Raising a jar of water to his lips he swallowed a deep draught to clear his head, after which he continued, “Nevertheless, it is a waste of breath to talk to you. When you hear the war cry of the Hittites and the thunder of their chariots you will whimper and hide your heads in the sand, for lack of skirts to creep under. If the Hittites break through to the water supplies in our rear, each one of you is lost and will be lifeless before nightfall, because we shall be surrounded and all retreat cut off. As it is we have no retreat. If we abandon the defenses we have built, the enemy chariots will scatter us like chaff before the wind; I mention this in case any one of you should take it into his head to scuttle off into the desert. We are all in the same boat and have no choice but to defeat the enemy. I will be with you, fighting at your side. Should my whip lash out at you rather than at the Hittites, that will be no fault of mine but yours alone, my valiant rats.”
The men listened to him spellbound. I confess I was growing uneasy, for already the enemy chariots were approaching like distant dust clouds. Yet I believe that Horemheb lingered designedly, to infect the men with his own composure and to spare them the oppressive time of waiting.
At length he glanced out across the desert from his high ledge, raised his hands, and said, “Our friends the Hittites are on their way, for which I give thanks to all the gods of Egypt. Go then, you Nile rats, each man to his allotted station, and let none depart thence unless so ordered. And you others, you my old ruffians, pursue this rabble-shoot over and round them-geld them if need be, should they seek to fly. I might say to you: fight for the gods of Egypt, fight for the Black Land, fight for your wives and children. Run now, boys, run swiftly, or the chariots will have reached the barricades before you, and the battle will be over before it has begun.”
He dismissed them, and they set off at a trot toward the barricades, shouting as they ran, whether from ardor or fear I cannot say. Horemheb followed them at a leisurely pace, but I remained sitting on the slope to watch the battle from a safe distance. I was a physician, and my life was valuable.
The enemy had driven their chariots across the plain to the foot of the hills, where they formed into battle order. Their colorful standards, the gleam of the winged suns on the chariots, and the brilliant woolen cloths that protected the horses from arrows presented a magnificent and most formidable sight. The chariots worked in groups of six, ten of these groups forming one squadron; in all I believe there were sixty squadrons. But the heavy, three-horse chariots, manned by three men, formed the center of their front. I could not conceive how Horemheb’s force were to withstand their assault, for they moved slowly and ponderously, like ships, and demolished everything in their path.
To the sound of horns the enemy captains raised their standards, and the chariots moved off at gradually increasing speed. When they had drawn near to the barricades I saw single horses tearing out between them, each with a rider clinging to its mane and drumming with his heels on the sides of his mount to urge it to still greater speed. I could not imagine why they should send their spare horses in advance, unguarded, until I observed these riders leaning over and cutting away the ropes that had been stretched between the stakes. Other horses galloped straight through the breaches thus formed. Their riders rose up and hurled their spears in such a manner that they remained fixed upright in the ground, and from the butt end of each floated a bright pennant. This all occurred with the speed of lightning. I failed to catch their purpose, for the horsemen then wheeled about and tore back at full gallop to disappear behind the chariots, although some dropped from their mounts transfixed by arrows, while many horses fell and lay kicking and screaming hideously on the ground.
When the light chariots began their assault, I saw Horemheb rushing toward the barricades alone, where he tore up one of the spears and hurled it far from him so that it stood once more upright in the sand. He alone had instantly perceived that these spears and flags were placed to mark the weakest points in the defenses, where a breach might best be made. Other men who followed his example returned with the standards as trophies. I believe that only Horemheb’s quick wits saved Egypt that day, for had the enemy hurled the concentrated weight of his first assault against those points the riders had marked, it is certain that the Egyptians could never have repelled it.
No sooner had Horemheb regained the cover of his troops than the light chariots of the Hittites were speeding against the barriers, driving in among them like wedges. This first clash was attended by so mighty a din and by such dense clouds of dust that from the hillside I could no longer follow the course of the battle. I saw only that our arrows brought down some horses in front of the barricades, but that succeeding drivers dextrously avoided the overturned vehicles and came on. Later it became clear that at one or two points the light chariots had penetrated the lines, despite severe losses. But instead of pursuing their course they halted in groups, while the spare men in each leaped out and began rolling away the stones and clearing a path for the heavier force, which had halted out of range to await its turn.
A seasoned soldier on beholding these enemy successes would have believed the day lost, but Horemheb’s raw rats saw only the horses kicking in the death struggle before the barricades and in the pits. They saw that the enemy had sustained grave losses and fancied that their own valor had halted the onslaught. Howling with excitement and terror, they hurled themselves with all their might on the stationary chariots, to lunge with their spears at the drivers and pull them down, or wriggled along the ground to hamstring the horses, while the bowmen let fly at the men who were dragging away the rocks. Horemheb allowed them to rampage as they would, and their numbers helped them. They captured many chariots, which they handed over, in a frenzy of excitement, to Horemheb’s seasoned “scum.” Horemheb did not tell them that all would be over when the heavy chariots came up but relied on his luck and on the vast pit he had had dug across the middle of the valley in the rear of the troops, which was concealed under bushes and brush. The light chariots had not come so far, believing that all obstacles were already behind them.
Having cleared a broad enough way for the heavy force, such Hittites as survived climbed again into their chariots and drove swiftly back, thus arousing great jubilation among Horemheb’s men, who fancied that victory was already theirs. But Horemheb gave rapid orders for the sounding of horns, the replacing of rocks, and the planting of spears with points slanted toward the assailants. To avoid needless loss of men, he was compelled to station them on either side of the gaps. The scythes of the heavy chariots, turning with the wheels, would otherwise have mown down the troops like ripe grain.
This he did at the last moment. The dust cloud in the valley had not yet dispersed when the heavy chariots, the flower and pride of the Hittite army, thundered forward, crushing all obstacles in their way. They were drawn by powerful horses, a span higher than those of Egypt; their heads were protected by plates of metal and their sides by thick woolen pads. So massive were the wheels that they could overturn even large stones, and the horses with their mighty chests snapped the standing spears. Howls and blood-curdling shrieks rang out as the defenders were crushed beneath the wheeels or slashed in two by the scythes.
Soon the great vehicles burst through the dust cloud, and the horses, as they trotted forward in their colorful, quilted blankets with long bronze spikes jutting from their masks, looked like unknown, fantastic monsters. They clattered forward in column, and it seemed to me that no earthly power could halt them, nor any number of Egyptians block their way to the water jars in the desert. At Horemheb’s order his men had withdrawn from the valley to the slopes of the flanking hills. The Hittites uttered a great shout and thundered on so that the dust rose in eddies behind them. I threw myself face downward on the ground and wept for Egypt’s sake, for-the sake of the defenseless Lower Kingdom, and for all those who must now die because of Horemheb’s mad obstinacy.