Night was falling, and a man in a worn traveling cloak with an army tunic beneath it was walking the streets in search of an inn with decent food and drink. Someone pointed him toward the center of town, toward a place called the Shattered Spear Inn, where soldiers gathered. "Sounds like just the sort of place for me", he said and set off in that direction.
When he got near the inn, he could hear singing and laughter inside, so he quickened his pace, eager to sit and sate his thirst. As he approached the door, a drunken man stumbled out, barely able to walk. When they passed each other, the drunk tripped and fell right onto the traveler.
"Oh, sorry", the drunk slurred as he moved on. The traveler, his mind on a drink, didn't pay him a second thought as he walked into the establishment.
Entering the building, the first thing he noticed was an old man singing off-key near the back of the room while other patrons laughed and jeered. Walking past tables where people were talking to each other in German, Latin, Greek, Egyptian and every other language known to man, the traveler took a seat at the bar with the weary sigh of someone who had been walking for hours and finally had a chance to rest his feet. "Give me a mead, please."
As his drink was being poured, the man reached into his cloak for his money to pay for it... only to find nothing there. It took a second for it to dawn on him what had happened. "That SON OF A...!", and the barkeeper could tell by the look on his face that he wasn't faking it to get a free drink. The traveler ran out the door, but the drunk from earlier was long gone and nowhere in sight.
"Never mind about the drink; i've been robbed", he said angrily, and he made to leave, resigned to going to bed with an empty stomach tonight.
"Now hold on there one moment", said the proprietor. "I can see by your clothes and that gladius on your hip that you're a soldier. If you have no money, that's not a problem. We have a policy here. Any man who comes in with a war story to liven up our evenings with gets a free drink."
The traveler turned back around, thought it over and returned to the bar.
"All right then, I suppose I could do that." Sitting down, he thought for a moment as he went through the memories of his experiences in the wars. "I've been in a number of battles, each of them interesting in its own way. But only one of them truly makes a thrilling tale."
The sounds of conversation gradually died down as the other patrons (including old man Hamish), having noticed the situation, looked over with interest to hear the soldier's story. He took a sip of his drink before proceeding, and then launched into the tale.
"Okay, so, the battle of Caralis. At least we call it that, but it wasn't actually in Caralis. It was just a little east of the city, near the southern coast of Sardinia. We were a smallish army, under the command of Kaeso Floarianus, a sharp young man who had just recently married into the House of Julius. He's a true soldier though; he didn't just get the command because of that.
The situation was, the Julii were racing the Scipii toward Carthage. While the Scipii were fighting the Carthaginians in Sicily, old Flavius Julius decided that the Julii could get to Africa first by using Sardinia as a stepping stone. So, he gave the command to Kaeso, who put together a force that was not very large but respectable enough. The bulk of the Julii armies were aiming for Greece, hoping to cut off the Brutii there. I'm not too keen on that political crap, though. But i'm a soldier, so I go where i'm told and fight who I have to. I was put in Kaeso's army, and we set sail for Sardinia.
Sardinia is fairly unremarkable, not the sort of place where you expect a major battle to happen. But just in case, we had a spy with us to investigate the island, and we sent him ashore to the city before the army disembarked. He reported back that the island's capital, Caralis, is just a little town and was defended only by a few town militias and peasants. So, we besieged Caralis and started building rams, expecting a walkover.
What we didn't know, was that a Carthaginian fleet was just on the other side of the island, with a full-size army aboard. That army, under the command of Bomilkar, one of the most powerful men in Carthage, came ashore as soon as they found out what we were doing. They raced around the city and attacked us from the north.
As I said, our army wasn't very large. We weren't expecting a serious fight; we thought that the Carthaginians were focusing their efforts on Sicily and that Sardinia would be lightly defended. We were wrong. The Carthaginian army was comprised mainly of light infantry, but they outnumbered us greatly. In addition to the main army, they also had their Caralis garrison coming at us from our left. Which was nothing to be worried about by itself, but while we were already so outnumbered it was cause for concern. Still, we wouldn't have had such a hard time of it if it weren't for the elephants. I had never seen an elephant before that day. Have you ever had an elephant charging straight at you? There is no sight in this world more certain to make a man lose control of his bowels than that. It was the elephants that scared us more than anything else.
The battle went badly right from the start. We had two cavalry units: the general's bodyguard, and a unit of equites. Kaeso sent the equites off to a patch of woods to our left, where the Carthaginians had a squadron of Numidian mercenaries trying to sneak around and flank us. At the right moment, the equites sprung the trap and charged, but got massacred. The Numidians were expecting them, I suppose. Either way, we lost the main part of our cavalry, while the Numidians only lost a few men. Things weren't looking good.
The next thing that happened was that the Carthaginians' slingers, mercenaries from the Balearic Islands, started peppering us with stones. They focused on our velites, which I guess they were worried could be a threat to their elephants. But they took a lot of us hastati down too. There was nothing we could do but sit there and withstand it, waiting for the main Carthaginian force to get to us so the real fight could begin.
We didn't have to wait long. They reached our lines and charged, elephants and all. Men were being thrown high into the air like rag dolls. Others were being crushed underfoot. Our velites threw javelins at the elephants, which helped, but we were still greatly outnumbered. Meanwhile those Numidians were throwing javelins at us, and we could do nothing to stop them. We did our best to hold the line, while General Kaeso tried to motivate and encourage us, but he had his hands full too. A squadron of Carthaginian cavalry tried to flank us from the right, and he was doing his best to keep them away from our lines.
We managed to withstand that first wave. The Carthaginian infantry broke first, the elephants broke second, the cavalry broke last, and they all pulled back. We then charged forward with the hope of killing as many of them as we could. But they quickly regrouped, so we returned to our defensive position.
We were down one unit, though. One of our cohorts had gone too far into the mass of fleeing enemies, so they got surrounded and massacred. The rest of us saw it happen. The elephants rampaged through their cohort and tore it apart, and the infantry finished them off. Not a single man from that cohort survived. Then the Carthaginians turned back towards us. We all braced ourselves and waited for the second wave."
At this point the tavern was dead silent except for the man telling the story; all other patrons, with the exception of a Briton who had passed out in a corner, were listening intently to the story. The soldier took another swig to wet his throat before continuing.
"We didn't think things could get any worse, but then about that time, the Caralis city garrison showed up to the battle, over on our left flank where they joined the Numidian horsemen. The entire Carthaginian army charged a second time. Again, elephants and all.
I still don't know how we survived that second attack. It was all we could do to stay in formation and hold. Man to man, we were better than the Carthaginian infantry, but they had us so outnumbered, and they had plenty of cavalry in addition to elephants. Kaeso had driven the cavalry back the first time, but they returned with the second charge. We infantrymen held the line and beat back everything they threw at us, while General Kaeso again fought off the Carthaginian cavalry, and our velites again tried to drive off the elephants, killing a couple of them.
The Carthaginians broke and fled again, gradually. It was on our right flank where they broke first. Those of us on the right then ran over to the left to help our comrades fight off the Numidian cavalry and the Caralis garrison militias, while Kaeso and his few horsemen went and ripped through the Carthaginian infantrymen that were running away. Finally we drove the Carthaginians off the left flank too.
But they still weren't done, no sir. If we still had the equites, they might have been, but we didn't, so we couldn't follow through on our victory. We infantrymen tried chasing down the Carthaginians, but we just couldn't finish them at the same pace that cavalrymen could. So, the Carthaginians reformed and prepared to come at us a third time."
Another sip.
"The good news was, this time they didn't have the elephants. The elephants were still there, but they'd had enough. Our velites' javelins, and us legionaries' miraculously unbroken lines, had made the animals decide they didn't want to fight us anymore. Several of them were already dead, and the rest went out of control. They ran around aimlessly and tore up the Carthaginians' own lines, while we Romans cheered. The Carthaginians had to kill some of their own elephants to save themselves. But then they once again turned back to us.
By this point we were seriously battered, our numbers badly depleted, but we were still determined to hold the line. The Carthaginians came at us for one last charge. This time they damn near beat us. They didn't have the elephants this time, but they still had Bomilkar's heavy cavalry guard, much larger than Kaeso's, which charged us head-on. But we held that line. We never broke, not one of us. The Carthaginians broke, for the third and final time, and we chased them down once more.
Kaeso and his handful of cavalry did most of it, but we infantrymen, though we had little energy left in us, managed to overtake and wipe out a good number of the Carthaginians. We wanted to be sure that as few of them as possible would make it back to their ships for us to fight again later. Kaeso and his guards nearly killed their horses rushing all around through the trees trying to catch every Carthaginian they could find. Our velites, with their last few javelins, managed to kill the handful of remaining elephants, ensuring that we wouldn't be facing them again.
Some Carthaginians did manage to escape, including Bomilkar himself. But his army was destroyed. Against all odds, we had held our position and never broke, and shattered a Carthaginian army three times our size. We had no cavalry, we had no archers, we had no high ground to aid us in our defense, while they had abundant cavalry and elephants too, with more infantry than we could count. We were just a few cohorts of infantrymen, a few velite skirmishers, and the general and his guards. But we beat them. We lost about 250 men, while we counted over a thousand enemy dead. We melted down some Carthaginian armor and used it to build a monument to the battle, marking the exact spot where we had stood and, impossibly, held that line."
He took one last, deep draught and drained his flagon, and then sat in silence. Conversation slowly picked back up as the other patrons began discussing the story they had just heard, and the innkeeper said "that was one hell of a story, soldier. Order as much as you like. Whatever you want is on the house."
[This message has been edited by Kawada Shogo (edited 04-14-2016 @ 08:17 PM).]