The Sword of Attila Read Online Free Page B

force lurking behind in the forests and on the steppes; and that behind them was a power like nothing ever seen before, a warrior army bent solely on destruction that threatened to eclipse Rome not by settlement and treaty, but by fire and the sword.
    Flavius had first met Macrobius only three weeks before when he had disembarked at Carthage with the other new tribunes and been put in charge of the reconnaissance
numerus
of the city garrison, his first field command. Half of the officer candidates who had gone through the
schola militarum
in Rome with him had been veterans like Macrobius, men who had risen from the ranks and been recommended by the
comes
of their frontier force or the
dux
of their field army. The military council of the emperor had deliberately sited the
schola
in the old city not just to remind the cadets of the past glories of the empire, but to keep them away from the imperial courts at Ravenna and Milan where the privileged younger cadets like Flavius might draw on patronage to ease their way through the training programme and gain favours. Macrobius himself would have scorned the
schola
and been wasted in it. He was a born centurion, superb at making a fighting unit out of the eighty-odd men of a frontier
numerus
but preferring to leave the life-and-death decisions to a tribune he respected. He relished his ancient rank – one derived from the fact that his parent unit was the famous Twentieth Legion Valeria Victrix, once the pride of the Roman garrison in Britannia, but with the withdrawal from that province thirty years before, now reduced to a unit of the African frontier army. His soldiers joked that he was the last centurion of ancient Rome. Given the likely outcome of today’s events, they might well be proved right.
    In the weeks before Flavius had arrived, Macrobius had been given the task of scratching together the reconnaissance unit from among the frontier troops of the desert who had come streaming into Carthage with the threat from the west, their forts abandoned and the frontier contracted to the defensive perimeter they were now occupying within sight of the walls of Carthage itself. The numbers in the city garrison were desperate: fewer than a thousand men of the depleted Twentieth Legion along with the equivalent of three
numeri
of frontier
limitanei,
a little under three hundred additional men all told. Even within the city the garrison was stretched hopelessly thin, with large sectors of the city wall manned only by sentries, scarcely enough to alert the garrison commander of an approaching enemy let alone mount any kind of serious response. With no hope of further reinforcements, the defence of Carthage was now a matter of upholding Roman prestige and honour, of fighting to the death, and of suicidal bravery and doing enough against the odds to ensure that history did not remember the end of Roman North Africa as an ignominious rout and a massacre.
    Flavius put these thoughts from his mind and focused on his men. Unlike the volunteer legionaries of the past, they were almost all conscripts, with the exception of the Illyrians from the Danube, who represented the nearest that Rome still had to a professional cadre motivated by a martial tradition. Yet Macrobius had shown him that even the least promising no-hoper could be knocked into some kind of shape, that there was always some strength to be found somewhere. The greatest strength of this army of Christian Rome lay in the compact size of its units, for they were less complex to manage than the old legions and better suited to dispersed deployment and small engagements. Flavius had paid the soldiers a bonus in gold
solidi
out of his own pocket, always a good start for a new commander, and with Macrobius to guide him, he had tried to build up their
esprit de corps,
telling them of the old generals and wars, of Scipio Africanus and the Roman capture of Carthage; he had told them that there was no reason why they should not be as