From the Camargue to the Alps by Bernard Levin

Author:Bernard Levin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Summersdale Publishers Ltd
Published: 2011-09-20T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Five

The Foothills

Goat and Compasses

HERE I TOOK a rest; which, incidentally, Hannibal did not. He could not afford to; winter was closing in on the Alps, there would be snow soon and the passes would be blocked, perhaps impenetrably. Time enough to rest when they were down on the lush green plains of Italy; first they had to get there. And despite his stirring words to his troops, urging them to defy the Alps and conquer them, he knew, and the army must by now have begun to suspect, that if there was no way over the mountains because of the snow, they would all perish, trapped in a land that would not sustain life. Hannibal certainly knew the history of the events in Carthage that had followed the first Punic War – none better, for it was Hannibal’s own father, Hamilcar, who at that time had led the Carthaginian army against the revolt of the city’s unpaid mercenaries in alliance with her slaves, and had won the savage battle by exterminating the entire force arrayed against Carthage, down to the last man. What Hannibal was remembering now was not just that most of his own troops were mercenaries, but, more pressingly, that the final detachment of Carthage’s enemies had died of starvation trapped in a mountain defile. And here was the son of the man who had led those victims into the trap, leading his own men into a gamble from which he could no longer withdraw even if he had wanted to, a gamble which might well end with a hideous death by starvation in another mountain defile. With as little rest as he dared to give his men, he pressed on towards his rendezvous with winter.

My own timetable was less inflexible. Winter was months away, and the likelihood was that I would arrive at my chosen pass, 9,000 feet high, in the middle of blazing August; nor would all be lost even if I didn’t. Hannibal’s army would rapidly have been reduced to eating marmots and other Alpine fauna, then their own pack-animals, then what roots and berries they could garner, and finally their own dead; for me, however, things would not be quite so grim even if every pass was closed. So far, on this journey, I had never been more than a few kilometres from a steak et frites, and even when I gazed at Italy with a wild surmise, the same would continue to be true. Of all the leaps of the imagination that a modern man must make when he tries to compare himself with the ancients, the most difficult, I have always found, is to feel the absence for them of the simplest and most rudimentary elements of our own civilisation. It is difficult enough to hold in view the thought that Hannibal’s army had no maps and no roads; it is much more difficult still to understand the implications of the fact that along their route there were no shops, no wholesalers or factors, no system of food distribution or transport.

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