The night before the battle was very cold. It was the day after the Ides of March, and a hard frost. Meteors blazed in the sky. The priests reported that the images of war we carried in our baggage had sweated blood. A deserter assured us that the eagles of the Pompeian legions had dropped the golden thunderbolts from their talons, spread their wings and flown to our camp. When none arrived, the man was soundly whipped. I suppose he was either drunk or demented.
The battle began with a brief cavalry skirmish, which was no more conclusive than such things usually are. Then the lines were locked. It was not a day for manoeuvring, and there was indeed no scope for any clever device. This was a battle, I saw at once, that would be gained by whichever side pounded the hardest. In such battles what matters most is morale. As long as men feel they are supported, they will hold their ground. They know besides, if they are experienced troops, that they have only two choices: to break through, or to engage in that most difficult of movements, an orderly retreat. Two fears dominate the mind of the experienced officer to the exclusion of all else. The first is that his own troops will break through on too narrow a front, with the result that they can be cut off and massacred. The second is that panic will set in. The officer's task therefore is to hold the line steady.
I have never known such fighting as at Munda. Our own troops were wonderfully resolute. They had not marched through Spain, enduring terrible hardships, to lose everything now. On the other hand, I was amazed by the enemy's spirit. This was quite different from anything we had previously encountered in the civil wars; it was as if the hatred which Labienus and Pompey's sons felt for Caesar had communicated itself to the whole army. I saw something else in one of those flashes of insight that can come upon one when nerves and body are fully stretched: this resolution was the justification of the policy of atrocities which the enemy commanders had deliberately pursued. In earlier campaigns the enemy's morale had been undermined by Caesar's declared policy of clemency; that, of course, was what he had intended. Now, as a result of their own actions, they knew that they had put themselves beyond his mercy. For them, as for us, it was a matter of conquest or death.
After some two hours of fighting, we had gained little ground. The enemy had yielded perhaps twenty yards, but their position was if anything stronger than before. A ripple of doubt ran along our lines. At that moment Caesar's self-control snapped.
He yelled: "Soldiers, are you going to betray me now to these boys?" and, snatching up a sword and shield from a wounded soldier, dashed against the enemy line. For a moment he disappeared from my view.
"Save the General," I cried. "Will you let him die alone? Will you be thus disgraced?"
I grabbed a centurion by the shoulder and pointed towards the melee around Caesar.
"There is where the battle must be won. Save the General or die disgraced."
Waving my sword high, but quickly couching it in the attack position, I led a charge of some two hundred men towards where the troops around Caesar were struggling. It turned the issue. For a moment the battle stood still. Then, very slowly and still in good order, the enemy left began to withdraw.
Our position was now one of the greatest danger. I could imagine Labienus smile as he watched the battle develop from his vantage point at the gates of Munda. Another fifty yards, he must have thought, and I shall be able to loose my cavalry on the enemy's flank. I shouted orders to halt the attack and re-form our ranks, but in the noise and press no one heard me or had sufficient self-control to obey. I looked across and up the hill. I could see cohorts of Labienus' cavalry and infantry moving from his right and centre. Our position was more dangerous than ever, and all, I cursed, as a result of Caesar's moment of uncharacteristic panic. (It is fair to say that this may have been the result of an epileptic attack he had suffered a few days before.)
But… Caesar always declared that he was a favourite of the gods, and if ever a day proved this to be the case, it was Munda. Labienus' manoeuvre, admirably intelligent though it was, destroyed him. The rapid and unexpected deployment of the troops was remarked and misinterpreted by the men in his front lines. They did not realise that he was about to unleash the blow that would give them victory. Instead, they thought that it was the beginning of a general flight. Panic set in, rapidly as it always does. Except for one legion, which retreated in good order, and died fighting almost to the last man, the army of our enemy disintegrated.
I have never known a battle change so completely in such a short time.
One wing of the enemy army broke, fleeing to the safety of Cordova. The rest were thrown back into the ditch before the walls of Munda. There was no escape. Few prisoners were taken. Our legionaries were determined to make an end of the wars, then and there, that grey afternoon. They could not have been restrained from slaughter, even if that had been Caesar's wish. And it was not. For the first time in the civil wars no quarter was given.
"I have often fought for victory," Caesar said as night fell on the field, whence the groans of the dying and the wounded still prevented the silence of night from descending, "but this is the first time I ever fought for my life."
It was reported that the enemy dead numbered almost thirty thousand. Among them was Labienus himself. I looked on that strong, proud, aggrieved countenance.
"He chose the path he has followed," Caesar said.
That night Octavius came to my tent. He was pale and trembling.
"Well," I said, "that is war, the great destroyer of illusion."
It was not quite the end. The two sons of Pompey had escaped the field. Sextus, it seemed, had found a refuge, none knew where. Gnaeus reached Gibraltar to find that all the ships were in Caesar's hands. He fled back from the coast, into the mountains. There he was discovered by a troop seeking fugitives from the battle. They found him wounded in a cave, deserted by all but a couple of slaves. He demanded clemency. Even in his extremity, I am told, he could not keep a note of arrogance from his voice. He received none. The soldiers made short work of him. As with his father, his head was cut off, and sent to Caesar.
Meanwhile Cordova had been besieged. The walls were stormed. More than twenty thousand soldiers and citizens were put to the sword. Antony was mighty in the slaughter, drunk on wine and blood-lust. The word "clemency" rang in my ears like a mocking bell. We had journeyed far from that dawn on the banks of the Rubicon.
CHAPTER 9
What a strange thing is love, a word we commonly employ as a euphemism for sexual desire. My passion for Octavius had died. Its end was abrupt. A few nights after the sack of Cordova, he came to me in tears. He babbled in confusion. It seemed that Antony (who had been roaring drunk for a week) had tried to ravish him. The boy's tongue stumbled over the story; his beauty fled from him. I was seized with an impulse of cruelty, not tenderness. Even now, I cannot account for the violence of the change in my feeling. I looked on him with contempt, even disgust. He needed my help, perhaps. I had none to offer him. Something in me had snapped.
A few weeks later he left for Greece, to resume his studies, by Caesar's command. He went to join Maecenas; another companion was an ill-bred young officer, by name Marcus Agrippa. Well, I was relieved to see him depart. His presence had begun to embarrass me. There is nothing so dead as an infatuation from which you have recovered. As the months passed, something of tenderness returned. But when we corresponded, there was now a distance between us. There was nothing intimate in our letters, and I knew that when we met again, there would be a gulf between us, like a stretch of inhospitable coastland fringing the sea.