Chapter VII
VII
And so it came to pass that at the beginning of the following year, when the new session of the Senate convened, Cicero went to war on the one battlefield of which he was the undisputed master.
He proposed that Octavius, in return for placing his army at the disposal of the Republic, should be made a pro-praetor, given a seat in the Senate and permitted to stand for office a decade earlier than the usual age limit.
Such was his mastery of this arena that on the fourth day of January, the motion passed.
The news reached us in Arretium a week later. Octavius showed me the official dispatch. It reported that Cicero had referred to him in his speech as ‘this Heaven-sent boy’. He read it aloud, savouring each word.
– ‘I promise, I undertake, I solemnly guarantee that he is, and will always be, a good citizen.’
He waved it in my face.
– Do you see that? The old man certainly knows how to lay it on thick. You would almost think he loves me!
At the age of nineteen, Octavius thus became the youngest senator in the history of the Roman Republic. He displayed an almost childish delight in his first official office. He ordered a senatorial toga with a purple stripe and wore it at every opportunity.
Salvidienus and some of the older officers were less enthusiastic about entering into a pact with Cicero, a man who had welcomed Caesar’s assassination as a liberation, to rescue Decimus, who had lured him to his death, but Octavius overruled them.
In the middle of January, Hirtius duly arrived to take command of our army.
His appearance was a shock. Gone was the plump figure with whom we had dined at Cicero’s villa the previous year.
It was said he had a cancer in his stomach.
Whatever it was, it had turned him into a walking skeleton.
Poor Hirtius. He was an experienced soldier.
He understood military strategy – he had written the eighth book of Caesar’s Gallic Wars, and his mind was still sharp – but as Octavius remarked later, he did not look long for this earth.
Over dinner, Hirtius told us that Pansa was in the process of raising four legions in Rome and intended to join us in a couple of months. In the meantime, the Senate’s instruction was that our army should hasten to the relief of Decimus in Mutina.
We marched north along the Via Aemilia. Hirtius had to be carried in a litter. At Bononia, twenty miles south-east of Mutina, we halted.
Here we built a fortified camp.
The word from Decimus, borne through the air by carrier pigeon, was that he had sufficient food to hold out for several more months.
Hirtius decreed that it made no sense to attack Antony while our armies were roughly the same size.
We should await the arrival of Pansa and his four new legions, when we would outnumber him two to one.
Over the next few weeks, Antony made repeated attacks on our camp and ambushed our patrols, trying to lure us into battle.
I found it frustrating to sit in a tent for most of the day while Octavius worked on his correspondence.
On a couple of occasions I ventured beyond the perimeter, and once narrowly avoided being killed.
I was still young and stupid. It would have been a pointless death.
It taught me a valuable lesson. A good part of soldiering consists of caution as well as valour.
Towards the end of March, Octavius received a letter from Cicero notifying him that Pansa was at last moving north with his army to join us.
Soon afterwards, the attacks on our camp ceased.
There was something ominous about this sudden silence.
We were right to be perturbed. Our spies in Antony’s entourage reported that he was moving the bulk of his army directly south, away from Mutina, with the clear intention of intercepting Pansa.
In theory, Pansa’s force was more than equal to Antony’s.
But it was composed not of veterans like his, but of the rawest of new recruits – ostlers, bakers, laundrymen and the like, who had been dragged from their usual occupations, pressed into the service of the Senate and given minimal training.
Hirtius roused himself from his sickbed and told Octavius we must set out at once with one of our legions to go to Pansa’s aid.
It took us a day and a half to march across country.
By the time we arrived at the village of Forum Gallorum, it was dusk, and the battle was already fully joined in the surrounding marshland.
I call it a battle: rout would be a better word.
We could hear shouts and screams and trumpet blasts.
Octavius had never seen fighting before.
He looked around in bewilderment. I suppose he must have imagined orderly lines and glittering helmets and standards, not this chaos.
He conferred with Hirtius in a nearby barn and proposed that we should camp for the night and intervene in the morning when we knew the enemy’s disposition.
Hirtius said that by then it would be too late.
They argued. In the end, Hirtius pulled rank and despite his illness left to try to locate Pansa, while Octavius stayed in the barn overnight with his staff, including myself.
As soon as it was light, we went outside and surveyed a scene of carnage – men and horses sprawled in the fields, dead and wounded, overturned wagons, abandoned weapons.
Presently Hirtius returned along the country lane, escorting a farmer’s cart.
In it lay Pansa, wounded in his side by a javelin.
Pansa reported that his army was retreating southwards, with Antony in pursuit.
Plainly he was no longer capable of fighting.
The ailing Hirtius, too, after a sleepless night looked like a ghost.
I thought to myself, what a pair!
But in war, as in life, a defeat can often bring opportunity.
If Antony was heading south, it meant his camp outside Mutina must be lightly defended.
Hirtius proposed that we should attack it while his back was turned.
Pansa meanwhile would be evacuated to Bononia to recover from his wound, and we would concentrate our entire force against Antony’s rear.
That afternoon, we were on the move again. As we rode alongside one another, I felt ashamed that Octavius and I had played no part in the fighting at Forum Gallorum. I worried that word might get out that we were cowards. But when I mentioned my misgivings, he waved them away.
– There is no heroism in stumbling around in the dark, trying to retrieve a battle that is already lost. What if I had been killed? We already have two consuls who are half dead!
I could not disagree. I also remembered yet again my promise to Caesar that I would guard and protect Octavius as if he were my brother. Nevertheless, when the time came for our attack on Antony’s camp, I resolved to make sure he finally saw some action.
I have always suspected that Hirtius, knowing he would soon be dead in any case, had decided he would prefer to die gloriously on the battlefield rather than waste away in bed.
At any rate, hoisting himself into the saddle one last time, he led the charge towards the enemy camp in one of the bravest acts of leadership I ever saw.
Octavius glanced at me. I nodded. We spurred our horses and plunged into the fighting after him, leaping a stream and smashing into the enemy line.
Octavius laid about him with his sword, and although he was at all times surrounded by a bodyguard, he certainly exposed himself to danger.
When the standard-bearer of our Fourth Legion was killed, I signalled to Octavius that we should dismount. I grabbed the legion’s eagle and gave it to him to carry. He ran with it across our front, in a conspicuous display of bravery that rallied the men and helped make his reputation as a soldier.
When he handed the eagle to one of our legionaries and remounted, his eyes were wide and bright with excitement.
He had fought in a battle at last and had survived.
The exhilaration is impossible to describe to any who have not experienced it.
It is like a drug. Once one has tasted it, one wants more.
The day belonged to us. By the end of it, Antony’s army was shattered and retreating. We went from tent to tent, searching for him in case he had returned, but he was nowhere to be found. And then, as the sun went down, the rumour began to spread that Hirtius had been killed.
We discovered the remains of the consul laid out in the centre of the camp.
His body was covered in so many wounds there was no telling which had been fatal.
Octavius stood for a long time gazing down at him.
I am sure he was already thinking that this was a stroke of fate that could change everything.
He issued instructions for his corpse to be escorted to Rome with a guard of honour.
Then he ordered Salvidienus to hunt down Antony.
Old Big Nose was plainly surprised he did not wish to undertake the task himself. He enquired about his intentions.
– I shall go back to Bononia, write to the Senate, and inform Pansa of our victory.
He told me to come with him.
Pansa was in his tent, attended only by his doctor. Our army was still at Mutina. The camp was mostly deserted.
He was sitting propped up in bed. His wound was dressed. He was eating a meal. He was delighted to hear of our victory, though he grieved for the loss of Hirtius. He ordered Octavius to send a message to Decimus that the siege was broken and it was safe for him to emerge.
Octavius did not take kindly to receiving instructions from a man who had recently led his own army to near-disaster and was now assuming sole command of ours.
Nevertheless, he congratulated Pansa on the speed of his recovery, advised him to rest for a few more days and promised to do as he asked.
He did not give vent to his true feelings until we were outside the tent.