolved upon
this career. If you would quit it, you must perforce be bold. No one,
except victorious, hath ever exchanged war for peace. Since to expect
safety from flight, when you have turned away from the foe, that armor
which defends the body, is indeed madness. Always in battle to who most
fears, there is most peril. Valor stands as a wall to shield its
possessor. Soldiers, when I consider you, and recall to mind your deeds,
great hopes of victory possess me. Your spirit, age, and valor, give me
confidence; moreover that necessity of conquest, which renders even
cowards brave. As for the numbers of the enemy, the defiles will not
permit them to surround you. And yet, should Fortune prove jealous of your
valor, beware that ye lose not your lives unavenged; beware that, being
captured, ye be not rather butchered like sheep, than slain fighting like
men, and leaving to your foes a victory of blood and lamentation."
He ceased, and what a shout went up, seeming to shake the earth-fast hill,
scaring the eagles from their high nests, and rolling in long echoes, like
reverberated thunder among the resounding hills. Twice, thrice, that soul
fraught acclamation pealed up to heaven, sure token of resolution unto
death, in the hardened hearts of that desperate banditti.
Catiline drank delighted inspiration from the sound, and cried in
triumphant tones:
"Enough! your shout is prophetic! Soldiers, already we have conquered!"
Then leaping from his charger to the ground, he turned to his body-guard,
exclaiming,
"To fight, my friends, we have no need of horses; to fly we desire them
not! On foot we must conquer, or on foot die! In all events, our peril as
our hope must be equal. Dismount then, all of ye, and leading your
chargers to the rear slay them; so shall we all run equal in this race of
death or glory!"
And, with the word, leading his superb horse through the intervals between
the cohorts of the foot, he drew his heavy sword, and smote him one
tremendous blow which clove through spine and muscle, through artery and
vein and gullet, severing the beauteous head from the graceful and
swanlike neck, and hurling the noble animal to the earth a motionless and
quivering mass.
It was most characteristic of the ruthless and brutal temper of that
parricidal monster, that he cut down the noble animal which had so long
and so gallantly borne him, which had saved his life more than once by its
speed and courage, which followed him, fed from his hand, obeyed his
voice, like a dog, almost like a child, without the slightest show of pity
or compunction.
Many bad, cruel, savage-hearted men, ruthless to their own fellows, have
proved themselves not devoid altogether of humanity by their love to some
faithful animal, but it would seem that this most atrocious of mankind
lacked even the "one touch of nature which makes the whole world kin."
He killed his favorite horse, the only friend, perhaps, that he possessed
on earth, not only unreluctant, but with a sort of savage glee, and a
sneering jest—
"If things go ill with us to day, I shall be fitly horsed on Erebus, by
Hades!"
Then, hurrying to the van, he took post with his three hundred, and all
the picked centurions and veterans of the reserve, mustered beneath the
famous Cimbric Eagle, in the centre of the first rank, prepared to play
out to the last his desperate and deadly game, the ablest chief, and the
most daring soldier, that ever buckled blade for parricide and treason.